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Antonio Cassano, the rebel genius who wants to live fast and die fat
Football is filled with so many military parallels that it’s the closest thing to war without violence (usually, anyway). Players are regimented, they train like soldiers under the eye of a drill sergeant, their coach. Team-mates build the kind of bond that is comparable to that which exists between those who fight and serve together. And, of course, there’s the discipline, the conformity and the coalescing to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Then along comes Antonio Cassano, a guy for whom discipline and conformity take a back seat to honesty and self-indulgence. How honest is he? Well, a few pages into his book, Dico tutto (e se fa caldo gioco all’ombra), translated as “I’ll tell you everything (and if it’s hot I’ll play in the shade)”, Cassano shares the fact that, when he was 12, he had a crush on his teacher. Sweet, right? Except he also tells us that he would go to the bathroom thinking about her and “well, you can imagine what came next”.
Normal and healthy, no doubt, but also a little too much information than we are accustomed to. Especially from a footballing superstar.
And what about the self-indulgence? Cassano loves football, but he also loves sex and food. He says he has slept with some “600 to 700” women, which, given that he is 26, is quite a feat. However, now that he plans to get married, he’ll presumably never match the late Wilt Chamberlain, the legendary basketball star, who claims that he had 20,000 sexual partners, which works out at just over one a day from the age of 15.
When Cassano was at Real Madrid, he would pay the bellboy to sneak a woman into his hotel room late at night on the eve of each home game. When he was done, he would gorge himself on four or five pastries. “Sex plus food: a perfect night”, he writes.
Because most of us who love football have come to terms, at some time or other, with the fact that we lack the God-given skills to fulfil our sporting dreams, we harbour a natural resentment towards people such as Cassano, men who had the gift but never fully exploited it. And Cassano certainly had — and in many ways still has — the ability to be one of the best players in the world. He has a rare cocktail of physical strength, pace, flair and technique, which is why Fabio Capello’s Roma paid £18 million for him when he was just shy of his 19th birthday, making him the most expensive teenage signing in the world at the time.
Needless to say, he has not come close to tapping his outrageous talent. And it’s not just the passion for sex and junk food. Lack of discipline and insubordination accompanied him almost everywhere. He says his favourite routine when he disagrees with a coach is to rip off his shirt and say: “Fine. In that case, why don’t you go on the pitch and play instead of me?” He has pulled this stunt with half-a-dozen managers. On other occasions, he has pretended to be injured or ill to miss a game and, once, he simply failed to turn up, literally locking himself in his house for three days (presumably with ample supplies of junk food).
Not even Capello, who managed him at Roma and Real, could tame him for any length of time. Despite admitting that he had a love-hate relationship with the present England manager — who once terrorised him by furiously chasing Cassano up and down the training ground bellowing: “Don’t run away! Only cowards run!” — he says that there is an underlying respect there, which is more than you can say for most of the coaches he has worked with.
It’s one of the realities of football that talent trumps (almost) anything. You can behave this way and — if not get away with it — at least live the life of a multimillionaire, playing top-flight football in front of adoring crowds. “I spent the first 17 years of my life dirt-poor,” said Cassano, who was raised by a single mother in one of the most crime-ridden neighbourhoods in Italy and said he is certain that had it not been for football, he would have become a hoodlum. “Then I spent nine years living the life of a millionaire. That means I need another eight years living the way I do now and then I’ll be even.”
That’s not what managers want to hear, which may explain why Cassano is now playing for Sampdoria, a mid-table team. But he doesn’t mind. Unlike 99.9 per cent of footballers, he isn’t preoccupied with “winning trophies”. “Winning is nice, but it doesn’t make you happy,” he writes.
“The problem is that we live in a culture obsessed with success. We fool ourselves into thinking we have to do our best and make sacrifices to succeed. But why? Trophies come and go. Once you’ve retired, it will all be gone, they’ll just be numbers in an almanac. And, except for [Diego] Maradona and Pelé and maybe a couple others, nobody will remember you or what you’ve won.”
“What is truly important is being happy now. I know I haven’t given 100 per cent physically or mentally to this game. At best, I gave 50 per cent. Maybe a tiny bit more in the good years. But so what? Thanks to my talent, I live like a king, I play football and I have a great time. If I had wanted to give 100 per cent, I would have stayed at Real Madrid, sacrificed lots of things, done my very best and I probably would have succeeded. Instead, I’m here at Sampdoria and I love it.”
Words that would bring most people’s blood to boiling point. We’re taught that squandering talent and opportunity is one of the biggest moral crimes an individual can commit. And that may be true. But it’s equally true that in a world of trite clichés and gutless conformity — and I’m not just talking about football — a man such as Cassano who can be brutally honest not just to himself, but to the whole world, makes for a refreshing change.
Will he regret it once his youth and talent have succumbed to the passing of time? “I don’t think so, but, if I do feel that way one day, I’ll let you know,” he writes.
It’s hard to tell if he will. He already has a plan for life after football. “I plan to get fat,” he writes. “I mean really, really fat. Even now, when I don’t play for a month, I’ll put on a dozen pounds. I plan on eating. A lot. I plan on eating everything.”
He ends his book by comparing his talent to a Ferrari. To get the best out of such a car, you need to be on the open road, pushing the engine to its limit, roaring along at 150mph. “I’d be driving my Ferrari through the centre of town in third gear, window down, arm out, smiling happily,” he writes.
Gabriele Marcotti
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/gabriele_marcotti/article5263546.ece
I love this guy. brutally honest but i feel sorry for the football world because he has soo much to offer in football but he will likely not be able to showcase it because of his attitude. hopes he get a chance for the national team again.
wrote:I think Cassano is in the Tyson zone.