On the island of Gianni Minà | The paper

One should always try to express one’s amazement for life and its beauty, so that no one will be willing to have it removed” wrote Gianni Minà, speaking of himself, of his amazement for politics, for music, above all of his amazement for sport as a total social fact, as a tool to look up to the world, with one condition: freedom. “There are people who don’t have a price tag hanging on them”, said Raymond Chandler and Gianni Minà was one of them who was kicked out of Rai for this very reason. He told it as a fact, as a journalist, almost without the bitterness of personal involvement. This is so much more of the life of this storytelling superhero, even difficult to identify in a single professional box (perhaps he would have liked “documentarian”), is told in Gianni Minà, Storia di un boxeur latino (Minimum Fax, 2020). He left from that Turin he loved so much (and where he fell in love until he lost his head for Toro, a team that was similar to him for many reasons) to become a Homeric hero, a world traveler, following three guiding stars: the amazement , curiosity and freedom.

This column has never violated the rule of making two books dialogue, but the first exception is reserved for Gianni Minà, because it is impossible to choose among his tributes to the greatest rebel stars of the sporting firmament: Muhammad Ali and Diego Armando Maradona.

Gianni Minà, Il mio Muhammad Ali (Rizzoli, 2014) is the collection, lovingly curated by his wife, the director Loredana Macchietti, of a long series of articles that tell the greatest boxer of all time up close. Ali loved Minà and Gianni returned the favor of telling it with skill, in his most glorious moments as in those of defeat, against opponents or against the clock. Because, if it is true as Mina says in the preface (without the accent, because Minà was able to entrust the beginning of the book to the famous singer) that “Ali didn’t fight, he expressed the maximum splendor, poetry , of the nobility”, Gianni Minà was also able to tell his fragility, his defeats, his battle against time which, inexorable, also passes through legends. Minà, capable of running to the locker room to be the first to hear Muhammad Ali’s testimony in Kinshasa, who triumphed in the most famous fight in history, years later, would wipe the corner of his mouth with a napkin in the living room of his house, where she had invited him to dinner, weak and shivering with Parkinson’s. Ali loved Minà, perhaps because Gianni understood and told his need not to be just a boxer.

The same thing probably happened to Diego Armando Maradona protagonist of Gianni Minà, I will never be a common man (Minimum Fax, 2021). He wasn’t just a footballer, El Diez, and perhaps no one has described him as well as Minà, whose masterpiece was to be able to tell the greatest, but always sided with the last ones. This book, also in this case an anthology of articles by Minà, recounts the rise, splendor, controversy and even the moment when everything collapses of another picaresque hero lent to sport.

Minà passed away on 27 March; his name, Gianni, was a guarantee for anyone who told the story of twentieth-century sport. Now, up there, there is a complete pantheon: Gianni Brera, Gianni Mura, Gianni Clerici, Gianni Minà. Of an incredible man, only the memory remains, which he described as follows: “The shape of memory does not resemble a city, but an island. I have always looked for my island somewhere. Always, wherever I found myself, I left for another. Curiosity or restlessness, I don’t know. It was my way of working, or of living. To abandon things just before they finish and run to where something more interesting is about to be born”. Have a good trip, John. Find that island and rest in peace. To us, quoting that Galeano you loved so much, “the melancholy that exists only after love and at the end of a football match remains within us”.