Any given Sunday, and evidently even more often, during the warm-up wearing the Olimpia jersey at the Mediolanum Forum, about 15 minutes before the tip-off, Stefano Tonut will hear the notes of Lorenzo Jovanotti’s song echoing that is the soundtrack for the historical film of the club’s legacy. Among these, at a certain point, his father will appear on the screen, roughly when he was Stefano’s current age, a little taller, the same number 7 jersey on. Only that in that film Alberto Tonut is wearing the opponent’s jersey. Alberto Tonut is in fastbreak mode, running towards two easy points for his team at the time, Libertas Livorno. It is Game 5 of the 1989 championshi series. The decisive one. Stefano was four years away from seeing the light for the first time. Alberto Tonut, who was an extraordinary talent, a great combo forward, did not score that easy field goal, because behind him a man who had won two NBA championships with the Lakers and the MVP award, known for his skills as a scorer, certainly not famous as a defender, instinctively dived on the slippery floor of an early summer night, to deflect the ball over the baseline. One of the most famous, iconic gestures in the history of our basketball. Bob McAdoo and his dive. Alberto Tonut on the wrong side of the story. Undeservedly.
Alberto Tonut had been on the verge of coming to Milan several times (he averaged 12.7 points per game when his Libertas Livorno’s team made the final against the iconic Olimpia squad), but the fate of the market did not allow him to do so. When Stefano was born, he was playing in Cantù. The identity card of the new Olimpia player never fails to remember it. That privilege will be up to the son.
Many are welcoming Stefano with some doubts, because despite the age of 28 he has never played in the EuroLeague. Yet, he was not only the MVP of the Italian league in 2021, but he is also a player who has won the championship twice at Reyer Venezia, who has won the Italian Cup once, who has won the Fiba Europe Cup and has played in the BCL Final Four. His journey in Venice was by no means ordinary. In 2016, when he was almost 23 and struggling to find minutes on his club team, Coach Ettore Messina took him to the Turin Preolympics tournament. Over the next few years, a great star in Italy, he legitimated that call-up and in 2021 he was among the key players during the surprising triumph in Belgrade’s Preolympic tournament that led to trip to Tokyo, always remembered by the five rings that he tattooed on his chest. Not bad for a player who, for different reasons, has been underestimated for years. He wasn’t good enough to translate his second division stats in the top league, then he wasn’t strong enough to have an important role for Reyer or for the national team or in some European competitions. The facts say that he has always managed to beat everyone. They say that as a classic Trieste mule he is stubborn in the right way. And they also say that he won a lot at Reyer and came Milan at the pinnacle of his maturity as a player and a man.
Even though he was born in Cantù, Stefano is actually a real mule from Trieste, a land that gave Olimpia a lot in terms of players, Romeo Romanutti, Cesare Rubini, Gianfranco Pieri, Giulio Iellini, Sandro De Pol. And now him. As a child he played basketball, but he was not considered a great prospect, perhaps because his last name raised the expectations too much. He had tried to play soccer until, growing in stature, he decided that he would try to play basketball anyway. He started in Azzurra Trieste, then in Monfalcone where he practiced twice a day, with the boys and with the first team, then in Trieste, then in Trieste’ second division team. Tonut exploded during the 2014/15 season, averaging over 19 points per game; immediately after winning the European title with the Under 20 National Team which included Amedeo Della Valle and Awudu Abass. He was not a star of that team, but he scored 10 points in the final against Latvia, basically a road game. After dominating the second league at a young age, he was signed by Venice and the rest is part of the history of Italian basketball.
In the end, he spent seven years at Reyer, almost a record in today’s basketball. If the perception is that the last season was not as good as the previous one, when he brought home the MVP award, the numbers say that his scoring average just decreased from 16.2 to 14.0 points per game. And as for the international experience, in addition to his national team career, he has played 51 Eurocup games. In Tokyo, at the Olympics, on his debut against Germany he scored 18 points. On the court, Germany had seven EuroLeague players and two NBA players, Italy had five EuroLeague players and one NBA star. In Belgrade, where Italy clinched the Olympic berth against Serbia, he scored 15 points over 34 minutes against a team formed by ten NBA or EuroLeague players. His next EuroLeague game will be the first of his career, but Tonut is not a real rookie. And the name it bears, that number 7 which is the same that Gianfranco Pieri had when he was playing in Milano, has nothing to do with it. His talent, his story have.
