The legendary winger of Cagliari and Turin and that technical magic with which he also scored goals: “They told me I was making fun of my opponents, but I liked it. And I was also there in the legendary scudetto won by Torino in 1976”
“I started at seven years old, playing in the street in Bari, without goals, against a shutter with my brother Vittorio. When we returned home he said: ‘Giovanni scored a strange goal for me'”. It was the rabona or the cross, you name it. A football magic. The supporting leg flexes, the other foot goes around it and hits the ball for a shot, a cross, a pass. Giovanni Roccotelli even scored two rabona goals. One with the Ascoli shirt against Brescia and one from a free kick with Nocerina against Juve Stabia. Today, at 72 years old, he is still remembered for that gesture, more than for the scudetto won as a supporting actor in the stellar Toro of Graziani, Pulici and Claudio Sala or for two extraordinary years in Ascoli or the season in Cagliari where the king of rabona found a wife and where he still lives, on the outskirts of Monserrato. “You make fun of your opponents, the coaches told me, but I liked it, only one of Catania threatened me once.” But Roccotelli also crossed perfectly and from there another phrase became legendary that made him known to many. In the editorial office of Corriere della Sera the journalist Guido Laiolo, pressed by his basketball colleague Zelio Zucchi, who was demanding more space for his beloved sport, exclaimed: “A Roccotelli cross is worth more than the entire basketball championship”. Gianni never met him: “But that phrase is beautiful.”