Trevisan company at Roland Garros, with a dedication to father Claudio da Cervignano: “For you my little boy”

Martina, after winning the semifinal in Paris, wrote a message on the camera to the parent, born in Friuli, who is fighting a degenerative disease

CERVIGNANO DEL FRIULI. “For you my father.” Martina Trevisan has just bought her ticket for the Roland Garros semifinal, a run-up of three sets (6-2, 6-7, 6-3) against Canadian Leylah Fernandez. Yet she could have closed it almost an hour earlier to reach Francesca Schiavone and Sara Errani (the only blue in the open era to get so high on Parisian soil), if her hand hadn’t trembled on the first match point.

That left hand – it is left-handed – which, having taken the white marker, was guided by the heart to write on the “winners’ glass” the sentence in favor of the camera: “For you, my little boy”.

Papa Claudio Trevisan was in Tuscany, where he chose to live, where he fights with a degenerative disease. Papa Claudio was born in Cervignano del Friuli on 27 July 1947 and was a footballer throughout the 1970s. He left 20 years old to make his fortune: Imperia, then Pontedera, Cosenza, Mantua, Montevarchi, Sambenedettese, Fano and Modena. All teams from Serie C or B.

After his career he does not return to Friuli and Monica, tennis teacher at the Santa Croce sull’Arno club, becomes the wife who in 1989 gives him the first-born, Matteo. Four years later Martina will arrive. And the two grow up with the racket in their hands. Matteo is extremely talented: in 2007 at Wimbledon he won double the junior category and set off on a professional career that never took off, also thanks to injuries.

Martina is also a starlet, but immediately after that family triumph on the London grass, fate makes her fall into a sprawling vortex. Dad Claudio then had a gadget company: «I met him to have the caps on our site, Ubitennis, made», says Ubaldo Scanagatta, director of the magazine and a great connoisseur of the world of rackets.

Soon Claudio Trevisan will know he has Parkinson’s, a disease that also destroys families. And Martina becomes a shooting star. “I ate a fruit and 30 grams of cereals,” she confessed years later. Tennis can’t be fun for a depressed 16-year-old with anorexia.

So the racket ends up in a corner for four and a half years. In 2014, after a long psychotherapy journey, he takes it back in hand and begins the ascent. What an ascent! From Tuesday 31 May Martina is virtually number 1 in Italy, number 26 in the world. And that’s not all: on Thursday 2 June, at 4 pm on the Philippe-Chatrier field, she will challenge the American Gauff, this time to go to the final. And inside her heart he has that dedication: “For you, my little father.”