This year marks the 40th anniversary of my World Cup championship. Watching the daily coverage from Qatar brings happy memories of the summer of 1982, when Italy beat West Germany for what many consider the greatest trophy in all of sports. And yes, that Italian team — the Azzurri — was my team. I’ve carried their iconic blue in my heart for four decades now.
Some backstory: My family spent the 1976-77 academic year in Torino, at the foot of the Alps in northwest Italy. My father was researching an era of Italian economics history as he pursued his Ph.D. I spent second grade in a private school where English was spoken as much as Italian, and I embraced the exotic of it all. I was just old enough for some memories to remain in full color today, including, ironically, those of a soccer team known worldwide for the black and white stripes on its uniform.
Juventus is the New York Yankees of Italian soccer. They’ve won more Serie A championships (36) than any other club and belong with Manchester United and Real Madrid in the pantheon of international soccer titans. And Juventus was my home team during our year in Torino. Before I discovered the likes of Roger Staubach and Ted Simmons, Roberto Bettega and Romeo Benetti were my first sports heroes. I collected soccer cards (they were actually stickers), counting each Juventus player I landed as a jewel, particularly that of Dino Zoff, to this day one of the greatest goaltenders to ever don gloves on the pitch. That ’77 team won the prestigious UEFA Cup (beating Manchester United and Manchester City on the way), and Dad and I were part of a happy riot on the streets of Torino.
Fast-forward five years, and I’m 13 years old, tuning in for what coverage I could find of the World Cup in Spain. And there on my grandmother’s TV screen in east Tennessee, I see … Dino Zoff. Tending goal for Italy! There’s Claudio Gentile. There’s Gaetano Scirea. There’s Marco Tardelli. My Juventus friends, names and faces I hadn’t seen in five years — my cognitive lifetime and from another continent — were beating Argentina, and Brazil, and Poland, and finally the Germans to win the country’s first World Cup in 44 years. It was electrifying, particularly for a boy just entering the world of organized team sports. Three years later, I played in a Vermont state championship for my high school team. We lost, but for one afternoon, I felt like an American Bettega.
I’ve watched the World Cup every four years since 1982, some years more engaged than others. When the U.S. qualified in 1990 (for the first time in 40 years), it felt like a gap had been closed between “world soccer” and the kind I’d grown familiar playing here in the land of baseball, basketball, and tackle football. Italy reached the 1994 World Cup final (played here in the States, a month after I married a former all-state soccer player from Vermont), only to lose to Brazil on penalty kicks. The Azzurri finally won another World Cup in 2006 (this time beating France on PKs). Five members of that team played for Juventus, but we define heroes differently as grown men. There was no Dino Zoff in goal.
You won’t find the Azzurri in Qatar. Italy didn’t qualify for each of the last two World Cups, akin to America not qualifying for the World Baseball Classic. (There are 13 European squads in the 32-team field.) This somehow magnifies the joy I retain from 1982, knowing time, place, and moment seldom converge for the kind of precision I celebrated 40 years ago. A team of precision will win the World Cup on December 18th, just in time for you to include a Brazil jersey (or Spain, or France … ) in the stocking of that favorite fan in your life. Me, I’ll likely have my Juventus scarf nearby for the championship match. No Italy in this year’s field? No problem. I won the World Cup 40 years ago and the thrill lives on.
