What is the sound of a superhero?

I am not thinking of superheroes like Batman [THUMP], Superman [SWISHHHH] or The Hulk [ARGHHHH].
I am thinking of a hero in flesh and blood, someone with the power to inflame and inspire, someone whose name people pronounce tiptoeing in a whisper, someone whose deeds are written with golden ink in every book, calendar, on every wall, trading card, commemorative plate.

Someone who like no one before or after has put us on the map, someone who people cannot believe their eyes, like my friend from the mainland, we were strolling on the main street one evening when everybody around started moving aside with a whisper, and the whisper became louder, closer and the people parted right and left like Moses and the water, and everybody whispering his name, accompanying his passage until he walked right in front of us, oblivious – or maybe just accustomed to crowds parting at his passage, and my mainland friend who doesn’t even belong here, and yet I read it in his eyes, and my friend who wasn’t even born here, who hadn’t been exposed to his religion, and yet my mainland friend dropped his jaw and uttered “Oh my god! It’s Gigi Riva!”.

The elements that concurred to create the myth that transformed a young soccer player into a divinity are sculped in the mind of every person in this semi-remote island of mine. You see, those were times of narrow shoulders and nervous legs, and if you were to look at a picture of a soccer team from those years, any team, you’d see how different from today they look in their heavy cotton t-shirts. Soccer players in their twenties but who still had on them a faint smell of a post-war period that had just only ended, children of a generation that had endured hunger and had seen bombs over the cities. Young men in their twenties, children with haggard faces. [END VINTAGE EFFECT] If you look closely at those images, you realise that in their eyes, there is not carefree innocence but a restless eagernes. They already look like family men.

No I have never been into soccer, I do not come from a soccer-family, my father never went to any match, the only thing I know about soccer is that there are 11 players per team, and that a game lasts 90 minutes.
And yet I too have learned and assimilated the Gospel according to Gigi Riva, the hagiography of the untouchable champion.

I can recite it like the beads of the rosary, how he was born in the very north of the country, in the mountains, bought by the local team while still a minor, how he led the very modest soccer team of Cagliari to win the Serie A championship in the 1969-70 season and how he never left the local team nor Cagliari, despite (the) outrageously generous offers by the richest and more blazoned clubs to claim him their own. But never did he go, never did he leave, always he said “I want to stay in Cagliari, I want to remain in Sardinia, because the people welcomed me when I was a nobody, and I will never forget”. I even know that he remains the top scorer of the Italian national team to this day, [SFX NEWS CLIPS?] the thunderbolt that awes the crowds to move aside as he goes by. And suddenly I am taken there, on this same street but so many years ago, little me, I am suddenly there, taken back…

The first thing that I remember are the particles of dust dancing in the air, suspended. I’m mesmerised. They look like fairy dust sparkling in the sunbeams entering through the window. I have never seen those sparkles at night, but this is a night that every forbidden action is possible and allowed.

And then the little golden ring, the one I just got for my fifth birthday, it hurts as it digs into my fingers. My hand is small, squeezed inside the hand of Dad who is holding me too tightly, afraid that we might get separated by the crowd.

I am as small as my hand. I have never seen anything like this, I feel... I feel strange inside my chest, a little bit scared, I bite my lips and hang tighter at Dad’s hand, and he pulls me, drags me, I am walking blindly, I cannot see beyond the barrier of legs, and I would like to see the people chanting. The laugher is contagious when it reaches me. I hold on tightly, tighter than the people pushing, and nothing matters anymore. Surrounded by buildings that, I am sure, I have seen before, but on this magic night everything has taken a new life, and my black patent leather shoes, those with the strap and the shiny button, bought for my fifth birthday, even those have become too tight after walking and now standing who knows how long already, elbowing to keep the position.

And then it happens, fireworks explode, and dust, and colours, and more screams and suddenly I feel the hands lifting me up and I am on Dad’s shoulders and he screams “Guarda, guarda! Ora arriva, guarda!” – Look, look, it’s coming! – I don’t know what am I supposed to look at but I look and I laugh and I clap my hands, and I am tall, taller than all the heads around, and I can see the faces, and the tears in the eyes – people are crying! - and the screams, and the sparks of the fireworks, and my heart pounding. I hold on tightly, ecstatic and terrified. And while I’m there, hanging or suspended, it finally happens, and suddenly, [but just for a moment], the crowd staggers, like a blind, gigantic creature, that moves right and left, and everybody is chanting his name and it is all this, but even more, crowd parting like opening a door, Moses parting the Red Sea.

And then everything stops, and for a very long moment, the face of the hero is right in front of me, and I lean forward, stretching out with my hand, but before I can touch it, the life-size papier-mâché statue of the top goal scorer, Gigi Riva, carried in procession to celebrate the victory of the 1969-1970 Serie A Championship, is sucked back into the crowd.

I mean, this is what I picture in my mind. The truth of the matter is that on that magic April night, I was nowhere near the crowd. I was at home, in bed with measles. The one cheering the champion on, sitting on my Dad’s shoulder is my older brother, always a favourite.

But hey, I am the storyteller and podcaster in the family. So, cope with it, in my memory that’s me, cheering and chanting and screaming at the top of my voice. And THIS is the sound of a superhero.
GIGI RIVA! C’È SOLO UN GIGI RIVA! UN GIGI RIVA! C’È SOLO UN GIGI RIVA! [there is only one Gigi Riva].