He has always told sports stories, and now from a singer he becomes an actor. I can beat Kennedy at golf is the piece with which Massimo De Luca, journalist and golfer, arrives in Rome (after Milan and Parma) on May 15th at the Sala Umberto.
De Luca narrates the “dangerous intersections” between sport and politics that characterized major events starting from the years between the 70s and 80s, when three consecutive boycotts pushed the Olympics to the brink of the abyss. “This show – De Luca tells the Ansa news agency – was born from a series of stories in which sport was intertwined with politics. The theme of what the link between sport and politics should be is relaunched, which in some ways becomes very current with the controversies over the control of sports clubs’ budgets. I was lucky enough to have a teacher like Sergio Zavoli on the radio who taught me to talk about something else by talking about sport. Here sport becomes a starting point to revisit episodes from the 20th century.
On stage De Luca also recalls apparently neutral events, which instead had a strong political overtone. Among these was an unconsummated golf match between Fidel Castro and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And still others profoundly marked by political dialectics, with protagonists, in the background, Hitler, Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet.
Or dramatic challenges, like the “Melbourne bloodbath“, the water polo match played at the Olympics in Australia between Hungary and the Soviet Union. It was December 6, 1956 and a few weeks earlier, in Budapest, the revolt of Hungarian students and workers had been bloodily crushed by USSR tanks.
De Luca from Che Guevara to Lazio-Barcelona
“The phrase that Fidel Castro uttered on the occasion of that photo of him with Che Guevara is the starting point for telling the background story. Kennedy – recalls De Luca – was a good golfer and his passion for this sport is intertwined with his death. What remains pending is that lesson-appointment with the then green champion Arnold Palmer which never took place because it was scheduled shortly after the tragedy in Dallas”.
And then how can we forget the match never played by Lazio with Barcelona in the UEFA Cup or the Davis Cup in Chile. And again: the life of the German tennis champion, Baron Gottfried von Cramm during the times of Nazi Germany..
The show, under the patronage of the Italian Basketball Federation, will have a charitable purpose in favor of LILT. De Luca reserves a special dedication for his evening: our thoughts turn to Gaetano Laguardiaformer FIP vice president who passed away on 19 December.
