“If you tell my story now, it seems like a fairy tale.”
The news of former Italy striker Totò Schillaci’s death at the age of just 59 takes me back to a sunny autumn afternoon in Sicily in 2017.
I had already spent seven months carrying out interviews for my book on the 1990 World Cup, World In Motion, including a trip to Cameroon. If meeting Roger Milla meant one big box ticked, here in Palermo was another opportunity to savour: an encounter with the home hero of that tournament, Salvatore Schillaci. And it did not disappoint.
The meeting place was Schillaci’s football school though the bald man by the bar who resembled an older version of Totò was actually his dad. The good-looking man with the moustache and lustrous hair – the product of several transplants, as he freely admitted – was Schillaci. He was full of good cheer and had some terrific tales to tell, as befits a man who scripted one of the greatest World Cup stories of all.
After all, the man who scored six goals to win the 1990 World Cup Golden Boot, as well as its Golden Ball, had only made his Italy debut three months earlier, and would only score one more goal for his national team. Until summer 1989, and his transfer to Juventus, he had not left Serie B. Yet suddenly the stars aligned, and a wild-eyed Sicilian had his place in football lore.
“Who was the bigger surprise, Schillaci or Cameroon?” asked the Rome daily Il Giorno at the end of a World Cup which, for the hosts, concluded with a semi-final shootout loss to Diego Maradona’s Argentina. Schillaci would probably have opted for himself. As he told me that afternoon: “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘How did it happen?’ Did it really happen to me? I really do ask myself because for me it was something totally unexpected. It was difficult to come to terms with. I didn’t speak Italian well and I didn’t know how to explain it all.”
What happened to him was, in brief, the following: with Italy being held 0-0 by Austria in their opening game in Rome, Schillaci stepped off the bench as a substitute and with his first touch headed the winning goal. “The joy was immense,” he recalled of his first international goal. By their third game, against Czechoslovakia, he had supplanted Gianluca Vialli and Andrea Carnevale in coach Azeglio Vicini’s starting XI and he opened the scoring in that match too, a 2-0 victory. The trickle then became a flood as he struck in successive knockout matches against Uruguay, the Republic of Ireland and Argentina, and then – with his sixth goal – England in the third-place play-off.
They stay truth is stranger than fiction and that was certainly the case with this 25-year-old international-football novice who, as he explained, listened to the Rocky soundtrack before each game to psyche himself up. “I compare myself a bit with Rocky,” he related to me. “Like him I had to make the most of that moment of going from a nobody to a somebody. That was a film, though, and this was reality.
“It’s as if it was predestined. I lived at number nineteen Via La Sfera in Palermo. Sfera means ball, and nineteen was my shirt number for the World Cup.”
Looking back, his ex-team-mate Aldo Serena described him to me as an “anarchic player”, not one for the systems and structures of today’s game. He had speed and a scorer’s instinct. “You no longer have the out-and-out striker, but I was like that,” said Schillaci himself. “Sometimes I’d go missing but other times I’d win the match.” In summer 1990, it was the latter.
Schillaci ended that summer holidaying in the palace of the son of the last king of Italy – quite a journey from the poor district of Palermo where he had grown up. As he told me, by the age of 11 he was already working, collecting wine for the bar where his grandfather worked. Yet suddenly, he reflected, he was “no longer Schillaci from Messina but Schillaci from the World Cup”. The pressure, he added, meant “it felt like a building had come down on top of me”.
The goals dried up at Juventus, an unsuccessful stay followed at Inter and by 1994 he was playing in the J League in Japan – and divorced from his first wife, Rita.
He recounted all of this with a smile on his face – and he continued to tell stories to a new generation of Italians through his appearances on reality TV shows, even following his initial surgery for colon cancer.
All of which explains the outpouring of emotion in Italy today for a much-loved man and footballer whose name – simply Totò – transports so many of us back to a fabled summer.
