Texts for Translation 2009:
  Martin Greig

*CHAPTER NINE*

The Toe of the Boot

REGGIO CALABRIA on a quiet December evening. Winter sunshine streams down on the immaculate lawns of Sant’ Agata, the training centre of Reggina FC. The smell of sea air fills the nostrils. In the distance, across the Strait of players, fresh from a training session, drift across the small courtyard. Africans, Asians, Europeans, even one Brit, an aspiring centre-half from Newcastle. They chat animatedly as they make their way into the residential quarters, an impressive white stone building they call home as they pursue their Series A dreams. I have come in search of Shunsuke Nakamura’s legacy. It soon becomes clear that it is all around me. Nakamura played for Reggina for three seasons between 2002 and 2005. He will never be forgotten. To say Nakamura made an impression on the tranquil seaside city is like saying Tiger Woods made a ripple or two in the world of golf. He almost single-handedly revolutionised the club and the city. He opened up new horizons, he generated the finance which helped fund new facilities, he scored goals, he helped keep them in Serie A, he inspired devotion. The last aspect is apparent everywhere you turn. Inquisitive looks from the locals melt into beatific smiles at the mention of his name. “Ahh, Shunsuke…” they say, eyes gazing into the middle distance as if they are watching a slideshow of the Japanese midfielder in their minds. If football is like a religion in Italy, then Nakamura is revered as a saint in this small city on the toe of the country’s boot. Mention his name in the local pizzerias and they will talk you through the ‘Shunsuke Special’, a pizza with the Japanese flag in the middle, made out of slices of mozzarella and one of tomato, representing the red sun. In the gelaterias they will tell you that his favourite flavour of ice cream is lemon and present you with a tub on the house. If you are brave enough to knock the shop door of the menacing ‘Ultras’ in the main street then they will, at first, peer threateningly from behind pairs of shades, before beckoning you into their darkened premises with hearty laughs when you namedrop their Japanese hero. Reggio Calabria has not forgotten Shunsuke Nakamura. In so many ways, he has never left. Pasquale Foti taps his cigar on the edge of the ashtray and flashes the kind of proud smile which a father reserves for his favourite son. The president of Reggina was the man responsible for first enticing Nakamura to the south of Italy back in 2002, which in itself was an astonishing achievement. Reggina are Serie A’s perennial bottom-feeders, the tadpoles in the shark-infested waters of the Italian top flight. In Scotland, their equivalent would be St Mirren or Inverness Caledonian Thistle, well-run, proud clubs but with limited financial resources and no chance of competing with the big boys. Reggina, and Foti, are under no illusions as to their status, but they remain laudably ambitious. They have, after all, accomplished much in the last decade. “Reggina are a small, provincial club who had always been confined to Serie B and C until we were promoted to the top division for the first time in 1999,” explains Foti. “From that point, a whole series of initiatives, a whole ethos of growth was put in place that has allowed us to stay there for eight of the last nine years. I would say that we’re a typical ‘southern’ club. The culture of the place has all the elements you associate with teams from the south of Mediterranean countries: huge passion, huge enthusiasm, huge appetite for detail and knowledge about what’s happening in every nook and cranny of the club. The people of Reggio are absolutely involved with their club, they are effectively one and the same thing. We’ve been the launchpad for a number of very successful playing careers. Players like Andrea Pirlo, Simone Barone and Bruno Cirillo all started out here and have gone on to bigger and better things. That tells you something about the environment we have created here - these players help us to grow, but we help them develop as well.” The south of Italy is viewed differently from the rest of the country. With much of their economy rural-based, they are dismissed as country bumpkinsby denizens of the more urban and sophisticated north. They are also viewed as insular people, with a deep suspicion of outsiders. It is a stereotype which Foti has always railed against. The Reggina president grew up in the south and has made his home, and his fortune, amid the resplendent natural beauty of the Calabria region. He rejoices in the community values which have effortlessly survived the passing years and believes the warmth of the people and the beauty of the countryside have either been overlooked or obscured by casual stereotyping. His involvement with Reggina has allowed him to use football as the vehicle with which to change people’s perceptions of the south. For years, Foti had been searching for a way to showcase the region and explode the myth of parochialism. In 2002, he found Nakamura. “It had been a tumultuous couple of years for the club,” he reflects. “We’d gone down to Serie B, then come back up again, and we decided to re-examine what we were doing to try to make sure we got more stability about the place. One of the things that came from that was a desire to open up the reality of Reggio and of Reggina to the whole world. When we came to know about Nakamura, he ticked all of the right boxes on that front.” Nakamura had first come to Reggina’s attention while playing for Japan in a friendly against Honduras in which he had scored twice and had an outstanding game. The wheels were soon set in motion, though it was not the first audacious transfer move they had attempted. Two years before they had come very close to signing Roberto Baggio, which conveys an idea of how highly they regarded Nakamura. After establishing a link with Yokohama Marinos, Foti and Gabriele Martino, Reggina’s then director of football, were invited to Japan for Nakamura’s farewell game against Tokyo Verdy. It was then that they realised the level of his popularity. His lap of honour took 20 minutes and the whole stand behind one of the goals was wearing tops with ‘Shunsuke’ on the backs. “I was bowled over by the reception he got from the fans there as he prepared to leave and the hundreds of photographers who snapped away at him all night,” recalled Foti. “All that brought it home to me what a big deal we would be buying into. I met Shunsuke and his agent, with various officials from Marinos also flitting about. The talks were very long and very difficult, with hundreds of journalists waiting around for any scrap of information. It was a completely new experience in so many ways for this club.” With impeccable timing, Reggina had just been promoted to Serie A and it was reported that, as the players were still on the pitch celebrating their return to the top flight on the last day of the season, Martino was already on the phone to Marinos to get the deal moving. After making contact with the club and