JANUARY 1999

 

Our memory has been subjected to a strange test endured for two evenings. As Proust, we have gone searching the loosen football, we have got back to June 1970. A private network has transmitted two matches of the world championship disputed in Mexico; the semifinal Italy- West Germany, Italy won 4-3 and the final match Italy -Brazil, when Italy was defeated for 1-4. The two matches were transmitted integrally. Applied to football and other sports sociology and psychology have already offered many answers to whom attempts to question the mysteries of the terraces of a stadium. We know that frustration and violence are the terms of the equation the support phenomenon is explained with. But along two evenings it passed on the video an animated album of memories, matches belonging to the romanticism of the distance. And overall matches already evoked for hundred times, instants ended since almost thirty years ago, archived as more or less glorious practices, like they were newspaper retails to which it's impossible, for a law of nature, give back the thrill of actuality. But it is not enough. It is well known that memory, when operating its meandering soundings, does not attend the chronicle rules, misses out details, gets very rapidly to the essence of remembrances. Maybe this is an error since, as the figure of Emilia says in “Our town” of Thornton Wilder, the feeling of life is more in the little things than in those great, is more in the milk bottle, in the morning , in the voices from the yard, in the scattered recalls, than in the sudden inspirations round which destiny seems to converge.

A question turns allowed: the fan memory is something different from the fans' memory if it falls a prey to the football passion? I think it is. An archive survey allowed me to find the listening indexes of the two mentioned matches: 23 million spectators for Italy -Germany and 32 millions for Italy -Brazil (on July 1969, for the landing on the moon the American spacemen had 27 millions spectators). The night of the Italy- Germany match, newspapers reported about anticipated timetable for movies theatre and horse races. Meaningful detail, the night trains travelled practically empty. All that has not happened again. Any town has stopped for two nights of revival. But if the listening index is obviously lessened, the two transmissions had the same rekindled humours, provoked family bustles and discussions. Nevertheless on the video, it was not passed only the magic moments of the goals, the roaring saves kicks almost touching the goal. There were also the breaks, the match getting breath back, the boredom moments, the incidents without consequences, the useless discussions among players. Not only, it's must be said also that for the fans the magic moments were all foreseen, the goal would arrive from this play, apparently meaningless, speaker's words were continuously denied and it was already known since the moment they were said. All was known, all at all, minute by minute, second by second. All was already lived, all inexorably established.

Notwithstanding...how to comment on this test of “collective memory”? The term, according to the philosopher Lukacs, would point out no less than the class consciousness. We have lowered its level very remarkably: we ascertain, if ever, to respect reality. If television (we make the example, the first we think) would have transmitted the Kennedy's death day, we would not bear the details concerning the departure from Washington, the arrive at Dallas, the authorities ' homage at the airport and at the beginning of the march past. We would have wanted, immediately and without too much delay, see the sequence of the vehicle bending, Kennedy bowing the shot head, his wife Jacqueline bowing over him, the vehicle speeding up useless toward the hospital, hoping to save the President... We would want all that, while for the football, instead, we have accepted all the details and surely a synthesis of all that matches would have left us unsatisfied. Maybe in Italy the sport, and overall the football, is more powerful than the great of history. The million fans that suffered behind the television lines, so many kilometres far, do not find anything abnormal in tasting, as it were an early fruit, even the minimum detail already seen. The “loss football research “ is not for that fans an exercise for memory.