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Cagliari - Napoli, 1976.
Serie A football championship. An hour and a half before the match, Luís Vinício, ‘O lione, Brazilian coach of the Neapolitans, tells his players who among them will take the field. Ezio Vendrame, genius and recklessness, usually sits on the bench. But this time, he is sent to the stands.
That year, Vendrame would rarely play and after the glorious years in Vicenza, as a player in Naples, he would probably never be able to make his mark. Nor do the fans today have an indelible memory of him. But that Sunday, Ezio does not lose heart and, seated in the stands, decides to play his game off the field. In the stands, he approaches a model - "a great piece of ass" - and, "after some hugs and some timid kisses", takes her to the bathrooms of the Sant'Elia stadium and screws her.
Some years later. San Vito al Tagliamento, province of Pordenone. Lying on a bed in a hotel room are two men. One of them is Ezio Vendrame. The other is Giancarlo Dotto, journalist and (alas) popular television personality.
The two gorge on ostrich cutlets. Vendrame reads the stories from his book, his "wicked tales", and Giancarlo Dotto writes the preface.
This is how "If You Send Me to the Stands, I Enjoy It" was born.
Ezio Vendrame was born in 1947 in Casarsa della Delizia, Pordenone (formerly Udine). Of Casarsa della Delizia, someone said it is a "gray place barely populated by antiquated farmer figures". That someone was Pier Paolo Pasolini, who lived in Casarsa and is buried in the local cemetery. It is precisely on Pasolini's tomb that Vendrame meets journalist Gianni Mura for an interview. A curious choice, dictated by the fact that Vendrame considers the poet, writer, and director (Pasolini, not Scaruffi) his most alive fellow townsman.
Vendrame, a strange case - but not that much - of an "orphan with still living parents," grows up a prisoner in boarding school. A difficult childhood, between oppressive priests and adolescent loves for a blonde classmate. Then someone discovers that Ezio can play football and, after a very brief tryout (twenty minutes), he is signed by Udinese. Conditions of the contract? Room, board, and a whopping 5,000 liras a month.
After Udinese (where, among many, he’ll have the chance to play alongside a young Dino Zoff), the great football comes, Serie A. Spal in Ferrara. Then Torres, Siena, Rovereto, Lanerossi Vicenza, Napoli, Padova, and the last years of his career spent kicking balls on peripheral fields. Once he hangs up his boots, Vendrame, besides dedicating himself to writing, becomes a youth-level coach, a role he still holds trying not to do any harm, because "when a youth-level coach doesn't do any harm, he is already a good coach!"
Ezio Vendrame was a talented and unconventional footballer, an eccentric long-haired rebel. Some have defined him as a great unfinished, one of the greatest (the greatest?) unexpressed talents of Italian football in the seventies. Giampiero Boniperti, the Marisa Juventus president and former member of the European Parliament, often compares him to the Argentine champion Mario Kempes and claims that if he had a different mindset, Vendrame would probably have successfully played for the National team. But the truth is that Vendrame cares little for the National team: he has always played in the National team because he has always done what he wants.
Vendrame cares little for football. He makes no secret of playing mainly for the money and prefers to play his matches off the pitch, with friends and women, in a small provincial bar or in a trattoria. Perhaps the trattoria of his friend Luigino De Gobbi from Olmo di Creazzo (Vicenza), a meeting point for incredible characters like the ventriloquist Conca, the flatulist Bigarella, and, above all, the artist, minstrel, and art dealer "Kubala." Occasionally, the legendary Gianfranco "Zigo" Zigoni, at that time the idol of the nearby Verona football square, also joins the gang.
Other times, it is Piero Ciampi, a singer-songwriter from Livorno, poet, who is Vendrame's adventure companion, the protagonist of his stories.
Football season 1975-76. Vendrame stays at the Hotel Majestic, a luxurious hotel in the center of Naples, in the company of two other players, La Palma and Braglia (nicknamed "machine gun"). It is within these walls that he meets Marcello Micci, who at the time works for a major cosmetics company, a longtime friend of the Livorno singer-songwriter. A gift, "golden bridge" towards poetry.
Ezio Vendrame meets Piero Ciampi in Rome, precisely in Marcello Micci's trattoria on Andrea Doria street. It is the meeting that changes his life. The two will become great friends: a true friendship that will last until the poet’s death in January 1980.
"If You Send Me to the Stands, I Enjoy It" is this and much more. It is a wicked story. They are stories of the life of Ezio Vendrame, the life of Ezio Vendrame on and off the field. It's a damn autobiography. Because Vendrame, as he himself is keen to emphasize, was really a damn player. No, not because he didn’t know how to play football. Because he was insatiable: he screwed like crazy.
Fall of 1976. Ezio Vendrame has been sold off by Napoli to Padova in Serie C. Vendrame is the star of the team. And the captain. One Sunday, friends Piero Ciampi and Marcello Micci from Rome come to Padova to see him play. Legend has it that during the match, Vendrame, seeing his poet in the stands, stopped the ball with his hands and interrupted the game to greet him. For this, he would be booked. But he doesn’t care.
He will later comment: "A football match is a small thing compared to a poet."
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