THE DEATH OF JOHN CHARLES on Saturday morning managed to jerk Italy away from its preoccupation with domestic football and the weekend’s Milan derby. The Welshman featured prominently in most of the day’s news programmes and was remembered on the front pages of all three sports newspapers and La Stampa, the Turin-based national daily.

Charles, a Juventus player from 1957 to 1962, symbolised a special period in Italy’s postwar development, as La Stampa writes: “Those were formidable years. Italians were driving Vespas as the economy boomed and television became the national pastime. Rome hosted the Olympics as Fellini shot La Dolce Vita. The darkness of the war and its aftermath was, if not forgotten, at least finally absorbed. And those three beautiful men in black and white stripes, (Giampiero) Boniperti, (Omar) Sivori and Charles, epitomised a generation finally ready to look forward, not back.”

Boniperti, the aristocratic country gent who later became Juventus president, and Sivori, the short-tempered Italo-Argentine precursor to Maradona, formed a friendship with Charles, the miner’s son, which was as close as it was improbable. The trio also came to dominate Italian football, winning three titles and two cups in Charles’s five seasons at Juventus.

“John and Omar changed my life and they changed the history of Juventus,” Boniperti said. “John was extraordinary, one of the fairest and most sporting people I ever met. Just imagine, he had been a successful amateur boxer while serving in the Army and he was usually the biggest, strongest man on the pitch, yet he never once was booked. Everywhere he went, his presence brought calm and serenity. You felt compelled to follow his example.”

When news reached Sivori, who now lives on a farm in his native Argentina, he collapsed from the shock. Later, he contributed to the eulogies, explaining that Charles had helped to focus his wayward genius. “I was arrogant, hot-headed and Latin, goodness knows how I became friends with someone like John,” he said. “I lost count of the number of times he restrained me from going after referees or opponents. He was so big and strong, the sheer menace of his presence kept me in line.”

Despite Charles’s size and terrifying physical prowess, only once did he clash with an opponent — his own brother. “We played Arsenal in a friendly and he was being man-marked by his brother, Mel,” Boniperti recalled. “We had wound him up beforehand, saying that he would go easy on his brother. This really bothered John, because he did not want people to think he would give anything less than maximum effort. He was so tense that the two of them actually came to blows.”

Charles, though never wealthy, worked tirelessly for a number of charities, both in Italy and in Britain. Egged on by friends, he also tried his hand at a singing career, but it did not go well. “We went to a nightclub to see him perform,” Sivori said. “Some in the audience started heckling. I’d had a few drinks and decided to stand up for my friend. It turned into a fully-fledged brawl, until John got off the stage, waded through the crowd and pinned me and another guy to the wall. We ended up laughing and drinking together until dawn. That was John. He was the ultimate peacemaker who made the world a better place.”

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