Joe McGinniss

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Joe McGinniss
Interview by Jeff Merron
SportsJones Magazine
June 17, 1999

Joe McGinniss landed on the New York Times bestseller list at the age of 26, for his book "The Selling of the President," a stunning account of the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. Since then, McGinniss has written many other best-sellers, including his 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, "Fatal Vision," and 1993's "The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy."

Before embarking on his latest project, McGinniss had planned to write a book about the O.J. Simpson trial, but gave up a $1 million advance after Simpson was acquitted, calling the trial "a farce." Instead he turned to "The Miracle of Castel di Sangro," a book about the deep bonds he formed with the members and coach of an Italian soccer team during the nine months he spent in the team's home town. Castel di Sangro is located in a remote and isolated section of the thinly-populated Abbruzzo region, which borders the Adriatic Sea in central Italy.

Jeff Merron: This is a real departure from what you've been writing about for the past 15 years – murder and politics. You walked away from a $1 million advance for a book on the O.J. Simpson trial. What happened?

Joe McGinniss: I spent more than nine months at the O.J. trial, awarded a full-time front row seat for every session by Judge Ito, who, as it turned out, was a fan of some previous books of mine. In fact, I spent more time at that trial than anyone else involved.

But the verdict made a mockery of the whole thing. "Garbage in, garbage out." The case as presented by Marcia Clark and her assistants was so full of holes, so badly organized, and the defense attacks, especially those of Barry Scheck, upon the LAPD and the LA police laboratory procedures were so effective that at the end, I could not have voted to convict if I took the standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" as seriously as the Constitution says we must.

It was a slam-dunk case for the prosecution, but they tried it blindfolded and backhanded and in the end only shattered the backboard. I believed deeply in my heart, and still do, that Simpson murdered both his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman, but it was a horrendous waste of time, except for some wonderful and lasting friends I made.

Merron: In the book, you date the beginning of your soccer fanaticism to the spring of 1994. In the fall of 1994, before the Simpson trial, you visited Italy and became even more obsessed. Did you follow the game during the trial?

McGinniss: Yes. Through the nine months I spent in L.A. my soccer obsession actually grew worse. Occasionally on weeknights, Mexican and Central American teams would play exhibition matches at the Coliseum and I would attend, often the only "gringo" there. One night I persuaded the famous attorney Gerry Spence to come with me, but he got all pissed off when some much shorter fans sitting behind him asked him very politely to remove his Stetson hat, and he refused. Well, they never said another word, but they went to the concession stand and brought back a big tray of salsa, and with the utmost delicacy, so Gerry never felt a thing, smeared salsa and ketchup all over the hat. That was it, I'm afraid, for Gerry and soccer.

I lived for the weekends. On Saturday, by getting to the Cock'n'Bull Pub in Santa Monica before 7 a.m. it was possible to see a Premiership match from England live on closed circuit, big screen. Ah, what bliss!

Then on Sundays, it was strictly couch potato: I would get up at 5 a.m. to watch a match from Holland, then go back to bed for a couple of hours, then get up to watch the Mexican League, and at 2 p.m. came the highlight: a Serie A match from Italy on same-day tape delay, or, on special occasions, live.

One of the great moments came in late spring when the Padova team for which Alexi Lalas, with whom I'd made friends on my first extended visit to Italy in the fall of 1994, was playing against Genoa in a "playout" to see which team would be relegated to Serie B. I had the number of Alexi's cell phone, which his girlfriend had with her in the stands.

So while I was watching the match – at 7:30 a.m. in L.A. and 4:30 p.m. in Italy – I was talking to her live to get both the objective and wildly emotional versions simultaneously. It eventually went to penalty kicks, and the winner was scored by a Dutch midfielder named Michel Kreek, who played for Padova that year, and with whose girlfriend I'd also become well acquainted while over there in the fall.

She and Alexi's girlfriend were best of buddies themselves and sitting together, and as Michel lined up to take the kick, they switched cell phones so Michel's girlfriend could describe her feelings, as I was watching on TV. She spoke pretty good English, but when he made the kick to save Padova from relegation, there was only one language in the world, and that was ecstasy.

