Soccer Tale Satisfying Until Author Drops the Ball

Joe McGinniss’ ninth nonfiction book tells two stories. One is the tale of how a soccer team from a town of 5,000 people in the remote and impoverished Abruzzo is “promoted” to play the 1996-97 season in Serie B, Italy’s second-highest professional league, against teams from cities such as Turin, Venice and Genoa. A championship is beyond imagining, but the townspeople and players of Castel di Sangro seek a lesser miracle: la salvezza, a finish high enough to avoid relegation back to the minors. It’s a sad, funny, desolating and inspiring story--everything, in fact, a story should be. And McGinniss tells it well.

The second story, however, is murky and undeveloped. It’s the tale of the author himself, of his sudden middle-aged obsession with soccer. The famoso scrittore americano Alex Guinness, as one Italian sporting paper misidentifies him, has turned down a $1-million advance to write a book about O.J. Simpson, he tells us, in favor of spending nine months in a wind-blasted fold of the Apennines, watching young men kick balls around muddy fields. Why? For “a variety of reasons of no great relevance to the first story,” McGinniss says airily--something we wouldn’t let a novelist get away with.

Fortunately, for most of “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro,” the first story predominates. The town, bombed flat in World War II, has used soccer as spiritual leverage to pry itself up out of the rubble. The team is rotten at the top--the owner, Signor Rezza, is presumed to be a crime syndicate boss; his nephew, the team president, is willing to sell it out to further his political ambitions; the manager has a cripplingly defensive philosophy--but the players are dedicated, modest and likable, and the fans virtually live and die with them.

McGinniss becomes such a fan. He lives next door to the manager, eats at the restaurant where the players eat, attends practices, keeps statistics and endures bus rides with the team to the far corners of Italy. He chronicles the 38-week season through ups and downs that match the jagged terrain: wins and losses, trades and injuries, snowstorms and scandals, a collective descent (or is it an ascent?) into delirium.

Castel di Sangro’s promised new stadium is left unfininished into the winter because Rezza is siphoning off the construction funds. Two players are killed in a car crash. A third is arrested for cocaine smuggling in which the team president also may be involved. The manager refuses to sign even the most promising foreign players. Still, as if this were indeed a novel, the team--made up of youngsters, retreads and a superb goalie, Massimo Lotti, who has appeared out of nowhere--keeps its hopes of salvezza alive right up to the end.

McGinniss has an ear for dialogue, a sense of the absurd and the ability to make soccer come vividly alive, even for non-fans. Clearly, it’s affection for Castel di Sangro that drives his deepening involvement with the team. He learns Italian with commendable speed, and if he often speaks it impetuously--he’s suggesting different tactics to the manager two games into the season, and asking Rezza questions that make others in earshot blanch--it just seems a sign of Yankee spunk.

But at some point he crosses a line. It isn’t enough that after a career of much-documented disillusionment (from “The Selling of the President 1968” to his book on the Jeffrey McDonald murder case, “Fatal Vision,” and ensuing legal battles), he should go in search of a warmer, gentler way of life and believe that he has found it in Castel di Sangro. Just as Rezza dynamites and bulldozes mountains to improve the view from his estate, McGinniss tries to use his clout as a famoso scrittore to make the reality of Italian soccer conform to his dream.

He is shocked--embarrassingly so for a veteran journalist--to find that end-of-season matches can be thrown. For enough millions of lire, a team assured of salvezza can arrange to lose to a team still on the bubble. McGinniss lashes out at the players, who have no choice in the matter, who are really part of that world, not just slumming in it, as he should have known he has been all along. He apologizes later, but his friendship with them is spoiled. And the reader, too, having enjoyed so much of the book, is left with a faintly sour, self-righteous taste in the mouth.