On some cloud somewhere in the sky, on January 8, 2025, the strange Clerici-Tommasi couple reunited, the most effective, original, and entertaining pair of tennis commentators that history remembers, even outside of Italy.: so much so that in 2002 the magazine Time dedicated a service entitled to them Tennis, the Italian style.
Rino Tommasi, after a long illness, at the age of 90, joined Gianni Clerici, just in time for the Australian Open. Very different, as people and as journalists, they had found in mutual compensation a highly original key to reporting on tennis: Tommasi reduced tennis matches to notebooks, (each tournament a notebook) covered with his own code of blue dots and red circles (for the most beautiful points), through which he could reconstruct the history of each match. The passion for statistics, combined with a prodigious memory, made Tommasi a living encyclopedia of tennis and boxinghis first true love: and in this way in the commentary Tommasi always knew how to bring the scribe, Clerici, who digressed by talking about white gestures, back to reality.
The mix was truly perfect: the two stories together enriched the game. Tommasi explained the why and wherefore of everything and in the end even someone who understood nothing about the objectively absurd score of tennis at the end of the match had an idea of the reasons why the game, the set, the match and the tournament had gone that way. Clerici brought in colour, imagination, wit, his long historical expertise as a collector, and gossip about the spectators who dotted the stands (those two knew everything about everyone in tennis and did not miss any comment with grace). They both understood a lot about tennis, they knew it very well, and they interpreted it wonderfully, having two different ways of talking about it, which made them complementary. To spice it all up, mutual irony, knowing how to take that game as a game and the commentary as well.
THE very different characters did not prevent a true friendship, the secret of the harmony even on television, which certainly survived earthly life: Clerici was a man from another era, unique in his genre and in his world, Tommasi is a man well introduced into the world and his time with a strong self-awareness. A famous phrase of his was: “I have no hobbies, because I only do something if I can do it best”. It happened that his colleagues made fun of him when the first monitors with real-time statistics arrived in the press rooms: «And now Rino, what will you do? They will make the circles themselves.” But everyone knew that Rino Tommasi certainly wasn’t limited to that.
No one was able to describe tennis better than Tommasi and Clerici, together, before and after them. It’s a great regret that we no longer have them to hear about Italian tennis as it is now, as strong and successful as it has ever been: who knows what nickname Sinner would have if they were still among us. Even the colleagues who predicted Tommasi’s risk of defeat in front of ever more powerful computers knew that no machine could compete with the strange couple of commentators, with their intelligence. Artificial intelligence was yet to come but even now that it exists it cannot give them back to us: they were perfect because they were imperfectly human and therefore unrepeatable.