So I would say that it was the escape to soccer on weekends – and the occasional live matches during the week, one of which I watched in the company of Bora Milatunovic, manager of the highly successful U.S. squad in '94, who taught me more about the game in 90 minutes than I could have learned in nine months on my own – that enabled me to stick it out until the end. Without soccer I could never have lasted nine months at that trial.

But as soon as I came home and started trying to write about the whole mess, I found myself spending three times as much time trying to find soccer sites on the Internet, which even in the fall of '95 were far less plentiful and informative than they are now.

I also was trying to maneuver, eventually with success, to get hired by the Sunday Telegraph of London to cover the European national championships – the World Cup of Europe, essentially – which were to take place that year in England in June.

And that did it. Once I walked through the gates of Wembley for the first time, I knew there was no more O.J. in my life. You know, you get to a certain point in life, and you can sort of calculate what your financial obligations will be in terms of paying for the education of your children, et cetera, and then, if you're a person like me, you truly believe that money isn't everything, and to give some back (the $1 million for the O.J. book) to buy the freedom to do what I wanted to do was the easiest decision I'd ever made and never once did I regret it.

However, it was 'il calcio' – the soccer of Italy – that was my strongest passion, for reasons that are explained in the book, and when I stumbled across this story of Castel di Sangro, the tiny mountain village from one of the most remote sections of the country, with only 5,000 inhabitants and a village team that had gone from amateur status to Serie B, the second highest professional league in country – featuring teams from huge cities like Torino, Genoa, and Verona – in virtually the blink of an eye, I knew this was what I had to write next.

God knows, I didn't know how, not speaking a word of Italian and not having any idea of even how to get to Castel di Sangro and not having any idea what sort of reception I'd find if and when I did. But, hell, I was 53 years old, just ripe enough for one more grand adventure.

Merron: I’m not a soccer fan, but I found myself immediately engrossed in the book, and now that I’ve finished it, I feel that I know enough about it to watch it with at least a little intelligence. Was this one of your intentions of writing the book – to convert some Americans into soccer fans?

McGinniss: If anyone also develops an interest in soccer, well, that's a bonus, but it was certainly not among my goals to be a proselytizer, or an ambassador for the game.

Unfortunately, soccer, as played in America, even at the so-called "major league" level, is such a hoked-up, inferior imitation of the real thing, that there is just no way – without an expensive satellite hookup, which was another part of the cost of my obsession – to see the real thing on a regular basis.

Merron: When you went to Castel Di Sangro, you knew you were going to write a book about your time there. Did you have an idea of what would happen, of how you planned to report and write on the team?

McGinniss: Jeff, when I start out on any book I never know a goddamned thing. If I knew in advance how to approach it, or how it would turn out, I wouldn't bother to write the book. Every book for me has been an act of discovery – of a new world outside myself, and of new aspects of myself of which I'd previously been unaware. To always plunge into something new and somewhat frightening is to keep growing, and I can't imagine middle age – or any age – without that sort of growth.

Therefore, I did what I always do when reporting. I just hung out. It was going to be a nine-month season and I didn't have to get pushy, asking questions in a language I couldn't even speak. I essentially hung back and waited for things to unfold.

How could I have predicted that two of the players would have been killed in an automobile accident, and the effect this would have upon the team? How could I have predicted that the president would have resigned three days before the first "true" home match?

How could I have known that the real owner was an extremely shadowy "construction" millionaire who lived in a fortress on top of the tallest mountain overlooking the town, and never left it without at least two bodyguards? And how could I have known that a player would be arrested on charges of being a participant in a $25 million a year international cocaine smuggling ring?

So, Jeff, I don't see how you can ever have a clear idea in advance. You show up, you stay, you stay, you stay, and gradually thousands of micro-impressions begin to form into shadowy notions, but the fact is I didn't write one word of the book while I was there. I just absorbed. I only started writing after all was over, after the final shape had been determined, after I knew what kind of structure I would have within to work.

But you know, you hang out, you eat meals, you start with little jokes, you pick up bits and piece of the language, and pretty soon, these players, who are no dummies, can tell whether you're truly simpatico or a phony. I guess the nature of my obsession and its manifestations were so obvious – besides, who would fake enthusiasm for soccer for the "privilege" of spending a winter in Castel di Sangro? – that the assimilation process took much less time than I'd expected. Plus manager Jaconi immediately gave me a seat at the team table for lunch and dinner, which were always taken in the same restaurant.

