The years 1980-1985
It is thegolden age. We like basketball because it evolves, because it knows how to change, to keep up with the times of an era that is becoming modern. In the 1979 American professionals discover that if they shoot from far away, a basket can be worth 3 and it is a Copernican revolution. Derthona, led by Enrico Merli, launches two promising players into the first team: Paolo De Ros and Massimo Codevilla and supports them with an Istrian talent, Sergio Jurkovic. The revs go up, the away games get longer, the opponents become prestigious but we get on the merry-go-round of the greats, of a sport that enters everyone's homes with the first matches on TV, with the Palazzone of San Siro and the Billy of Milan, with the first games that come from another world, from the NBA that knows two interesting guys. One is white, comes from Indiana and settles in Boston, the other is black, has the body of a center but plays point guard, studied at Michigan State and moves to California: if you haven't understood who I am, I lost to you the hopes.
With the sale of Codevilla, and the consequent lire, we won quite a few championships but we became famous for the climate of our field, because it feels like being in Greece when the Lions' Den arrives.
"Armed lions we are marching, we are the Leon's Den..."
In the away match in Tortona they don't like to play and they referee even less cheerfully but the warm climate isn't enough to avoid relegation. They fish us out almost immediately and with Guido Ghisolfi as first manager, a future is planned that is already around the corner: Aldo Caenazzo is the coach, while Armana raises the brood of 1967-68 that it will take away some satisfaction from us. A couple of years of transition, the promise of alternating Presidency, then came 1983 and here we could go from memory. It is the year of Nantes, of the European Championships of Meneghin, of Sacchetti, of Villalta but in Tortona it is the year of Licia Fassino as president, of Teo Mitton from Alessandria, of Angelo Lorenzon from Valenza. Then there are our boys: the Cermellis, Giovanni Lonardo, Enrico Marina, Adelio Ferrari, Marco Ghisolfi, Piero Fornasari, the great Nereo. And the May 1984, and after a top championship, everything is at stake in the match against Carpi: victory in game 1, defeat in game 2, destiny is in the "beautiful" and Tortona stops for an evening because they are all at the Palazzettto, people Never seen before and never seen again. Marco Ghisolfi, from his tile, doesn't make a mistake even as a joke, he writes 32 and sends Tortona to heaven, in C1, and thinking about the refugees from Istria, at the Passalacqua Barracks gives me shivers.
It's the highest point.
It only lasts one year, because perhaps the C1 is too much for us, or perhaps because luck turns its back on us, the fact is that if we talk about 1984 we prefer to remember a November date in which the NBA lands in Tortona: it is the Four Roses, a team on a European tour that stops in our home. It would take two arenas to satisfy the desire for basketball, to applaud Nate Tiny Archibald, a talent who comes from Brooklyn and who on the other side of the world won the MVP award, in an unforgettable evening.
A sweeter memory than the relegation, of the awareness that Ghisolfi is in his last year with playing shoes, that Gazzaniga surrenders to his fragile knees. It is the end of an era, but it is not the end of Derthona Basket driven by coach Canegallo's girls and with a group of young men knocking on the door of the stadium: to name two, there are Roberto Tava and Francesco Barabino who with the junior team have crossed half of Italy and have no intention of stopping.
Texts taken from the book “HEART OF A LION: fifty years of basketball in Tortona” by Roberto Gabatelli – 2008
