The identity card says Montebelluna, province of Treviso. Luigi Datome was born there on 22 November, 1987: Montebelluna is the small town where his mother Antonella’s family comes from. She was born and raised in Asmara in Ethiopia where his grandfather had emigrated in the 1920s. Gigi lived in Veneto only for a few days before moving to Olbia, the base of his whole life. Even his girlfriend, Camilla, is from Olbia. And Olbia is the place where he spent the lockdown phase, training at the PalaDatome, which is not named after him as many people suppose, but to his uncle Roberto who died prematurely in a car accident. “I tried to stay in shape, I even discovered was a Tabata is all about,” he jokes (tabata is a high-intensity interval training, where you perform an exercise for 20 seconds and recover for 10).
Basically, even before Rome, Olbia is the place where he became a player. Coach Piero Pasini once provoked him during the halftime of a game: he told him that he was playing scared. Anger and pride triggered him. Andrea Carosi, another of his coaches, wrote him a note when he was 15 and played in third division: “To become someone remember that you are nobody. To become someone, you have to remain the Luigi of now.” He took that advice and transformed it into a mantra, the manifesto of its existence. Hence probably the many passions that make him – to his surprise – a different person from the stereotype of the modern athlete. His passion for books dates back to when he was a teen-ager, with the Harry Potter saga, during the Rome period he took guitar lessons and now the guitar accompanies him everywhere, in Istanbul he started to draw. He remains a curious character, who reads between the end of the warm-up and the coach’s pre-game speech, he is very proud of his origins, very close to his family and eager to know the world in which he lives.
His career took off in Siena, detoured towards Scafati – who was in the top league at the time -, and then he was great in Rome, where he the MVP award and made the championship series. The journey led him to the NBA. When the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers. The quote belongs to Oscar Wilde, is one of his famous aphorisms, which contains a base of truth. Gigi Datome, in the summer of 2013, celebrated his entry into the NBA, with a two-year contract signed by Joe Dumars, one of the basketball greats of the ’80s and ’90s, a two-time NBA Champion with the Detroit Pistons, the only team he had ever played for and subsequently worked for, also winning a championship in 2004 as its general manager. But Dumars was at the end of his story, the head coach Maurice Cheeks was a lame duck: Datome had no role in Detroit, also due to a preseason missed after an injury that he had during the 2013 European Championships. The following year, a new boss was in town, Stan Van Gundy, but things got even worse and Gigi was even forced to play three games in the G-League along Spencer Dinwiddie who is now a star in Brooklyn. It was a frustrating experience that turned into something unforgettable in February 2015 when he was traded to Boston. After a few weeks of adjustment, he became part of the Celtics regular rotation, he played well and made his debut in the playoffs, in a series the Celtics lost against the Cleveland Cavaliers, a team led by LeBron James on its way to a championship. In those two months in Boston, Datome proved to be a legitimate NBA player, he treasured the incredible proud of playing in one of the most iconic cities in the basketball world, of wearing the legendary green uniform. He also began to wear his number 70.
The summer of 2015 was the one in which he could have come to Milan. It’s no mystery, because Olimpia confessed its interests for Gigi. Fenerbahce had just played the EuroLeague Final Four and had the rosterto aim for the championship. That was what he was looking for. Datome went to Istanbul, and played the championship game three times in a row. After the disappointment of Berlin 2016 and the triumph of Istanbul 2017, he scored 16 points in 26 minutes in the semifinal win over Zalgiris in Belgrade 2018 obtaining the third consecutive berth to the ultimate game, but losing it 85-80 against Real Madrid. In 2019 in Vitoria, after a record year, 25-5 in the regular season, 3-1 over Zalgiris in the playoffs, Fenerbahce was plagued by too many injuries and lost the semifinal against Efes, a game that Gigi did not even have the opportunity to play. In Istanbul, however, he also won three Turkish titles, one as the playoffs MVP in 2016, three national cups, the last in 2020, the President’s Cup. In Istanbul, it has been a perfect wedding. (2-to be continued)