Merron: What did you know about the town of Castel di Sangro and its team before you went to Italy? As you write in the book, the town is pretty far off the beaten tourist track, and Serie B Italian soccer doesn't exactly garner a lot of international press.

McGinniss: Listen, it's literally true that the day I arrived in Italy I didn't even know where I'd spend the night. And of course I had no idea what would happen with the team. I had a fair fan's knowledge of the various squads in Serie A – and a passionate admiration for Roberto Baggio, which still endures – but Serie B was terra incognita.

My first surprise, then, was not being able to sleep in Castel di Sangro when I arrived, because there were no hotels in which I could stay, and while Italians are for the most part warm and welcoming to strangers, they're not going to invite a foreigner who can't even say "buona notte" to spend the night at their home after knowing him for only an hour. Besides, in Castel di Sangro, a very poor town, there was not much extra living space. It's not exactly a guest-room sort of place.

My second surprise was to learn that the team had no home pitch to play on. Serie B regulations required that there be a minimum seating capacity of 10,000 and Castel di Sangro had had only 4,000. Well, the story of the construction of the new stadium and the delays and delays and delays is yet something else too detailed for this format, but from September to January, the team had to play its "home" matches at a stadium two hours away.

Merron: Did you have any idea of what struggles the team would face? Were you aware that management was among the team's worst enemies?

McGinniss: The only thing I knew that first day was that when I compared the roster of the new "Serie B" team with that of the team that had struggled up from "Serie C1" the year before, and from "Serie C2" the year before that, they were 85 percent the same. The management, although given millions of dollars in bonuses to allow them to buy stronger players so they could compete effectively had not used the money for that purpose. It was virtually the same team from two levels lower, two years before.

So I went into the season considering it a real possibility that Castel di Sangro would lose all 38 matches that it played. That it could finish above the bottom four of the 18 clubs in the league, and thus avoid relegation back to C, would seem to have required an even greater miracle than the first.

Merron: Early in the book, you admit that "they," the team, had become "we" – that your support of the team was so complete and unconditional that you had become part of the team. Did you ever think, as you became more and more involved with the team, that you were losing your objectivity as a journalist?

McGinniss: Nothing about my experience in Castel di Sangro troubled me as a journalist because I did not go there as a journalist, I did not act as a journalist while I was there, and I have not written a journalistic book.

My intention, as it has been in every book I've written, was to tell a story as well as I could. In each case my goal was to give the reader, insofar as was possible, the experience of actually being there – of actually having an experience, not just reading about an experience that I had.

I did not become a part of the team so much as the team became a part of me. Yes, they accepted me into their family – and it was more a family than simply a group of professionals in Castel di Sangro. This degree of closeness was uncommon even in Italy and almost unheard of in England, where players generally tend to go their separate ways after training and matches.

But I also came to consider them members of my family. And while I've been spared the unsurpassable agony and torment of the death of a child, when those two boys got killed in that accident, the sorrow I felt was as deep as any I've ever felt in my life. Yet I'd known them for less than three months, they were half my age, and I was only beginning the process of really being able to talk to them. But that's simply how intense the experience was.

There is a bond formed, however, that both precedes and goes beyond verbal expression, and for whatever reason, when that bond was formed among the Castel di Sangro players, it included me. In fact, I was even inducted in the Associazione Calciatori Italiani, the Italian players' union. Only as an honorary member of course, but there was a presentation of a certificate and a pin and a cap, all made quite seriously by the team captain, who had the power to induct, at his discretion one, but no more than one non-team member into the Union each year. Of course, he didn't have to induct any.

You know, that simple act, because of its utter sincerity, brought more joy to me than I've ever received from seeing a book of mine on a best seller list.

Merron: You had an interesting relationship with Castel di Sangro's coach, Jaconi. It was volatile, and often hostile. You become so involved that you frequently, and insistently, tell the coach both how he should play, tactically, and who should play. Did you ever think, "I'm stepping over a line here"?

McGinniss: Well, I felt from the start that it was up to the manager to draw the line in terms of what I could or could not say regarding tactics.

