“You need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper; a masochist and an egocentric as well.” – Gianluigi Buffon
Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE in Florence
“I’MMA so sorry,” she said. “But izza the closing, how you say, stanzas of the season. And then the players they are leaving. So izza not posseebleh.”
I was buoyed by even that response, a reply to an emailed interview request, from Juventus’ press office. It brightened, briefly, a grim afternoon in a hospital in Florence with a wife doubled over by a kidney stone.
“What the hell,” I said to her a few, mercifully pain-free, days later as we sat laptop to laptop in Libreria Café La Cité, a leftie literary hipster hangout a street away from the green Arno and its gently arching bridges, “I’m writing my Buffon story anyway.”
At the mention of the magic word, a bearded man in a hoodie, a Renaissance monk give or take a few centuries, jerked his face upward.
He had been intently focused on his laptop. Now he looked at me with burning blue eyes and smiled long and hard.
Gianluigi Buffon can do that; unite people who speak different languages, come from opposite hemispheres, and may not even be football people.
Apart from the talent, skill and presence that have made him the finest goalkeeper of the age — any age? — he is a fine example of what it means to be man in an age of uncertainty for those of us fortunate and unfortunate enough to have been born with balls. Here’s a smattering of reasons why:
“You need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper; a masochist and an egocentric as well.”
“I was 12 when I turned my back on the goal. And I will keep doing it as long as my legs, my head and my heart will allow.”
“The day I quit I want people to be sad about it.”
Buffon and Juventus, where his 17 years ended this season in the triumphs of a seventh consecutive Scudetto and a 13th overall Coppa Italia, are inseparable in the imagination. But he will always be a son of Tuscany: from Carrara, a place of not quite 63 000 souls squeezed between mountain and river 100 kilometres northwest of Florence.
It is famed for the white marble that has been quarried there since the Romans thought they owned the planet. Michelangelo himself walked Carrara’s cliffs.
“By sculpture,” Michelangelo said, “I understand an art that takes away superfluous material; by painting, one that attains the result by layering on.”
How can that not be a metaphor for the creations of those who sculpt away layer on layer of superfluous attempts at art by dime-a-dozen strikers to reveal the tangible beauty of what remains?
I had wanted to ask Buffon a different question — why is passion so important to the human condition? — and then sit back and listen to the 90 minutes and more of his answer.
Denied that chance, I ask the thoroughly Florentine owner of a fiaschetteria — a no-frills wine bar — near the Duomo that’s practically purple with Viola memorabilia why Buffon never played for Fiorentina,. He looks nonplussed, shrugs, and rubs his thumb and forefinger together.
On Piazza Santo Spirito, at a joint that serves superb lampredotto — the fourth stomach of the cow, chopped, boiled and spiced — I get a less polite answer from a man who spits a glare of disgust and thrusts out his right wrist.
There, where if he sliced deep enough he could kill himself, was tattooed: “Juve Merde”.
“They hate Juventus,” a Florentine friend explains. “Not Buffon.”
No-one could.
Bulletproof Truth 