Ferry, Shaw Lead Rome in Debut

Dressed in sweatpants and an Il Messaggero T-shirt as he sat in the lobby of his team’s hotel Tuesday, Danny Ferry wondered if basketball on Italy’s Tyrrhenian Coast would be much different than it is on the Atlantic Coast.

“I’ve heard the crowds here are worse than they are at Duke,” he said.

“But not as clever,” he was told.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t understand the language yet.”

In last season’s Italian League championship game, the fans in this port city about 10 miles south of Pisa were so riotous when Enimont Livorno lost to Philips Milan on a controversial call that the team has not been allowed to play its first three games this season at home.

Home is the inappropriately named Sports Palace, a tired, old gymnasium that seats 4,000 on concrete bleachers and looks like a World War II airplane hangar.

It is shared by the city’s other team, Pallacanestro Livorno. That is the team that Il Messaggero struggled to beat, 91-90, Tuesday night in the opening game of the Italian Cup, a round-robin tournament involving all 32 league teams that runs concurrently with the regular season.

Pallacanestro, which means basketball in Italian, is the other team in every sense of the word. Owned by a cooperative of small businessmen, it finished so poorly in the standings last season that it has been relegated to the second division. Pallacanestro is to Enimont as the Clippers are to the Lakers.

On the other end of the scale, if not yet the standings, Il Messaggero of Rome is perhaps the world’s richest basketball team. Its new owner is Raul Gardini, the director of Gruppo Ferruzzi, an agricultural concern which did $18 billion in business last year and was accused of attempting to corner the U.S. market in soybeans.

Now Gardini is investing in U.S. basketball players. With only two foreigners allowed per team, he went after two of the best available, Ferry and Brian Shaw.

“Ferruzzi wants to be the best at whatever they do, basketball or soybeans,” Ferry said.

Ferry, a 6-foot-10 forward who was the Clippers’ first-round draft choice this year out of Duke, signed a one-year contract estimated at $1.8 million. Shaw, a 6-6 guard who started last season for the Celtics as a rookie from UC Santa Barbara, signed a one-year contract estimated at $1 million.

After eight exhibition games, Gardini finally had a chance Tuesday night to discover whether his latest acquisitions would pay dividends in a game that counted.

According to a local journalist sitting at courtside, the capacity crowd was treating the game as a metaphor for the class struggle. But, to their credit, the fans did not necessarily want to participate other than vocally. Besides, they were separated from the court by a plexiglass restraining wall. There also was substantial security.

The crowd was given hope when Pallacanestro went up by 10 points early in the second half. But then Ferry and Shaw did what they are payed to do, scoring 22 of Il Messaggero’s last 30 points. Shaw’s three-point shot from 25 feet with 25 seconds remaining was the difference.

After missing last week’s exhibition with an injured ankle, Ferry played both forward positions and center. He had 30 points, nine rebounds, and three assists. Shaw had 23 points and eight rebounds.

Ferry said that he was not surprised Pallacanestro raised the level of its game against Il Messaggero.

“I saw the same thing, and Brian saw the same thing last year,” he said. “There’s an aura about Duke and an aura about the Celtics. These teams will have our pictures on the wall all year.”

Il Messaggero’s coach, Valerio Bianchini, said that he believes that his team eventually will contend for the championship when all of the players get to know each other. Only two players returned from last season’s team, which finished in the lower half of the standings. Bianchini also is new to the team.

“It’s like we say, Rome was not made in one day,” he said.