The Champions Are Dead

To Italians, as to most Europeans, soccer is what baseball is to Americans. No team in Italy was more beloved than Turin's Torinos, whose emblem was a charging bull. Bull-like, the Torinos charged their way to the national championship four times, seldom failed to pay off in the totocalcio, the national soccer pool, where 22 million Italian fans each week place their bets. When the Torinos beat Spain's championship team in Madrid last March, a husky Parma worker cried out: "The Italian Republic's first international victory." The papers picked up the phrase and made it into a national slogan.

Last week, the Torinos took off in a chartered airliner for a routine training match against a Portuguese team (which defeated the Italians). On the flight home, lost in a soupy fog, the plane crashed into the Basilica on Superga Hill above Turin (where the members of Italy's former royal house are buried). Dead in the flames were all eleven members (and seven reserve players) of the Torinos team.

All over the country, workers and clerks spilled into the streets and squares, wearing the Torinos' badge encircled in black crepe. Pope Pius XII sent a message of condolence to the players' families. Mourned President Luigi Einaudi: "Horrifying disaster . . . Harsh blow for the entire nation . , ."

In two days, more than 800,000 mourners had filed into Turin's rococo Palazzo Madama, past coffins that held the remains of Italy's greatest team. Sobbed nine-year-old Luigi Foschi: "The champions are dead. What shall we do?"

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