An Internet prank! There I was, busy with other searches, when my name popped out from a word keyed in a search engine. It was an article for the online newspaper Il Nuovo.it dated January 24 2002 and written by the well-known journalist and especially sports reporter, Gian Paolo Ormezzano, who generally writes for La Stampa.
Title: ”Sports, a show for Peeping Toms”.
Subheading or summary: ”A porno star sponsors a volleyball team and arouses the sports world’s official outrage. But why be outraged? Sports are pornography and spectators are Peeping Toms who watch exciting shows they will never be able to perform personally”.
And to think that almost thirty years ago my mother cried over it… You are right if you have not got the hint - let me explain myself immediately. Meanwhile, the story is a way of saying how the Internet can change one’s life in terms of research and especially of memory, including all relevant remarks, which are positive if we consider the great technological chances and negative if we object that when a PC replaces your brain, the latter risks becoming more or less unusable.
Then comes the article’s subject matter, which is on the whole quite interesting for a third-rate semiologist, a naive sociologist and a “real sportsman”. I will not summarize the gist of Ormezzano’s article because the above mentioned summary has already saved me the trouble; as is often the case with him, he is an average voice here too, which is both a quality and a defect. ‘But blessed child, how does your mother fit into the picture?’ you will be curious to know. Hang on to your patience just a while longer.
The article closed with the following paragraph: “And lastly we would like to (well) recall here a theory that time back we drew from Oliviero Beha, then a promising youth working for a newspaper specialized in sports. Sports line up against a porno star… but sports are themselves (also) pornography, at least when they reach high show-biz standards. Just think it over: we go to a sports event to watch the excellent, high standard performance of professionals in that which we too dream of doing but cannot carry out. Then are sports something like a live-show? Yes, in some way, at least at its performance peaks, with us Peeping Toms watching, envying and emotionally participating”.
I presented the theory Ormezzano refers to in a long article called “Athletics are like pornography” published in Tuttosport, a Turin sports daily (which I worked for as a freelance), way back in 1974. I took my cue from a paper Umberto Eco wrote at the time on voyeurism and extended the theory to athletics that Nebiolo & Co., lively hucksters of athletics as a show (a fashionable format at the time), were beginning to “pass off” with all due solemnity as an event. I tried to warn against the risks of ‘peeping’ applied to a supreme sport, a real cultural gauge for a country’s civilization, which, practiced little and “felt” little in Italy, was being auctioned off for money. But my “lecture” excited a very hard answer, which was published in the front page of Tuttosport itself and greatly highlighted. It called me a pornographer (making my poor mother Gigliola shed tears…) because I was supposed to have insulted athletics, I was supposed to have proved myself a pervert for who knows what reasons and… in short fee, fiddledee, fiddledee.
Hark ye folks! It was an unsigned, anonymous answer with a couplet by the newspaper’s editor explaining that “Yes, anonymous pieces are usually not published but we have bent the rules in this case, considering it was by an important personage …”.
I was naturally not given a chance to retort. It was later known with no effort whatsoever that the article’s real author or mandator had been the now deceased Primo Nebiolo, the Very Important President of Federatletica and later of all athletics in the world. So far so good… Well, it is not so good but let us skate over it… But what if I tell you that the editor of Tuttosport at the time, a real flunkey in this context, was Gian Paolo Ormezzano himself, whose piece (written 28, yes 28 years later!) I have mentioned? “Athletics is like pornography” is nothing in comparison! ”Memory, omission, falsehood, a servile disposition or cowardice are like pornography”, don’t you think so? And isn’t this a useful episode to take up the standards of the journalist category, which I often complain about in this magazine too?

P.S. I must not fail to get my mother, poor thing, to read Ormezzano’s “apologetic” article…
Translated by interpres sas