The prince of clay and the Davis Cup, he who actually had noble blood on his mother’s side. Nicola Pietrangeli and Italian tennis have been one and the same for a long time. First, the great racket champion, then the yardstick with which to measure all those who came after him, including Panatta. He won a lot even if not everything he could have, but as Rino Tommasi wrote “Nicola would never have given up a dinner, a party, a woman to be able to play a game better”.

The greatness of a discipline is given by the quality of its interpreters throughout history. And it is no coincidence that among the greats of the racket who wanted to pay homage to Pietrangeli yesterday, the memory of Rafael Nadal came among the first. You cannot be a champion of your sport if you do not know how to recognize and appreciate those who, before you, contributed to its growth. Nicola Pietrangeli was a tennis champion, one of the best of his era and probably among the strongest players on clay, as evidenced by the two triumphs at Roland Garros (as well as two finals), the three titles in Monte Carlo and the two successes at the Internazionali d’Italia. The second, in 1961 in Turin, beating Rod Laver 6-8, 6-1, 6-1, 6-2 in the final.

Regarding the Spanish left-hander, Pietrangeli himself once told me the emotion he felt in rewarding him all those times between the Principality and the Foro Italico: “Rewarding is a great honour, an award ceremony is followed by millions of people worldwide. I have lost count of how many times I have rewarded Nadal between Monte Carlo and Rome: it’s incredible!”.

The funeral will be in his stadium, at the Foro Italico, as he had already declared years ago. The court where cheering changes the fate of a match and where you can smell the red clay and the effort of the tennis players. A surface of which he knew every pitfall and every trick. When one day Fognini asked him if he ran as much as him during the years he played, Pietrangeli replied: “No Fabio, I didn’t run, I made the others run.” Noblesse oblige.

A life of a novel

Number 3 in the world between 1959 and 1961, when the rankings were drawn up by journalists, Nicola Pietrangeli’s life could be told as a mix between sporting epic and novel of customs, a bit of Hemingway and a bit of Fellini, with the all-Italian taste of transforming sport into entertainment and biography into myth. Immersed in sport, glamor and relationships, the great Nick knew how to hit millimetric passers with his backhand and a few minutes later be, equally at ease, at the Crazy Horse in the company of the most beautiful stripper in Paris.

Vitality and zest for life, off the field he embodied the Roman “dolce vita”: friendships with actors, directors, singers, protagonists of culture and entertainment, he moved with the same naturalness between living rooms and playing fields. He was a true competitor, a champion who loved glories and victories, but always with the lightness and charm of those times, when with a victory in a Grand Slam you paid two months’ rent, while today you settle a couple of generations. For Lea Pericoli, a lifelong friend, he was “an eternal child”.

The man who became a friend of Prince Ranieri, tennis teacher of his son Alberto, and who frequented Sean Connery and the lawyer Agnelli, was born in Tunis to a father of Abruzzo origins and a Russian mother who fled the October Revolution. And here his life turns into a novel by Salgari. Forced to flee, the Pietrangelis return to Italy, to Rome. Nicola also plays football so well that he scores goals in bursts in the Lazio youth team, but tennis is in his destiny. When the Biancocelesti decide to send him on loan to Viterbese, he hangs up his shoes and picks up the racket.

He plays in one of the golden eras of tennis: the Australian giants Rosewall, Laver, Newcombe, Fraser, Emerson, Stolle and Roche, but also Hoad, Drobny, Santana and Ayala. How strong was Pietrangeli? The answer was given several years ago by Ken Rosewall, capable of winning 8 Slams without being able to play 44 because in the meantime he had turned professional: “If in our time they had confined us to an island for six months, without tennis courts, and then made us play a tournament, Nicola would have beaten us all.” As if to say: we make up for it with training and dedication, but in terms of talent Pietrangeli is second to none. He always replied: “It’s true, if I had trained more, I probably would have achieved better results, but I would have enjoyed it much less.”

Rosicone? No, Pietrangeli

First Panatta, then Berrettini’s successes and finally the rise and consecration of Sinner. Over the years, every comment by Pietrangeli on the state of health of Italian tennis and its players has often been relegated to the “rosiconi” box. Pietrangeli has always only done Pietrangeli. Maybe a little snobbish, perhaps too used to reading the present through the lens of the past, but if he couldn’t talk about tennis in Italy, who else could?

The first historic Davis Cup bears his signature as everyone, it must be said, has always recognized him. Without his intervention, Panatta & C. would never have landed in Chile in 1976. He moved heaven and earth, went from one salon to another, collected favors and made deals, on the right and on the left, but in the end he got the green light to bring his boys to Santiago. Once there, there was no Pinochet to hold: the most famous salad bowl in the world could never have escaped the blues.

As a journalist and devoted enthusiast of the events that take place on that rectangular field divided by a net in the middle, I had the privilege of interviewing the great Nicola on two or three occasions. The last one was three years ago, while I was starting to write a book on the history of tennis number 1s. He saw them all play and beat many of them; so who better than him could tell me what made them so special to look down on everyone. Here is one of his answers: “In tennis all times have had their number one. Which was the best? To answer we can look at the numbers and results, but making comparisons makes no sense. You are number one when you are playing, would you be number one in twenty years? We cannot know. Each of them was the champion of their era. You have to look at who is in front of you, it is he who you have to beat.”

Then he broadened the discussion to an old worry of his: “I will never understand this ‘open tennis’ thing, why always divide the history of tennis in two? Italy boasts of having won four football world championships, but it won two of these in the 1930s: so they aren’t valid?”. How can you blame me, Nick.

He won with elegance and came close to an incredible Wimbledon final in 1960, when in the semi-final he forced Rod Laver to a fifth set. Elegant on and off the court, he was dethroned by Sinner in all the Italian tennis records, but he only has one left and for him it was everything: 164 matches played between singles and doubles in the Davis Cup, impossible for anyone to even come close to. His passing, which came a few days after the fourth title won in Bologna, brings with it a veil of melancholy mitigated by the last great joy in his favorite tournament. Nick leaves us with the strongest Italy ever, with a number 1 like Sinner and with Musetti in the top ten, a worthy heir to the one-handed backhand.