The former striker opens to the Gazzetta: “I was an introverted boy, nobody helped me, the field was my only refuge. In Manchester I conquered me compared to hard muo”
Tears, suffering, falls and climbing, sports and family dramas overcome in the name of extreme resistance, out of the norm. The story of Pepito Rossi is known. The injuries in series, years of football lost as two world championships in a painful way, a life with great wounds. “And in fact I don’t make me tell me for the umpteenth time, that I don’t want to do therapy, everyone knows it and puts me an anguish …”, he says from New Jersey, where he is following the training of the boys of his campus. Ok.
So since it is surrounded by children we return to the summer of 1999, when from the US it arrived at Parma. He was 12 years old. What relationship did he have with Italy?
“Magnificent. Every summer we started from Clifton, New Jersey, and we passed a month and a half in Italy. The base was Fraine, the 500 soul village where my father was born, in the province of Chieti. And then Acquaviva di Isernia, Molise, another small fraction from where my mother had started, and the sea in Vasto”.
How did you meet?
“At school, in Clifton, where they both taught. Dad had arrived in America at 16, mom at 13”.
“It seemed to me New York. I lived in the typical terraced house of the American shows and I could only move in the car, there was no sense of neighborhood, it was a very closed life in the house, and among the nearby children nobody wanted to play football. They thought only of basketball, football, baseball and I was doing the two against two with my father my mother and sister. The days with interminable matches, and then in the evening in Piazza Calcio and Music, absolute freedom, we swept undisturbed, we parents without worries without worries.
“At a certain point of the holiday my father took me a week to Tabiano Terme to a summer football school. I went there 3 years and a Parma observer saw me.”
“Tremendous. I didn’t want to go inside me, but I didn’t want to disappoint dad. And so he and I moved to Salsomaggiore and mom and Tina, my sister, they remained in Clifton. Very hard: at home we spoke 40% Italian and 60% English, and I suffered from writing to death, as well as in French and mathematics, a matter that in Italy is much more advanced than in America. I was struggling to make friends and professors thought they were there for football and did not help me in the least.
And to further complicate his life at 17, he ended up at the United by Sir Alex Ferguson.
“They had an observer in the area, and one day in May 2004 he approaches me, gives me a pins of Manchester United and tells me they want me. I think it’s a joke, I pass the number to dad and it’s all true. A very important contract for 4 years, and the possibility of training with the first team of what was then the most important club in Europe”.
The first meeting with Sir Alex?
“At the signature. A surprise: an austere but affectionate and careful person, close, a paternal figure used to treating young people like jewels, protecting and stimulating them to make them grow at best as people and as players, with very precise and outlined values and rules. We found ourselves because I had great ambition and great education, my father had pulled me on a very precise way in this sense, immediately”.
“Incredible. Another planet. Another sport compared to what I was used to. Bestial speed and brutal intensity. He has the famous phrase, ‘you play as you train’? Well, my father always repeated it to me and there at United, however, it was multiplied by a thousand. In training there were no friends: kicks, pushes, aggression”.
And her 17 year old striker minute how did he react?
“I quickly understood what I had to do. I had talent, I had to use it to conquer the respect and trust of those monsters. I was physically behind, I had to get away with technique and intelligence”.
“Thinking about a new speed. Before the ball arrived I had to know what to do with us. Otherwise Gary Neville or Nemanja Vidic were there to give me the alarm clock. Some wood … there is an anecdote that perfectly photographs my mental state of that time. Roy Keane in his autobiography said that once in training he had fallen a young Italian because he had not passed the ball and this boy had replied. ‘If he had told me something I would have struck it.
When he arrived in Parma he ever thought of giving up everything and telling dad, ‘let’s go home’?.
“Yes, many times. But I never told him, and not even my mother, to anyone. I didn’t want to disappoint it but above all I didn’t want to lose, and I wanted to be the last word. As with the injuries, further on my life: I always came back, I would be the one to decide when to give up, not a doctor or manager, and it went like this: I did my last 5 games with Spal and I stopped.”
“The difficulties help are necessary in a process of growth and learning. I was lucky to have to face them so much young, with the help of dad. When I missed, in 2010 when I was 23, I was ready, he had prepared me for life, and therefore for what I would spend later. The suffering of the teenager Pepito was fundamental because the Pepito man surpassed the great difficulties he found on the walk”.
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