Today, "Against", ten small sports stories written by Paolo Patui and published by Bottega Errante Edizioni (16 pages, 17 euros) is released. This is my preface.

There's soccer, but also athletics, basketball, rowing, boxing, tennis, cycling, and even arm wrestling. There's Lupo, but also Spaccamontagne, Bruciaboschi, Lady Muscle, Barbablù, the Negro, and Chiquito-ten-and-praise. Gustavo Thoeni is mentioned, as well as James Dean and Tony Manero, Gigi Meroni and Gianfranco Zigoni, Larry Bird and Adriano Panatta, George Foreman and Piero Pelù. Tales of three-pointers and left hooks, but also of Aldo Moro and the Red Brigades, God and the Gospel, police and G8, Po and Tupamaros. It's about adolescence and consciousness, and therefore also about feelings and dreams, precipices and redemptions, complicity and friendships, that is, sports and life, sport as a life teacher, life as a sports theater. For example, in a Baraccone.

I thought sport had an insurmountable advantage over everything: that it didn't need fantasy or imagination, because in sport reality surpasses fantasy and imagination. As if behind a curve or inside a scrum, on the tennis net's wire or in a hawk's television eye, at the last shot or the last instant, everything could still happen, change everything, start over again. In sport, you dig and find. And you find gold, gems, diamonds. From manure, flowers and champions are born. Yayah Kallon, from Sierra Leone: fled from Kono, where he was born, to avoid being recruited as a child soldier, eight months to reach Libya, entrusting himself to a boat, first landing in Lampedusa and then, as a footballer, in Serie A. Serghei Vitali, from Moldavia's Falesti: arrives in Italy, enters a hellish circuit, ends up in prison, stays there sixteen years, learns rugby as a prisoner and embodies its values, until after serving his sentence he begins to play and coach, outside, free. And Martina Caironi, from Alzano Lombardo: at eighteen, while returning home on a scooter after a party, is hit by a car and has her left leg amputated, is reborn with a prosthesis, dedicates herself to athletics, transforms into an arrow, 60, 100 and 200 meters, long jump, result: three golds and four silvers at the Paralympics, six golds and two silvers at the World Championships, six golds and two silvers at the European Championships.

I continue to think that sport doesn't need fantasy or imagination. Everything is already inside. Just peel back a bark, which is often just laziness or distrust, and you find gold, gems, and diamonds. But Paolo Patui has shown that if you can't do more, you can however do something else. Emotions, circumstances, details, dialogues, dreams, defeats and comebacks, marginalizations and challenges, twists of fate. His "Against", ten small sports stories, is made like this. Hard and raw. True. Even in language. Like a three-pointer. Like a left hook.

I read the first, second, and third stories on the phone: I was dying of curiosity. The fourth, fifth, and sixth on the computer: sitting at my desk. The seventh, eighth, and ninth on A4 paper: I had them printed. I haven't read the tenth yet: I'm waiting to do so by sniffing the book, still fragrant with typography, with my eyes closed. To say that a book like this can be read anywhere: even waiting for the tram, even traveling by train, even in the locker room or living room, even in the bathroom, which, in terms of solitude and concentration, remains a privileged place. To say that a book like this can be read with the eyes, can be read aloud, can be read to a little girl or boy, can be made to be read by a girl or boy, can be read and reread until becoming friends with the protagonists, feeling their absence - placed on the bedside table - inventing another ending - placed on the shelf.