MILAN (ITALPRESS) – Sports journalism plays a key role in connecting sport to the public, transforming events and competitions into news and exciting stories: telling sports does not only mean bringing back results or charts, but also bringing out emotions, values and meanings showing all the commitment, consistency and spirit of team life behind the athletic performance: sports journalism contributes in fact to the creation of a world of imagination. “The elements that make a truly memorable sports history can be technical, such as a great performance, or human, like the path of Pietro Mennea. A paradigmatic story is that of Dick Fosbury: until 1964 he jumped perimetrally, climbing his belly, but he began to climb back and since then jumped up like this. The victory that involved me most, having been there, is that of the 1982 World Championship: getting to win after such a hesitant start, after in the last friendly the federal president said that maybe it was the case of packing, after all the polemics with journalists and the press silence, after having missed a penalty kick in the first time of the final was really extraordinary and has returned touge our football, to dry of successes from the European journalists of 1968.
As far as his work has led him to follow football and tennis, De Luca points out that “my passion has always been baseball: there is a really incredible story about Jim Abbott, born practically without a hand and with only a balloon. As a child they had put a hook on him, but he had asked to take it away because at school they teased him; as a boy he had begun to practice baseball as a pitcher and to hit with the good hand he shoved the glove in the murk, and then immediately pass the glove in the other hand. Abbott arrived in the Major League and also played for the New York Yankees: in a game he arrived not to give a single valid joke to the opponents, demonstrating what the will can do.” In declining the change between past and present in the journalistic narration of sports disciplines, the central aspect in the reflection of the former director of Rai Sport is that “many years ago football did not monopolize as now the first pages of the newspapers although already starting from the victories of the Worlds of 1934 and 1938, coincided with the spread of the radio, it overwhelmed the other disciplines. If we had to judge now football from the point of view of spectacularity would be a bit difficult: sometimes a game of volleyball or basketball gives more intensity and emotions and when there is something big the interest turns on even more; think for example to curling, which until a few years ago seemed like crazy stuff and with the vinte medals awakened a great interest”.
As for golf, De Luca explains, it is a sport on which “the Italian public has little culture: it has come to know how Tiger Woods phenomenon, become number 1 of the world for a decade and passes into a sport that until the 1950s-60 had a separate championship for people of color as they were forbidden to play with whites; seeing a black dominating the scene in this way was a generational leap”. The last theme treated by the sports journalist is his theatrical show ‘I can beat Kennedy to golf’, in which “there are four stories in which the sport has intertwined with politics: one of these concerns the famous photo with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara on a golf course, recalling the rivalry at a distance with Kennedy who among other things was an excellent player; other stories concerning the 1976 Davis Cup, the annulment of a Lazio-Barcello.
– photos taken from video Medicine Top –
(ITALPRESS).