It really began after the very first match, when I was so impressed by Lotti's play in goal that even when the number one, de Juliis, was over his suspension and eligible to play, I told Jaconi flat out that I hoped he wouldn't make a change. He just laughed. I'm there one week, have never even seen the other guy play, but I'm telling him he should stick with Lotti.

But I think Jaconi realized it was going to be a long and hard season and if I could amuse him with occasional bursts of lunacy, that was all to the good.

As time passed, he saw how serious I was about learning the game – and many of my didactic statements about what formation he should use and who should start and who should not were simply more efficient forms of questions.

He'd been asked questions by journalists for twenty years and had learned how to fend them off. But he hadn't flat out been challenged face to face.

And I should make clear I did this only when we were alone, never publicly in front of the squad. I would not have dreamed of insulting him in that fashion. And remember, too, by that time we were literally neighbors, living in adjacent apartments at one end of a long hall in an otherwise sparsely occupied building, owned of course, by the Man of the Mountain, the owner of the team.

So it was not as blatantly offensive to him as it may have seemed in the book, although absolutely there were times I'd push it too far or he'd be in the wrong mood and he'd grab a pencil and angrily draw lines and X's all through my carefully calibrated formation and tactical plan. But the irritation never lasted until the next meal. And I did learn things.

I also learned a lot about tactics and lineups from the players who, once they felt they could truly trust me, and once they were confident I was understanding what they were saying, would frequently seek me out to bitch about Jaconi's lineup selections and tactics. And these were not only from the substitutes, from whom you'd expect it, but from many of the regulars.

In fact, for all the familial atmosphere, which was utterly genuine, the squad was split into two camps: those who had come up through the ranks with Jaconi and who had developed absolute loyalty to him, and those who had joined more recently and who, almost to a man, considered him a narrow-minded and obtuse buffoon.

Personally, I kept going back and forth between the two points of view as the season progressed, but as a man and as a neighbor I never had anything but the greatest of affection for him and gratitude to him for letting me participate so fully in the life of the team, for really, just one word from him that I was not welcome down on the training field or in the locker room or on the team bus and I might as well have gone home. But it never even came close to that.

I'll just add this: one day he was driving me to his home in a city about two and a half hours from Castel di Sangro so I could meet his wife and daughters for the first time. His daughter was teaching him English on his off days so he could better communicate with me which was, when you think of it, an extraordinarily decent and generous thing to do.

I remember him saying to me, mostly in Italian, but with a little English mixed in, "I'm glad you're always butting in with your own ideas, because I listen in the hope that just maybe I might learn something new." "And have you?" I asked eagerly. He said, "No, not even one time. But you keep trying because every time I see more clearly that I is right. So your wrongheaded and stupid advice is good for my confidence."

Merron: And he asked you once to officiate a game.

McGinniss: That’s one of the more memorable situations. Jaconi suddenly tossed me the whistle and said, "You be aribtro. I watch." And all at once I found myself the referee.

It may have been only a five-on-five scrimmage, but it was played – as Castel di Sangro always played – with the intensity of a World Cup final. And no matter how friendly we might have been five minutes earlier, once I blew the whistle, I was the enemy to every player involved.

And I made some mistakes and I got in some arguments and I threatened to send off a player for protesting too much, and in the end the mini-match was settled by a very controversial decision of mine, allowing a goal to stand, where the scorer had quite possibly committed a foul in going for the ball near the goal. At dinner that night the guys on the losing side would not speak to me.

Jaconi got a great laugh out of this, of course, but he'd also had a more serious, and generous, purpose in mind. To let me see the game from an entirely different point of view. Which, believe me, it was.

That was in early December, just at the point when Jaconi thought I'd be able to handle it without his having to bail me out. And I did, just barely. And I might have learned more about the true nature of the game that afternoon than during all the rest of the season. And Jaconi had done it for just that reason: to give me that rarest of perspectives.

Merron: Was there one turning point when you felt things had changed, that you were no longer an "outsider"?

McGinniss: After about the first two weeks I'd lost virtually all sense of self, I was just part of this energy field far larger than myself. In fact, only at certain times in Alaska, which led to "Going To Extremes," was I ever as unconscious of myself as a writer as I was in Castel di Sangro.