meeting with the player’s agents, Reggina had the most difficult part to come. They had to persuade Nakamura himself to sign. At that point, he was the rising star of Japanese football. He had other offers, more lucrative ones. As well as Reggina, Chievo, Perugia, Napoli, Lecce and Atalanta were all interested in acquiring his services, though Real Madrid’s interest had cooled after he failed to make the World Cup squad that summer. Nakamura was already well-acquainted with Italian football. He had fallen in love with the Italian style in the late nineties when the great AC Milan side including Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard had won the Intercontinental Cup, then staged in Tokyo, twice in a row. But would Reggina really be the right club to move his career forward? On paper, probably not, but Foti was not a man to give up without a fight. He was a salesman, after all. Selling ice-cream to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabs was one thing, but could he really convince this Japanese genius to sign for lowly Reggina? Foti’s trump card was to emphasise the passion of the supporters and the hospitality of the local people. Reggio may be a relative backwater, but the zeal of the fanbase is not in question, as Foti will testify. The Reggina president has been attacked on several occasions by supporters, once receiving a severed calf’s head in the post. The flipside to such fanaticism is the devotion which can be heaped on a player who the supporters take to their hearts. After momentous away wins it is not uncommon for a crowd of 10,000 to be waiting at the airport to welcome the team back. Simply, Foti told Nakamura that he could become a legend. “Reggina is not a place that automatically sells itself. We had to actively convince Shunsuke to come here,” he smiled. “The discussions had gone on hours and hours without us really getting anywhere, so at a certain point I asked to speak to him myself. He couldn’t speak Italian, I couldn’t speak Japanese, but somehow I made myself understood and got across to him everything that was waiting for him here if he agreed to come and take it.” Foti then mimics how he grabbed Nakamura playfully by the cheeks in a desperate attempt to convey his desire to sign him. “I said, ‘Come on Shunsuke, tell your directors that it wouldn’t be good to wait. Who knows when a chance like this will come round again?’ I think he fell in love with me!” he chuckled. “I expressed something of the passion and warmth that Calabrian people have, the adoration that this club and this city could give him, and eventually we got our ‘yes’.” With Nakamura’s signing sealed, the club wanted to make a statement both about their own upwardly-mobile intentions and people’s perceptions of the Italian south. “The choice of venue for Nakamura’s introductory press conference was quite deliberate. We took it to the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, to emphasise that Reggina and Reggio were opening their doors to the world. There were more than 100 journalists there, from all over the planet, and we had many of the Calabrian institutions and authorities send representatives to again fit in with the theme of opening new horizons and exploring new realities,” recalled Foti, who also gave out Reggina tops with Nakamura’s name on the back to all the journalists in attendance. “That press conference gave a very powerful new image of this city and this club. Through Nakamura, we were offering up to the world all that is good about the south, while at the same time showing that we ourselves were open to what the rest of the world has to offer us.” The process of expanding their horizons also had lucrative financial advantages and the club sold 25,000 Nakamura shirts in his first fivemonths at the club. “Nakamura was, in part, a commercial investment on the club’s behalf,” added Foti. “I should make it clear, however, that it was Nakamura’s technical appeal that attracted us in the first place; the commercial aspect was a happy by-product, something that came along later. I will always remember the friendly we played in Yokohama soon after the World Cup final [in 2002]. We were granted an official reception by the Italian embassy and a lot of Japanese businessmen were there. Again, we were able to show just what the club and the city had to offer, and a lot of them realised there was a real opportunity to establish new and profitable links. Many of these companies went on to get involved with us as sponsors, and there started to be a real wave of tourism from Japan into Reggio and the rest of Calabria as well. At the game itself, there were 67,000 fans, many of whom bought Reggina shirts, and the homage they paid to Nakamura was extraordinary. The whole ground was on its feet applauding him for the whole game, and it brought home just what an idol the man is.” One story encapsulates how Reggina regarded Nakamura as a cultural ambassador. Reggina travelled to the San Siro to face AC Milan a couple of months into his first season. It was a huge day for the club on their return to the top flight. It was also a big chance to showcase the abilities of their star Japanese signing in the city where they had unveiled him to the world only a couple of months previously. The huge San Siro press box was heaving with Japanese journalists. The stage was set and anticipation was huge but, as is typical in football, things backfired spectacularly. After 20 minutes the visitors had Vargas sent off and Bortolo Mutti, the Reggina head coach, was forced into a hasty tactical rethink. His next move would have far-reaching consequences. Mutti substituted Nakamura and brought on a defender. As the legions of Japanese journalists hung their heads in despair, it is rumoured that Martino and Foti were so angry that they immediately stood up and left the directors box. When Reggina were thrashed at home by Lazio a few weeks later, it was no surprise that Mutti was relieved of his duties. Soon after Nakamura’s arrival, the local tourist board for the first time began to publish its brochures in three languages, Italian, Japanese and English. The club were also actively involved in attracting Japanese tourists and set up a package whereby groups of around 30 fans could fly from Tokyo to Reggio Calabria, attend a couple of training sessions, go to the game and then go out for dinner with Nakamura himself. Japanese television crews were regular visitors and, as well as recording Nakamura’s progress, made documentaries about the history of the Calabria region. “Nakamura effectively became a bridge between Calabria and Japan in a number of ways, to do with football and in everyday life,” said Foti. “If you look at the club now, we have so many different nationalities, and so many different influences, particularly in our youth sector. Nakamura was undoubtedly responsible for opening a number of those doors. Reggina is now an international club, Reggio is now an international city, there are no longer any boundaries for us.”

ENDS

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