SASSARI. The pioneers of the basket ball, almost a century before the arrival of Jack Devecchi, dribbled in the dust and performed outdoors between an athletics competition, a cycling race and a “bomb throwing” challenge.
Eighty-nine years before the Scudetto landed in Piazzale Segni, a basketball was already bouncing in Sassari, with ten men in undershirts and shorts ready to compete on a clay court no more than a hundred meters away from where today the flag of the Italian champion hangs inside the PalaSerradimigni.
The discovery. The history of island basketball backs off two months and moves two hundred and twenty kilometers further north, from Cagliari to Sassari. Until now it was believed that the first basketball game ever played in Sardinia dates back to November 16, 1924. That day in the capital, at the Meloni Stallaggio field, a challenge was staged that saw the Cagliari players and the Ichnusa rowers as protagonists. The match ended 8-1 for the rossoblù, who had settled on the viale Trieste pitch since the club’s birth, dated 1920. Now, however, the anniversary must be updated.
The new coordinates. That of the first game of ball to the basket on the island is a story of other times, of which the memory had been lost. The traces were found by the historian Mario Fadda, a member of the Italian Society of Sports History and a great expert on the heroic era of island sport. Among other things, he was responsible for the impressive work of reorganizing the jagged and often contradictory news on the beginnings of the main sports clubs in Sardinia. While researching his latest book, “The pioneers of Sardinian football, 1902-1935”, Fadda made a discovery that allows him to update the space-time coordinates of Sardinian basketball. The first match was played at the Torres field, the current “Vanni Sanna” stadium, on 21 September 1924, between the team of the 45th Infantry Regiment and the Sassari District, and ended with 14 to 8 baskets.
History. At the dawn of the twenties of the twentieth century, piazzale Segni is a luxuriant olive grove still far from the inhabited center and the only real city sports facility is located a few tens of meters further on: it is the field of Sef Torres, which the rossoblù club is it was built three years earlier, paying for land, materials and labor out of its own pocket. In 1924 the company, founded in 1903, already has two decades of activity behind it and, like every year, September 20 celebrates itself and the anniversary of its public debut. A large provincial multisport event is therefore organized for Saturday 20 and Sunday 21, involving various companies in the hinterland and which is combined with the military regional championships. The event, to which the main authorities of the area are invited, is organized in grand style: there will be competitions of all the specialties of athletics, from sprinting to jumps, from throws to middle distance, from relays to the grueling 51 kilometers of walking , which will see runners struggling along the roads of neighboring villages. You run by bike, over various distances (from 2 to 40 laps of the track) and vibrated ball competitions are scheduled (a discipline very popular at the time) and – listen, listen – the military will compete in two different throwing specialties of the bomb: distance and accuracy.
The great debut. Those scheduled at the Torres field, in front of a large audience, are competitions of disciplines very familiar to the sportsmen of the time. The real big news is scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday 21 September. The basket ball, born in the USA in 1891, is still an unknown sport in Italy, where the first official match was played in Milan in 1919. The organizers have made it known that “the competitions will take place in any weather and schedule. it will be scrupulously observed “. Thus at 5.45 o’clock the “ball to the basket” challenge (as reported in the program) takes place, valid for the military championships between the formations of the 45th Infantry Regiment and the Sassari District. The chronicles of the island’s newspapers, including La Nuova, will dedicate the beauty of two lines to this historical event, from which we only get to know the final result: 14-8, with the individual baskets at the time that were worth only one point.
The ancestors of Dinamo. The Italian Basketball Federation was born in 1921, while in 1926 the national team will take the field for the first time, again in Milan. Basketball debuts at the Olympic level in Berlin ’36 and in the meantime in Sardinia the challenges between high school or university students are now frequent. It is played in Cagliari and Sassari, but also in Nuoro, and at the dawn of the 1940s the best island teams cross the Tyrrhenian Sea to participate in the national finals. Even in 1949 Torres went to Ajaccio, winning 47-39 what – until new discoveries – should be the first match in a foreign land for a Sardinian team.
The witness. Alberto Palmas, born in 1932, recently took a pen and paper and tried to rearrange the memories of his pioneering experiences on the Sassari pitches. In turn, bringing out an avalanche of extremely interesting information. «During the war years – says Palmas – my elder sister, Vanna, already played basketball with the Magistral team, coached by Professor Chiama, and also with Torres of the unforgettable Professor Giovanni Fadda. I started when I was 10, in 1942, on the clay court of the S. Domenico Savio association, in Piazza Duomo, where the Collegium Mazzotti now stands. Nearby there was also the field of Robur. There were clay courts also in other parishes, such as Capuchins and San Giuseppe. At the time, the balls had external seams and there were no coaches: the new recruits learned simply by watching their older teammates. Among these I remember Mario Casu, Giuseppe Moirano, Paolo Testoni, Giuseppe Florenzano and my brother Mimmo Palmas. We at Domenico Savio were short in stature, but quick and precise shooting. However, when we faced the Capuchin team our veins trembled in our wrists, because among them was Paolo Biamonti, who was the size of the current basketball giants ». Among the stars of the time there was also Alberto Preti, from Cagliari who moved to Sassari with his family after the bombings.
Soon, with the birth of the CSI (Italian Sports Center), from occasional meetings we passed to regular tournaments. «We founded a team – Alberto Palmas still remembers – which took the name of Turritana, directed by Mario Casu and then by Edmondo Serra and Tonino Carta. We moved to Meridda, we began to challenge the Cagliari teams and in 1950 after winning the regional phase we participated in the national phases, repeating the feat three years later. They were heroic, unforgettable trips. In the second half of the fifties there was a qualitative leap for us thanks to the sponsorship of the DC, the Libertas Turritana was born, which won the regional promotion championship in 1957 and the following year took part in the national Fip C series ».
The birth of Dinamo, in 1960, was now just around the corner. «By now the times were ripe – concludes Palmas -. Thanks also to the contribution of one of the most promising young people of our old Turritana, Giovanni Pischedda, the new club managed in a short time to give much more prestige to the city basketball ».
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