I was a citizen of the town, a somewhat privileged fan of the club, but I just lived life as it came, day by day. I became very involved soon after my arrival, and there were surprises. "The book? There will time enough to worry about that later. But right now, Jaconi is knocking on my door to drive me up to the village of Altadena, where the men of this mountain hamlet have prepared a banquet of freshly shot game for him and some favored players."

As he did on every such occasion throughout the season, Jaconi made sure I was invited, too, because he wanted to expose me to as many different aspects of Abruzzan life as he could.

And I didn't go thinking, "Wow this might be a great scene for the book." I went because I was hungry, and because Jaconi said the food would be wonderful, which it was.

These occasions sometimes got kind of giddy. That night a player stood up on his chair – the only way to command "the floor" at such a gathering – and accused me of being an American war criminal because I'd done nothing to stop the bombing of Hiroshima.

Well, this fellow was not drunk, but let's say feeling somewhat merry. But he had hurled at me such a direct challenge that I could not ignore it. So I stood on my chair and said, "Giacomo, ascolta!" Listen! When Hiroshima was bombed I was two years old. "Che sono stato tenuto a fare? Cacare porpora?" What was I supposed to do? Shit purple?

That was apparently considered a more than adequate response, because the villagers and players and Jaconi stood as one to give me an ovation. And when Giacomo, the player, tried to continue, they booed and whistled him down from his chair. At which point – and this is really the point of the story – he immediately walked up to me and hugged me and said, "Bravo, Joe!" I replied "Grazie" and just as immediately poured him an ounce of grappa, saying, "Prego." Then I poured one for myself and we toasted and drank and everyone stood up and cheered and applauded again.

(Quite soon after that, I should say, we drove the thirty minutes back down the mountain to Castel di Sangro, because these social evenings never turned into drunken debauches. In Italy, that just is not done.)

It was only later that I realized the spontaneous incident had also carried an almost ritualistic aspect. I had by then been there long enough to be challenged point blank. Largely in jest, yes, but there was a subtext. And my prompt retort, especially the use of "cacare porpora," a phrase I'd never spoken or even heard spoken before and was really only guesswork on my part, turned out to be the decisive moment.

I'd been challenged and I'd responded, and all had ended in hugs and cheers. Actually, I don't think it would have mattered what I'd said, as long as I'd tried to say it in Italian, and had shown myself to be enough in the spirit of the gathering to stand on my own chair and respond, rather than trying to ignore him.

Merron: You mentioned earlier how close you became to the players. Did this surprise you?

McGinniss: Yes, it did. The fact is, I had much more in common, in terms of age, educational background, family, etc. with the team president than I did with any of the players, who ranged in age from 19 to 35 – the oldest being nearly 20 years younger than me – and who for the most part had nothing beyond a high school education and in many cases not even that.

Yet they were open, guileless, embracing, caring, an extraordinary group of men. All in all, it was the greatest lesson in my life about the insignificance of age difference in relationships. I found them 'simpatici' which means "genial, cheerful, or likeable" – not to be confused with "sympathetic" – and they found me the same. This was just a natural meshing of personalities, but because of the age difference, and differences in life experience, it did surprise me how quickly the gap closed.

Merron: Are you in touch with any of the players, or the coach? Do you have any plans to return to Castel di Sangro?

McGinniss: Yes, I'm in touch with a number of the players, and only yesterday I sent Jaconi an inscribed copy of the book, calling his attention to the next to last sentence on my "Acknowledgements" page, which his daughter can translate for him.

It says, "To the finest next-door neighbor a man could ever have, Osvaldo Jaconi, I extend my deepest and most sincere gratitude."

Of course, the last sentence says, "And don't we all wish it had ended differently." I don't want to expand on that, for obvious reasons, but let me just say if I'd left Castel di Sangro only one week earlier than I did, the book would have had a much simpler ending, and my ongoing friendships with the players would have far fewer obstacles in their paths.

On the other hand, the book would not have been nearly as true as it is, so once again the writer of nonfiction was faced with his lifelong problem: loyalty to subject vs. loyalty to reader, which also means fidelity to the truth, however messy and unpleasant it might be.

Merron: It's been two years since you left Castel di Sangro. Do you still follow minor league Italian soccer? Are you still a calcio fanatic?

