Sports Illustrated - USA (2022-05)

soccer has a long and sordid history with the Mafia.

Members of Naples’s Camorra crime syndicate plied

Diego Maradona with drugs and sex workers during the

1980s. Sicily’s two biggest sides, Palermo and Catania,

have long stood accused of Mafia ties. And in November,

former Palermo captain Fabrizio Miccoli was sentenced

to three and a half years in prison for commissioning a

Cosa Nostra mobster to recover a friend’s debt.

Mancuso was also wary of soccer’s on-f ield culture,

which rewards f lops and theatricality, and which cen-

ters on an obsession with individual talent. In contrast,

a well-timed juke or kick may break a rugby team’s

barricades, but no ball reaches the opposing try line

without everybody’s involvement.

Soccer is balletic and Brownian. Rugby is trench

warfare. “We’re in a society that is individualistic—a

performance,” says Mancuso. “In rugby, you need to

look at what you have around you. It’s not enough to

have very good players. You also have to work together.”

Nowhere is that ethos better distilled than in one of

rugby’s key moments, the ruck, where a tackled player

must release the ball and wait for teammates to grab or

contest it, often in the form of a bone-crunching shoul-

der charge. Stricken players have to get back up and go

again. “If you fall,” says Gloria Mertoli, the captain of

Briganti’s senior women’s team, “[teammates] will help

you back up. This is like life....You fall down, you get

up—and you continue.”

Mancuso applied this maxim at the San Teodoro,

a former potato field that had been repurposed for

the 1997 World University Games but was never used.

Denied in his initial petition to the city for control of the

abandoned grounds, he pushed on, unfazed. Finally, on

April 25, 2012—32 years to the day after Italy was liber-

ated from fascism—Mancuso declared the San Teodoro

to be Briganti’s official home, paperwork be damned.

SPORTS

ILLUSTRATED

SI.COM

MAY 2022

77

When the Cunsolo clubhouse was

torched, players approached it

like they do their sport: “You fall

down, you get up,” says Mertoli.