Aka Gpo, Gian Paolo Ormezzano is a man without edges: round and generous, in appearance and in soul. It resembles his writing: a sinuous phrasing, where each word is chained to the previous one, very difficult, if not impossible, to cut (but very precise in the measurements, with the foresight of also leaving space for the signature) because there is never one word too many, nor a random choice. A continuous flow from the mind to the hands on the keyboard, which do not stop even if they call him and he looks elsewhere, to get to the voice, with which he speaks exactly as he writes, about sport but not only, without taking it or taking himself too seriously.
«I worked for Tuttosport at the time and collaborated with Orizzonti, Famiglia Cristiana arrived in my life while I was packing my suitcase for the 1960 Rome Olympics», the first of an infinite, still very human edition in which it could happen that a Turin journalist brought Livio Berruti, the Bolt of the moment, Olympic champion and 200 meters record holder, home by car, without it seeming strange: a partnership that still lasts, when possible, around a table based on “plin” and boiled meat. «Don Giuseppe Zilli, the director at the time, called me and I believe that his affection opened doors for me with those who came later. I have covered sports far and wide, even topics, not just characters, free to write without having a single word censored in decades. After the Munich attack in 1972 (a Palestinian commando took the Israeli building at the Olympic Village hostage, causing a massacre: 11 guest athletes, a policeman who intervened and 5 dead terrorists, ed.), Don Leonardo Zega, then deputy director, called me asking a piece to say “Let’s stop the Games”. I replied that I saw it differently, that this way the terrorists would be victorious. He replied: “Okay, write what you think. But in this way he personally takes responsibility for it.” Afterwards he proved me right. In 1978 Don Zilli had a serious road accident, I went to visit him in hospital. At the time I was managing Tuttosport. Moved, he said to me: “But how, with all he has to do, can he come to visit a poor Christ like me?”, a phrase that gave the idea of the person.”
It would have been said that it was difficult to keep oneself balanced between different commitments: «And yet none of those who sent me around the world to cover events found fault with the fact that I wrote about them, with different cuts and at different times, even on Famiglia Cristiana: it was a added. He opened doors. When, during the African Games, I managed to get from Lagos to Biafra in 1973, starving from the recent civil war, the moral license of Famiglia Cristiana made me welcome by the Irish missionaries, even with a small piece of chicken to fish with my hands in the boiling broth . Not only that, without the push of three seminarians from Campania, who knew me thanks to FC, I would never have finished the New York marathon at the age of 60.” The difficult thing in the early years, not very technological, was the closing times, with the delivery much earlier than the release, balancing acts to stay inside without ending up in a black hole: «Sometimes I had to cheat a little, write things like “regardless of the final outcome, the event meant this,” when I still didn’t know the outcome. It didn’t always go well, Carla Fracci’s husband laughingly asked me to intercede because he no longer saw his wife on Famiglia Cristiana except in an advertisement for a soap, since their son was, improvidently, born early, between the closing of the cover that he wanted it “on hold” and for the number to come out.”
To those who ask him which sports he has followed most on these pages, he responds with “Everything”, a concise summary that encompasses the entire world. He talks about an era in which it was possible to be sent from Mexico to Sao Paulo in Brazil as if on the street: «To interview Pelé, having a direct relationship with the champions that the era of press officers and prosecutors sent to the attic; after answering a few questions, O Rei said to me, mixing Spanish, Italian and Portuguese: “But now ask my companions something too.” Nice isn’t it? I spent some time looking at his feet and started writing from there. It wouldn’t have been possible via Skype.”
It could also happen that I met the father of a champion by chance: «Dino Zoff told me that his father read to get a complete idea of Famiglia Cristiana e l’Unità, he introduced him to me in Friuli explaining: “You know, I think he doubts my work, he says to me: But are you really sure that you earn all this money by preventing something made of leather from entering the internet?”. I thought about it when I wrote Don’t tell my mother that I’m a sports journalist, she thinks I’m a snatcher of old ladies. My mother was like Zoff’s father.”
In Turin 2006 Ormezzano, from Turin and Turinist Dop, now retired, did the honours, making fun of the Olympic motto “Passion lives here” which lent itself to risqué translations. Perhaps he doesn’t know, Gpo, that, on a memorable night of memories, in a bar in Crocetta under the reddish snow sky of Olympic Turin with Livio Berruti, he gave blood and flesh to the imagination of a former little girl, obsessed with sport, who many years earlier had sought in his stories about FC an escape from the boredom of adult chatter on winter Sundays. He doesn’t know that it took a moment, then and there, to instruct the mind to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle: the champion of Rome and that torrential signature with the two gentlemen lost in amarcord at the counter. How nice, though.
