101 Greats of European Basketball

Owner of two
European threepeats
It was in 1963 when somebody at FIBA had a great
idea: organizing continental tournaments for the
junior category. The first edition of the FIBA European
Championship for Junior Men was in 1964 in
Naples, Italy with only eight teams: USSR, France,
Yugoslavia and Spain in Group A, and Bulgaria, Italy,
Poland and Czechoslovakia in Group B. From that
first edition came many future stars: Modestas Paulauskas
and Zurab Sakandelidze (USSR), Jiri Zednicek
(Czechoslovakia), Aldo Ossola and Carlo Recalcati
(Italy) and Vicente Ramos (Spain). The Yugoslav team
included a future prominent head coach, Bogdan Tanjevic,
just like Recalcati would also become.
The top scorer of that tournament was Paulauskas
with 21.2 points, including 36 points against Yugoslavia.
The first champ was the USSR, a 62-41 winner
against France in the final. Italy won the bronze against
Bulgaria, 73-72. Recalcati’s point column was empty in
that game and his biggest contribution was in the game
against the USSR, with 8 points.
That first tournament was played in early April. Carlo
Recalcati, who was born on September 11, 1945, was
18 years old and had a bright future ahead. He was a
shooting guard who, standing 1.84 meters, could also
play at point guard, depending on his team’s needs. He
started in Pavia and at 14 years old he was already in
Cantu with a clear idea of making a living in basketball.
He was taken to Cantu by Gianni Corsolini, one of the
three men whom Recalcati himself considers most important
to his career as a player.
The other two men are coaches Arnaldo Taurisano
and Borislav Stankovic. In an article written by Recalcati,
he explained that he learned “technical things” from
Taurisano, “political things” from Stankovic and “the relationship
with teammates” from Corsolini. Stankovic,
the future FIBA secretary general, had been a Yugoslav
champion coach with OKK Belgrade, starring Radivoj
Korac, and had reached the semifinals of the EuroLeague.
In 1967-68, Stankovic coached Orasonda Cantu
and became the first foreign coach to win the Italian
League title. Cantu won 18 games and only lost four,
and it had a balanced team. Recalcati was its top scorer,
with 18.5 points, 10th best in the league. When I spoke
to him 47 years later, Stankovic had these memories of
that season and of Recalcati:
“It was a team that won the league with, essentially,
six players. There were more, but six played all the time:
Recalcati, [Antonio] Frigerio, [Carlos] D’Aquila, [Alberto]
De Simone, [Bob] Burgess and [Alberto] Merlati. Carlo
was a confident shooter. He didn’t waste too many possessions.
He was a very ‘economical’ player, with high
precision. He was lacking a bit in the physical aspect
and a couple more centimeters would have helped him
become a superstar. But despite all that, he was a great
player.”
Stankovic says that back then, he could not see the
coaching potential in Recalcati:
“He showed interest in basketball. He liked to discuss
the theory of the game, but I never realized he
wanted to be a coach. But he was very young. He would
play for 10 more years and discovered his talent for the
bench a little further down the road.”
101 greats of european basketball
Carlo Recalcati
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