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.)

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.