Milan, Dec. 1 (LaPresse) – “Today Italian tennis loses its greatest symbol, and I lose a friend. Nicola Pietrangeli was not only a champion: he was the first to teach us what it truly means to win, both on and off the court. He was the starting point of everything our tennis has become. With him, we realized that we too could compete with the world, that dreaming big was no longer a gamble.” This is how FITP president Angelo Binaghi remembered Nicola Pietrangeli, who passed away today at the age of 92.
“When we talk about Nicola, we immediately think of records, Davis Cups, titles, and triumphs that will forever remain in our history. But the truth is that Nicola was much more. He was a way of being. With his sharp irony, free spirit, and inexhaustible desire to live and joke, he made tennis something human, real, and profoundly Italian. Talking with him was always a pleasure and a surprise: you could leave a conversation laughing out loud or with a reflection that stayed with you for days,” he added.
“In my office, there is a photo I cherish greatly: me as a child, a ball boy at a Davis Cup match in Cagliari, and right in front of me, him, Nicola Pietrangeli. Every time I look at it, I feel as if I am back on that day. And I realize that, in the end, everything for me began there. That photo is not just a memory: it is a symbol. The symbol of how a child can fall in love with a sport thanks to someone who embodies it so fully and naturally. For me, Nicola was not just the greatest player in our history. He was tennis, in the deepest sense of the word.”