In September of 1971 I showed up at the pre-designated assembly point at New York’s Kennedy Airport. All the students from the Rutgers Junior year abroad program were there with their Italian instructor who would be our program’s director in Florence. Most of them already knew each other from the campus in New Brunswick New Jersey. They were Italian American working class students from ethnic neighborhoods of New Jersey like Dumont, Patterson, Vineland and Jersey City. I was probably the only student without a vowel at the end of my name. I wasn’t in Italy yet, but I certainly wasn’t on the Harvard campus any more.

We all flew to Roma and then rode a train to Florence where we quartered in a Pensione or boarding house in downtown Firenze. Before we were to enter the University of Florence we had been assigned an Italian boot camp to sharpen our skills so we could handle the lectures and classes in Italian. That meant spending intensive time with my fellow students from New Jersey. One of them, Alfonso Gilliberto, knowing that I had played American football announced to me that he was huge fan of “La Juve” and that he would be watching every game they played on TV while in Italy. “La Juve” is short for Juventus, the soccer team owned by the Agnelli family, the founders of FIAT, the giant Italian automaker in Torino.

Sports was then and remains today a big connector for me with other people, especially other men. Some of my comrades in the labor movement have said that Marx’s famous assertion about religion, that “it is the opium of the people”, could also apply to sports. Every time I find myself in a giant stadium filled with over 50,000 people watching a sporting event I close my eyes and wish I were at a rally for workers rights or raising the minimum wage. It would be a great day to see our labor actions consistently draw the giant crowds that even a dismal franchise like the Oakland Raiders is able to pack into the Coliseum for home games. I can certainly see the dulling effect of spending one’s time rooting for the home team rather than dealing with society’s problems. I can also be critical of the rampant racism and sexism of pro sports and supportive of the courageous athletes who stand up against it. But I have chosen to make sports a way to connect with workers. I have chosen to use it as an idiom for teamwork, unity and preparation. In every organizing job that I have had, I have sought out the social networks created by soccer and softball leagues as a way to reach and proselytize among workers.

One day in the fall of 1971 I was out jogging near the Stadio Communale where the Florence futbol team, AC Firenze plays its home games. I jogged around a field where Italians were practicing a sport I recognized as rugby. I heard a voice shouting at me, “Americano, vuole giocare?” I guess they spotted me as someone who could bring some size to their team so I jumped into their practice and started to learn the basics of rugby. This proved to be a very fortunate encounter because I now had the best formula for language comprehension, total immersion among Italians in a sports venue where there is no option but to master the street idiom and even the Florentine accent.

Frontisterion G.S. was the name of the team. Frontisterion is Greek for “ a school for young males” and as its name suggests was originally a training team for fascist picchiatori, goons who were kept in good shape in between “political” assignments. The other team in Florence was CUS Firenze and their ranks were made up historically of very large marshals and enforcers from the PCI, the Partito Communista Italiano. One of the biggest players on their team was nicknamed “Bambino.”

The coach of Frontisterion was an officer in the national Italian police force, the carabinieri, and he was assigned to the political squad. However over the years the team had evolved away from its fascist origins and now all the players were members of the Italian Communist Party, their sympathizers and some students who were sympathetic to the extra parliamentary left, Lotta Contina and Potere Operaio.

I was sympathetic to the extra parliamentary forces and would often go to their rallies and demonstrations. Inevitably in the back of the plaza I would spot our coach, Sr. Bilota. He would beckon to me and I would go find out from him when the next rugby practice of la squadra was taking place. I am sure some of the Italian compagni concluded that the American “comrade” was really a police agent after seeing him consorting with a Calabrian carabiniere assigned to the red squad

“it has become necessary to partially partake in different forms of capitalist mass culture…”

But the team fully embraced me and because of my training in American football, they decided to employ me as a hit man assigned to brutally tackle an opposing team’s best players. I am not sure if I ever fully understood the rules of rugby, but Coach Bilota would give me an opposing player’s number before every game and suggest that I take care of business. I remember playing a game in Ferrara in Emilia Romagna and after a particularly vicious hit hearing the crowd chanting “Yankee go Home’ and “Fuori il codino”, or “Throw out the player with the pony tail”.

But I got my comeuppance. My rugby career ended prematurely in the early spring of 1972 when we played a game against a team of big brawny dockworkers from the Port of Livorno. I made the mistake of using my head in a collision with a large opponent and wound up lying unconscious under a cold shower in the locker room. I could not remember where I was and my Italian deserted me. That following Monday I went to see a medico in Firenze and he examined me and concluded that I could no longer play rugby because I might endanger my brain if I was involved in another violent collision. That was actually my third concussion as I had suffered two in American football. That Italian doctor is probably responsible for the relatively full retention of my faculties to this day. I imagine that medico with his sharp diagnosis and strict orders could have saved a whole generation of American professional footballers from the plague of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) that they are now facing. Viva Italia!

With my brain still intact and not yet suffering from CTE I prefer to take the 1998 perspective of the Austrian Marxist Eric Wegner on the role of sports in capitalist society: “it has become necessary to partially partake in different forms of capitalist mass culture in order not to become completely isolated and to avoid psychological breakdown. Futbol has historically not only served the distraction from political and social problems, but also the creation of collective pride and class consciousness [….] with a more than average progressive potential.”

Next Installment #6 – Politics in the Piazza