Pallbearers carry the coffin of Salvatore Schillaci during his funeral ceremony at the Palermo cathedral, Italy, on Sept 20. — AP
AZEGLIO Vicini did not have any particular words of wisdom for Salvatore Schillaci. He did not send him on to the field at the Stadio Olimpico, into the white heat of a home World Cup, weighed down by some complex tactical schema.
Vicini was not that sort of coach. His instructions were simple: Entra, e fai gol. Go on, and score.
They would, as it turned out, be the last words anyone said to Salvatore Schillaci before he took the field late in Italy’s opening game at the 1990 World Cup.
A few minutes later, the 25-year-old Schillaci had fulfilled Vicini’s request.
His header had given Italy the lead against Austria. His celebration, eyes wide with shock and awe as the Stadio Olimpico melted around him, enraptured a nation; he would, from that moment on, only ever be Toto.
Football mourns its idols, these days, with unhappy regularity. Last Tuesday, Aston Villa wore black armbands to commemorate Gary Shaw, one of the heroes of their glorious European Cup campaign in 1982.
A few days earlier, Anfield stood to applaud Ron Yeats, captain of Bill Shankly’s first great Liverpool side. The funeral of Sven-Goran Eriksson, a former England manager, was held in Sweden this month.
This is, obviously, a function of time, of the unfortunate truth that even childhood heroes are not impervious to age.
But it is a consequence of fame, too, a measure of football’s growth from weekend pastime to global sporting phenomenon.
Gigi Riva and Franz Beckenbauer, who both died this year, formed part of the sport’s first generation of truly global icons, names that resonated beyond the bounds of the field.
Schillaci, who died this week from bowel cancer at 59, belongs in that category, too, though he would never have claimed to rank alongside the likes of Beckenbauer as a player.
He was, by his own assessment, “useless” in the air. He once described himself as “mangy.”
For much of his career, Schillaci was a perfectly respectable but somewhat workaday striker: He had a couple of prolific seasons in Serie B, Italy’s second division, and a brief flourish in Serie A.
For one month in the summer of 1990, though, he was something else: certainly the most beloved player in Italy, and undoubtedly one of the most famous players in the world.
The impact he had can be gauged by the grief that greeted the news of his death. Italy stood in mourning.
In his hometown, Palermo, the city’s stadium was given over for fans to pay their respects. A swath of Italian football’s great and good lined up to offer eulogies.
It is not difficult to understand why Schillaci commanded such affection in his homeland. He had been such a late inclusion in Vicini’s squad for the 1990 World Cup that he does not feature in the official Panini sticker album for the tournament; he had won his place only after impressing in a tune-up game against Switzerland.
Even so, he did not expect to play much of a role. He had scored 15 goals in Serie A for Juventus the previous season, but Vicini had an embarrassment of riches in attack: Gianluca Vialli, Aldo Serena, Andrea Carnevale and, of course, the country’s great ponytailed star, Roberto Baggio.
The summer, though, would belong to Schillaci. He scored against Austria, and then again in the final group game against Czechoslovakia.
He helped Italy past Uruguay in the last 16, and Ireland in the quarter-finals.
His celebrations became as imprinted on the national consciousness as the goals: those eyes, wide and delirious, as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing, what he was doing.
It all felt, he would say during the tournament, “like a dream,” so feverish as to be infectious.
Italy was not alone, though, in falling for Schillaci. Italia ’90 was not, by most standards, a particularly attractive World Cup.
The tournament’s opening game – Argentina’s defeat by Cameroon – was thrilling and surprising and uplifting, but it was also unapologetically brutal; Cameroon finished the game with nine players.
That established a tone that would last for the rest of the month.
Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Voeller. England hooligans tore up various scenic locations around Italy. The final, perhaps the ugliest in living memory, was a dour, intensely cynical game in which Argentina – completing the circle – had two players dismissed, West Germany scored a late penalty and everyone agreed the final whistle was a blessed relief.
And yet few tournaments are remembered as fondly, or proved so formative. Much of that was to do with the packaging: the music of the Three Tenors and New Order; the grandeur of the stadiums, the spectacular homes of what were then the greatest club teams in the world; the unhuman menace of the official mascot/logo, Ciao.
But those warm memories were related to the timing, too. There were several events that served both as signposts and nursemaids on football’s journey from the dark days of the 1980s to the bright, corporate vision of the sport that took root in the 1990s: the founding of the Premier League and the Champions League in 1992; the Hillsborough disaster; the start, in Europe, of satellite television.
Italia ’90, though, was one of them. It made football, for possibly the first time since the early 1970s, seem glamorous, and exotic, and sophisticated.
For those few weeks, Schillaci, nicknamed Toto, became the defining figure in this moment of great transformation: a player, or at least a phenomenon, who could not have existed either a few years before or after.
Italia ’90 was sufficiently global to turn him into a star overnight, but it was also a remnant of a previous age, one of the last tournaments played before wall-to-wall coverage and video games and then the internet rendered football fans immune to surprise, made everyone a household name, stripped the game of its last few wisps of mystery.
He went into Italia ’90 unknown to almost everyone outside Italy. He left it as the central character of that summer.
He would never just be Salvatore Schillaci. He would always be Toto. — NYT
