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Paolo Rossi scored more than 150 goals in his career, but if you want to understand the brilliance of a player whose death at 64 brought Italy to tears on Thursday, it may be enough to see the one he caught in the 1982 World Cup final.
Or, more realistically, perhaps a slow motion replay. The Italian forward appears to have no position on his West German opponent Karlheinz Förster as Claudio Gentile prepares to send a cross from the right. Only from repeat visits does it become clear that Rossi has started his career a frame or two earlier, picking up speed, anticipating delivery before it has even shipped. He defeats Förster, and his own teammate Antonio Cabrini, to the ball by a fraction, heading from close range.
“That goal, more than any other goal I scored, had the distinctive feeling of being me kind of goal: a goal that reflected my characteristics, “Rossi recalled in the 2018 documentary One To Eleven.” It was mine, because I stole that tenth of a second from the defender. I went before him and I knew he couldn’t catch me. “
Few could. Rossi was rarely the fastest player, but somehow he used to be the fastest – moving away from his marker before they realized he was gone. Fulvio Collovati, a teammate of that team from the 1982 World Cup but a rival in Serie A for many years, described it as “pure matchstick.”
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Only on his last trip was it too early. Giovanni Trappatoni, who managed Rossi for four seasons at Juventus, expressed a pain many felt when he wrote on Twitter: “Players are not supposed to leave before their coaches.” The tributes came from all over Italy, as well as from other places. Teammates remembered his lightness, the ability to keep smiling even when results were tough and training grounds dragged on. The coaches recalled his work ethic. Even the opponents whose dreams he shattered had fond memories of his good-natured demeanor and courtesy on the field.
Rossi burst onto the scene at Lanerossi Vicenza in the mid-1970s, returning the club to the top flight and racking up 39 goals in his first two Serie A seasons. He would move on to Perugia, on loan, and then to Juventus, where he won. Serie A twice, as well as the European Cup and the Recopa de Europa once each. Rossi ended his career in Milan and Verona, but most of all he will always be remembered as the man who launched Italy to World Cup glory in 1982.
In the space of a week, he scored a hat-trick to eliminate favorite Brazil, Italy’s only two semi-final goals against Poland and then that opener against West Germany, paving the way for a 3-1 win. Rossi left with the Golden Boot and the Ballon d’Or, recognized as the best player of the tournament and the most prolific. At the end of the year, he became the third Italian to win the Ballon d’Or.
It would have been an extraordinary achievement for any footballer. In Rossi’s case, it hardly seemed plausible. He had returned just a few weeks prior from a two-year suspension, playing a total of three Serie A matches before joining the Italian World Cup team.
By his own account, he had lost ten pounds due to stress. Not that someone needed a scale to see that he looked underweight. Journalist Gianni Brera described him as “an ectoplasm of himself.”
The chef of the Italy team started bringing him a glass of milk and a brioche to his room every night at 10:30 in an attempt to fatten him up.
Beyond the physical aspect, Rossi had mental obstacles to overcome. He had been expelled after being accused of helping to fix a match between Perugia and Avellino, a charge he furiously denied.
Rossi would always maintain that he had been drawn into a scandal that had nothing to do with him – his only mistake was letting a teammate, Mauro Della Martira, introduce him to two strangers one day at the Perugia training facility.
When they started talking to Rossi about how a draw could be a good result, maybe even with him scoring a couple of goals, he thought they were talking in general terms rather than a real solution.
In any case, he said he excused himself and left as quickly as possible without accepting anything. However, the game ended in a draw, with Rossi scoring two goals. When prosecutors began to unravel the extensive match-fixing efforts of a couple of people, Massimo Cruciani and Alvaro Trinca, the defendant named them after the forward.
Rossi would later describe a period of dissociation from the events happening around him, saying that “it was as if it was happening to someone else.”
Even after the initial sentences were handed down, he remained convinced that there had been a mistake and that he would be acquitted on appeal. Instead, Rossi only got a reduction in the length of his suspension, from three years to two.
He thought about leaving football altogether, but was persuaded to continue after receiving an offer from Juventus to sign and train with his first team until the second year of his suspension. The president, Giampiero Boniperti, told him on his first day of preseason training to get married, as that would help settle life. Rossi and her then partner, Simonetta Rizzato, got married in late September.
Juventus was not the only one to show faith in him. Italy coach Enzo Bearzot visited him at the 1978 World Cup and kept in touch during Rossi’s suspension, letting him know he would still be under consideration. Once the tournament started in Spain, Bearzot never wavered in his support for Rossi, even when the player worked poorly at first.
That faith was richly rewarded. When the whistle blew to confirm Italy’s victory over West Germany, Rossi experienced a simultaneous wave of joy and dismay. The euphoria at what he and his teammates had accomplished collided painfully with the sadness that this World Cup journey had come to an end.
“It makes you think about what happiness is and is not. It’s a moment, a second, a tenth of a second. Then he’s gone. “For Rossi, the euphoria only lasted as long as losing a defender would be worth. The memory of a defining World Cup, however, will endure for many more years.