McGinniss: Sad to say I am even more of a fanatic now than I was then. This is not something I got out of my system as a number of people close to me had hoped. You know, it's no fun for a kid to have a father who most people consider deranged. And we can't even invite people over for dinner unless I make sure first that it won't conflict with a televised match. And at 56 I don't think this is something I'll just outgrow.

I've kept in touch with teams, players, managers. It's not so hard because in Italy, everyone, certainly every calciatore, has a cell phone. I've been back to watch matches in every division from Serie A to C1. I even went to a C1 match outside Rome this February just because the goal keeper I did not want playing for Castel di Sangro was playing in that match, and I wanted to see him. Oh, we had a great time. Hugs all around and dozens of photographs. Honestly, he greeted me like a brother, even calling the hotel three times the night before the match to make sure I'd know how to find the stadium. Of course, his team lost, 3–2. What can you do? He's a great guy but at best a very mediocre goalkeeper.

And in America, through satellite, we get to watch a Serie B match every Saturday, then two Serie A matches on Sunday, plus an evening sports show which has players and managers as guests – all in Italian, of course – but I can understand enough, as can my wife, to pick up the gist of the conversation.

The greatest thing is that my son James, now 15, will sit there and watch it, not understanding a word, just to see some of his new heroes wearing suits and ties instead of uniforms. He cares far more about Inter Milan than about the Red Sox, and almost as much about Hellas Verona in Serie B. And then of course there are the matches from Germany, Spain, England, Mexico, Argentina and Chile every week. I've become a passionate fan of Boca Juniors, from Buenos Aires. Still, Italy is the core, the essence, the mother lode.

So that's my life now, for better or worse, and I care just as much about whether the new team managed by the dismissed Castel di Sangro manager, Jaconi, beats Palermo in its second round playoff match that could elevate it to Serie B than I did about who won the Champions Cup – heresy or worse to your Manchester United contingent, but the heart goes where love is, and for me that's Italy.

JOE LEARNS ITALIAN (SIDEBAR)

Merron: What was the most important lesson of your time in Castel di Sangro?

McGinniss: Not to be flippant, but the answer is "Italian." Without grappling toward at least minimal ability to be able to comprehend and to converse (much harder than reading and writing, incidentally) I would never have advanced past square one. I was blessed with two wonderful teachers, in succession; the only two people, in fact, in the whole town able to speak, read and write in both languages.

But the best teachers of all were the players, and Jaconi, and the team "massaggiatore" or rubdown and taping guy, whose name was Angelo, and who figures in the book only in a minor capacity, but who actually played a much larger role in my life there. Why he was more or less left on the cutting room floor has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the need to be ruthless in the interest of keeping a story flowing.

But Angelo took a special interest in my language problem, and would correct me every time I misspoke in Italian. When I could not understand him, he would slow down his words-per-second rate for my benefit. At training, we would often lapse into 15 minute linguistic sessions before he was called upon for other duties.

And Jaconi played no less a role. He took a genuine and active interest in helping me try to get my Italian up to at least minimal speed. As did Marcella, her inimitable patroness, and her two grown sons, Christian and Giovanni.

The married players, of course, spent less time with me than did the bachelor crew at Marcella's, and among them, while all were always more than cordial, some went beyond and took a deep interest in my attempt to learn to speak their language.

The truth is, I think most of them felt flattered that an American of my age would come to Italy and make such an effort with the language, which, as you know, is spoken nowhere else on earth. It's not like French or Spanish. The only reason to learn Italian is in order to function in Italy.

So really, my day, from dawn – when I would walk to the news kiosk to buy the morning's sports papers – until bedtime, when I would finally retreat from Marcella's to my solitary apartment, occasionally stopping for a neighborly chat with Jaconi, was in a way one gigantic Italian lesson.

If you want an opinion on the "immersion" method of learning a foreign language, I'll give it to you: it's unsurpassable. I needed to learn it in order to function, in order to stop being just the middle-aged American writer and "idioto" who had come to the Abruzzo because he had nothing better to do with his life. It was learning Italian that saved me from that fate.

ON CORRUPTION (SIDEBAR)

Merron: I need to ask you about the corruption you discovered surrounding and involving the team and its president and owner – specifically, the throwing of the last game of the season. Are you still as angry about this now as you were when you found out about it?

McGinniss: The short answer is no. The long answer is also no.

