Scardina, the Milanese idol of the people between punches, social networks, show biz and that debut in prison…

Scardina is all in an image of a Milanese night outside the old palalido. A small group of people and many puffs of smoke, mixed between breaths numbed by the cold and the unloading of the sandwich van: King Toretto had just won the Wbo super-middleweight intercontinental title by forcing the German mastiff Doberstein to leave and was eating salamella with friends and fans. Marcell Jacobs had come for him, there was the gotha ​​of Italian rap, the AC Milan players. But the star was Daniele, King as King and Toretto as Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious, the best Italian boxer of his time. A king who undressed his royal robes put back on the comfortable ones ever.

Pueblo boxer

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Because Scardina is to Milanese boxing what Carlos Tevez was to Buenos Aires football, he is a pueblo boxer. He comes from Rozzano, here he threw his first punch at the age of 8 against someone who had mistreated his cousin, here he made a mess (“but I always made mistakes with my head, never to please the herd”), here he entered for the first time in gym and fell in love with the smell of sweat and bags. And he dreamed, Daniele, dreamed of leaving and then returning to King. One day he does, he gets on a plane and flies to New York. He has no money but a desire as big as Italy. His idols are Miguel Angel Cotto and Marvin Hagler, humble people, who built the myth for themselves. From their example he learns the culture of work. He does his best in boxing temples, from Brooklyn’s Gleason’s Gym to Miami’s 5th street. In the same clubs where greats like Jake La Motta and Sonny Liston trained, he tempers his physique, learns to use it, refines his technique and in his spare time he makes ends meet, unloads furniture and works in bars. He discovers his faith and tattoos it on him also because he has nothing else. He makes his debut in a prison, La Victoria, in Santo Domingo: in a ring arranged with only the inmates as spectators. “They were people he had made a mistake and was paying for, I saw myself as little more than a child in Rozzano while I was struggling to live”. That night he throws Wilson Jimenez down and realizes two things. The first: that a piece of those boyish wishes has come true. The second: to climb even further you need rules and sacrifices. Hagler told him, Marvelous Hagler. He met him one day in a shopping center near Milan, hugs, photos, then Marvin shows him a ring: “They give it to you with the world champion belt, you must have it too. But never think you’ve arrived.”

Mantras

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But Scardina already knew it, it was a mantra he embodied. He is not only a very talented boxer – 20 career victories before the only defeat against De Carolis last May 13 in Milan – but the living demonstration that even starting from the bottom you can build a ladder that leads to dreams. The tattoos, the emerald life, the hyped love story with Diletta Leotta, the beautiful clubs, the hundreds of thousands of likes, the seats of the show biz, the cinema life that everyone dreams of Scardina does it because she built it . And if he made it with his fists, those who want to become a doctor, engineer, president, actor can make it: the limits to dreams are set only by those who don’t dream. His media presence is also good for his sport, for a long time without icons in Italy, and he has been very skilled at becoming an entrepreneur of his image: “My idea of ​​boxing – he told the Gazzetta – is to unite many worlds. Stopping at sport would be a mistake, I’ve been living in the States for years and there I understood that we need to go beyond boxing. I want to take fans from all sports and make them passionate about me, and thus about this sport.” However, this does not distract him from the ring, where he has made his way in the rankings and with patience and the right matches he aims for ever more glittering limelight. The misstep with De Carolis was a hitch, he should have had a rematch, then the choice to move up to the light heavyweights and make his debut against the Frenchman Cedric Spera: match set for March 24th. But there was a sudden illness.