The triumphs, wave hair, actor smile, jokes, loves, games with Gassman and Tognazzi, exaggerations, self -irony and many cigarettes. snapshots of the first tennis star in Italy: “If I had made a different life I would not have been and I prefer me so”
Always been free, even not to celebrate. And in fact the trophies lost them in some move, “but they were all rusty”. He admits that age has its advantages but the disadvantages are more numerous. It has three regrets in everything, and one is Wimbledon 1979, but then contradicts himself and indeed he corrects himself, “he has never been one of his dreams, I always thought it was a joke, come on, you cannot play on the grass”. He had three dreams (like the regrets): win Rome, win the Roland Garros and win the Davis Cup. And destiny made them make them all three in the same year, the wonderful 1976 of Adriano Panatta. Absolute happiness. “You cannot compare it to the joys of life. It is a flash, a big joy, which lasts very little. It is like when you enjoy after sex, then smokes a cigarette and it’s all over”. On the evening of success in Paris they waited for him at the Sue wife restaurant and a few friends, ten people in all. The others ordered sought after dishes, opened precious bottles, wanted to make a toast to the poetry of your tennis. He felt distant and a little depressed, empty. “They said to me: what do you have? I was thinking: that’s all? At the bottom I was just in the underwear, with one thing in hand, to chase a pallet. I had not invented penicillin.” He told it in a book on the void, the one that takes you in the moment of maximum fullness for a sample. Desecrate, diminish, disassemble: it does it continuously. “Happiness lasts ten seconds, maybe less. It is like a sudden folar, when there is no wind. Do you think: it is beautiful, and it is already over. The magic does not last. I made me enough.” The others were not prepared to see all that melancholy on him. He had won Rome and then Paris, one after the other. It was time to celebrate. But he doesn’t. “I remember this quite strange feeling. I thought: beautiful, beautiful, I won this thing, but now leave me in peace, I am a sad man”. Always exaggerate Panatta.