dvdjamm
All Star
FLORENCE, Italy — Last Tuesday, about 24 hours before he jammed his fingers into another man’s nose, dropped his elbow across another man’s neck and put another man’s feet where one’s ears are supposed to be, Rodrigue Nana considered, just for a moment, the basic notion of fear.
“Do you want to know what I am afraid of?” he said, his fingers tracing the meaty scar above his left eyebrow. Nana, a Cameroon-born transplant to Italy, leaned forward, as if to share a secret. “I am afraid of showering.”
He did not laugh. Neither did any of his teammates sitting nearby. This was not a time for joking; Nana and the rest of his team were about to begin their last training session before last Wednesday’s final match of calcio storico, a centuries-old competition that features very few rules and the sort of human wreckage generally associated with the days of the gladiators.
Nana and his friends have endless stories. There was the player whose ankle shattered at the bottom of a dog pile. The one who went into a coma after being punched in the back of the head. The guy whose ear was bitten off in the middle of a scrum. In one game, Nana had his shaved scalp cut open the way a letter opener slices an envelope.
“The thing is,” Nana continued, “when you’re playing, you don’t feel any of it.
“But then you calm down and take a shower. And that is when everything starts to burn.”
A few of the other men, who ranged in age from their late teenage years to their mid-40s, nodded. None of them could say why, exactly, they were sitting on dilapidated benches beside a raggedy field, could not put into words what, exactly, made them spend four months preparing to play, at most, two games that almost always required some form of medical attention afterward.
They just knew that they felt they had no choice. For many, it was simply hard-wired history. This grand city has four historical quarters, each with a church at its center, and calcio storico, which is believed to date to the 15th century, is played by one team from each neighborhood. To play for your neighborhood team — to wear the Verdi (green) of San Giovanni or the Azzurri (blue) of Santa Croce or the Bianchi (white) of Santo Spirito or the Rossi (red) of Santa Maria Novella — is, as Niccolò Innocenti of the Verdi put it, “deeply Florentine.”
“When I played for the first time, the sensation I had was one of truly being a man,” he said.
For others, though, the attraction is more primitive. With two teams of 27 players placed in a sand pit and told, essentially, to do whatever is necessary to get a ball into the other team’s end zone, the sport is a strange mix of American football, rugby and street fighting. Watching it live, a more direct comparison might be to the children’s game Red Rover, but with punching and tattoos.
Brutality is everywhere. No player has died during calcio storico, but Luciano Artusi, a former director of the body that oversees the games, conceded that “we have had a spleen removed.” Filippo Allegri, one of the on-field paramedics, said that his group generally expects that seven or eight players from each team will not finish any given game and recalled, without prompting, that 10 players, or about 20 percent of the participants, required hospitalization after a particularly brutal final in 2013. There are no substitutions, so exhaustion is common. So, too, are dehydration and concussions.
All of this might make more sense to the average outsider if there were millions of dollars (or at least enduring fame) on the line. But players are not paid in calcio storico, and there is no significant prize. The winning team used to receive a calf from Tuscany — butchered, not live — but now the champions simply have the cost of their postgame dinner picked up by the federation. There is not even a medal ceremony.
“It is like a war — no one does it for the money,” said Nana, who plays for the Bianchi. “You do it because you feel an obligation to fight.” He shrugged. “So you fight. And if you come back alive, you get drunk and talk about it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/sport ... EMARK&_r=2
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