Underdog: Destiny belongs to the last ones on the list

A new appointment with “Loquor”, the column edited by Carmelo Pennisi

“As a child, I was always the last option.” Tom Brady

I’ve always wondered who the best people really are, the ones who make the difference and indicate the right place to go, the best gesture to offer, the best expression to adopt, those who at a precise moment in your history know how to look you in the eye and tell you: “there is something special about you, and I can’t wait to find out what it is”.

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Dick Vermeil imagined American football on the opposite side of Tony D’Amato/Al Pacino, his fictional colleague drawn by Oliver Stone in “Any Given Sunday”. For the Californian coach there has never been a hell to get out of, there have never been people who loved him kicked out, and not even an ad libitum squandering of money. Vermeil’s American football is also miles away from the “suspended moment” Leigh Anne Tuohy/Sandra Bullock talks about in “The Blind Side”, as his vision was to continually hunt for the improbable in order to make it credible. In him there has never been the “paraculism” of sport that has become a global advertising event, the philosopher’s phrases of the “Reader’s Digest” intended for the deluded, disillusioned and then deluded audience by the dispensers of psychedelic “rooms with a view”.

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The latter take a seat on a bench, turn on the turbo of their fireworks passed off as ideas, and then get the rich owners to sign checks on the player market, convincing the media and enthusiasts to go on a beauty hunt. Football from overseas is something that must be understood and rummaged through its explosions where every bone that cracks gives the “Quarterback” time to think in which line of air the oval ball will be hit. We are at the concept of “frontier” where the “pocket”, the semicircle created around the “Quarterback”, is every time the “7th Cavalry” of General George Armstrong Custer intent on trying to give a different fate to the battle of the “Little Big Horne”. ”. In every centimeter of the “yards” (or yards, you name it) there is the story of the most controversial state in history, its being good and bad, with the anxiety of being a leader because it is aware of its greatness. America has no second thoughts even when it realizes it was wrong, having a clear conviction that every goal erases every pain, every doubt and even every sin.

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Football is the “Stars and Stripes” flag that takes the world head on and forces it to think exclusively about the goal. You fly over the “Statue of “freedom” and arrive, passing through the “Campidoglio”, up to the “White House”, where the President sanctions the ever-present validity of the spirit of the “Frontier”. In this pentagram of existence it doesn’t count to win, but the courage with which you tried to do it counts. Being bold is part of the victory, which otherwise would be incomplete and not worthy of being remembered. Here sport is sublimated, overcoming every irreverent disenchantment that wants it “bread and circuses” for trained audiences. Dick Vermeil in this sublimation has been able to give an almost literary value to the figure of the underdog, or the one / she given as an underdog capable of subverting any prediction of defeat. Vince Papale was nailed to the counter of a bar, Kurt Warner was growing melancholy among the shelves of a supermarket, and this moment in their history recalls how, before arriving at what you want to do, sometimes (I would almost always say) you have to do that what must be done. More than underdogs, the two in the eyes of the surrounding world are dreamers eternally willing to imagine a future in football that they will never have. “You must learn to remain calm and focused inside the Pocket while a wall of humanity collapses around you”, in this story by Kurt Warner we understand the meaning of a climb towards a seemingly impossible goal. Vince Papale played for the “Philadelphia Eagles” for only three years, but he realizes every fan’s dream: to play for his favorite team.

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In 1975 Philadelphia is not doing well at all, the most violent economic crisis of the century is closing factories and is literally razing all kinds of job opportunities. The “Eagles”, the beloved football team of the city, have not been able to reach the playoffs for fifteen years, and Papale has just been dumped by his wife with a farewell note transfigured into a ruthless sentence: “you will not go anywhere , you will never become a nobody and you will never make any money”. The only things left to him are his friends and the dusty field where he plays football with them imagining himself to be an “Eagles”. “I got lost in a dream looking for something that doesn’t exist”, writes Gabriel Garcia Marquez; it is the feeling of being trapped in a labyrinth where you feel the fury of the Minotaur approaching and you still haven’t seen Theseus with the thread of his beloved Ariadne, designed to get you out of the contrite maze of all your feelings and defeats. At the apogee of the depression into which one of the toughest cities in America has fallen, Dick Vermeil appears at the door of the “Eagles”, one who does not simply solve the impossible, but sees the “possible” buried under invisibility of failure.

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There would be a lot to say about the epic of Vermeil’s “Eagles”, forced by previous bad management choices to not be able to make the best choices in the “Draft” for a few years (the complicated system by which professional league teams sign players from university colleges), but it suffices to know how from the cylinder of lost opportunities the Calistoga coach brings out, from the auditions made to all the discarded and forgotten of this incredible sport, a big boy born and raised in “South Phillys” (the refuge of the underprivileged in the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed), the “forgotten” by all possible “drafts”, the now thirty-year-old resigned to remain a barman and to see the “NFL” on TV, and makes Papale and Philadelphia live among the three best years of their sporting life. The need of those who “find you”, of those who have the ability to “see you”, of those who do not allow themselves to be corrupted by the needs of the market and by interests, whether hidden or obvious, is much more important than talent: it is the justice of a necessary infinity. Kurt Warner knows this well, and even today he struggles to tell his story because even in his eyes it seems impossible that it really happened. As a child he falls in love with Joe Montana, legendary “Quarterback” of the “San Francisco 49ers” and he too blossomed surprisingly starting from number 82 of the “third round” of the 1979 “Draft”. He is practically considered a bench player, in the madness of a sport that will elect him one of the greatest of all time.

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Warner is worse, much worse; there is no Draft waiting for him nor a great destiny, many consider it too kind for a sport that expects you to play “like someone hit your mother”. There is no perseverance, self-sacrifice, hard work and absolute faith in God that can change the negative course of things, there is the surrender that converged first on the shelves of a grocery store and then in the Arena Football League, a sort of “Harlem Globetrotters” of the oval ball in indoor format. “I ended up at the circus, but we need money, and I only know how to play football,” Warner says bitterly to his wife Brenda, aware that at 27, in the “NFL” and in sport in general, dreams cannot no more knocking on your door. But it’s a clean rendition of Dick Vermeil, the diviner of talent who knows that football is a game of mistakes, where the one who makes the least wins. Back to coaching sixteen years after the experience of the “Eagles”, the most atypical coach on the square, in order to find who can make the difference, also has his “scouting” probe the Arena Football League, finding and signing Kurt Warner against the opinion of the big press and of all its staff. It takes courage, it takes intelligence, it takes the ability to make yourself impermeable to the diligent chorus of crowning only those who are considered elite, it takes determination to act.

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It’s Dick Vermeil, gentlemen, and he launches an almost old boy into the firmament of US sport, making him the greatest player in American Football history ever to go through the Drafts and one of the greatest Quarterbacks ever. From $5.50 an hour of grocery store shelf clerking, Warner moves up to $18 million a year contracts, managing to win a “Super Bowl,” where he is elected “MVP” (best player) . The designated and co-opted aristocracy has never passed by Vermeil, and years after his retirement his most important teaching remains carved in ageless stones: we have a duty to “find”, and the need to be “found”. , because “destiny belongs to the last ones on the list”. On behalf of all those who made it and all those who keep thinking about making it: Thank you Dick.

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Writer, screenwriter and director. A huge grenade fan and already co-author with the late Anthony Weatherill of the “Loquor” column on Toro News which he continues to edit in honor and memory of him. He counts, among his numerous works and screenplays, that of the film “Now and forever”, in memory of the Grande Torino.

Through its columns, thanks to the work of qualified commentators, Toro News offers its readers food for thought and independent insights into Turin and beyond.