I learned a few things at the very end of the season that offended my American sense of right and wrong, black and white, good and bad. I was physically, psychologically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted by that time (it is both a physical and mental strain to have to communicate only in a foreign language all day, every day), and I overreacted. I could blame part of it simply on the hot weather and lack of air conditioning.

In any event, after having come to feel that in the space of only nine months I had become almost as Italian as the Italians, the truth was that when a crunch came I reverted right back to my American know-it-all preachiness and displayed this trait in ways that I have come to deeply regret.

It was not that I was wrong objectively; I still believe the team was wrong to do what it did. It was that I utterly failed to understand the value system which Italians had developed as they had developed their civilization since the time of Julius Caesar, and which was as integral a part of their culture and very being as appreciation of physical beauty, emotional warmth, religious fervor for il calcio, and the tendency to always have more than one person talking at a time, so that on occasion the whole country seems like one giant Robert Altman movie without subtitles.

The key word is subtlety. In nine months I had scratched the surface deeply enough to recognize that many, many layers lay below, but not enough to even begin to appreciate the significance of this discovery. So I applied my G.I. Joe, red-white-and-blue standards to an extremely complex situation in a manner which I now believe to have been almost entirely inappropriate.

Still, I cannot say I wish I hadn't. Tactically, it was a very poor decision, yet, damn it, at the same time it was me. I reacted spontaneously and instinctively and openly, as is my nature. I was offended, and so in turn I had no qualms about offending others, even men whom I'd grown to love in virtually every sense but the physical.

And, even more, I was offended by the very powerful men for whom I'd come to develop at least disrespect, if not contempt, and who responded by filing criminal charges against me which, in theory at least, could lead to my spending six years inside an Italian prison. But let me be clear, the latter category did not include any of the players, nor Jaconi.

That's probably all I should say about an issue which we shouldn't discuss in detail because it would take a very delicate situation out of an extremely complicated and multi-nuanced context.

ON PUBLISHING; AND WHAT'S NEXT (SIDEBAR)

Merron: What's your next project?

McGinniss: My next project? To move to Italy and to learn the language well enough so I can write a biography of Roberto Baggio. No, seriously, the worst time to ask a writer – or at least this writer – that question is when a book is in the process of publication, trying to make its way in the world, as "The Miracle of Castel di Sangro" is doing now.

But I will say I am fed up – and I am far from the only author to feel this way – with the bottom-line mentality that has caused an always imperfect but once honorable industry, that of book publishing, to virtually implode.

At this moment, I would tell you in all sincerity that I will never write another book, because I simply cannot again contemplate facing the rigors of the pre-publication and publication processes: from corporate lawyers second guessing your every choice of verb or adjective to prissy and sanctimonious people on the editorial end draining all the joy from what really should be the largely enjoyable culmination of a long, lonely and arduous process.

The quality of the people involved in this business has deteriorated beyond belief in the thirty years since my first book was published. There are exceptions, of course. But almost all of the most honorable people it was my privilege to know in an author-editor or author-publisher relationship are either dead, retired, or fired.

And those in charge now? I can't think of even three I'd want to invite inside my home. Not that they would come anyway, of course, because they'd be in the Hamptons or on the Vineyard, kissing each others asses, which they call networking.

It's funny, George Vecsey of the New York Times, who's been such a marvelous sports columnist for so many years and who, to my mind, is the best in the business right now, asked me the same question less than a week ago. I said, all I know is, no more books. I told him that in an ideal world I would move to Italy and using a home there as a base would become European football correspondent for an English language journal or newspaper, or combination of same.

And George said, in essence, "Damn! That's exactly what I want to do." So at least I know I'm not the only nut case in America.

But to be serious, I really don't know, Jeff. Family considerations play a large part in any such decision, but I'm 56 years old now and while one never knows what "il destino" holds in store, the one certainty is that more of my working life is behind me than ahead of me.

Therefore, the answer to your question becomes one of the most important decisions facing me in life, and for that reason I'm going to have to tell you honestly, "I don't know." But I cannot imagine that it would not involve both Italy and football in some way. For me, right now, America is where I came from, and though I may still be here geographically, spiritually I'm six time zones removed.

Jeff Merron is a SportsJones senior editor and a journalism professor.

http://www.sportsjones.com/mcginniss.htm