“Should I live a hundred years, my memory will remain green.” Bernard Pivot stopped early but he did not deny this sentence taken from his book “Football in Green” published in 1980. The man who loved books and authors so much also loved matches and dribblers. Especially when they were rolling the ball on the pitch at the Geoffroy-Guichard stadium in Saint-Étienne.
“I am a declared supporter and for life,” he confided to us one day when we interviewed him for an article on a player. The response for the newspaper took a minute but the conversation lasted almost an hour. Pivot loved talking about football. Like a break between two books. A childhood recreation that took him back to his Lyon boarding school in the Croix-Rousse district where he discovered the pleasure of kicking a leather ball between two lessons.
VIDEO. Death of Bernard Pivot at the age of 89
“We are all born football players but the difference between Kopa, Cruyff, Pelé, Platini and me is that life has given them good balls and I have some very ugly ones,” he laughed. But a football had slipped into my shirt. It bounced to the rhythm of my heart and will never leave me.”
He hesitated for a long time between OL and ASSE
Lyonnais, Bernard Pivot hesitated for a long time, “like between two women”, between supporting the club in his town and the regional rival. “But like these men who have been torn for a long time, I have decided to switch, with body and soul, like all of France, to the side of the Greens.”
Bernard Pivot loved this pleasure of standing out in the literary world by admitting this passion for football. Because for a long time, perhaps until the 1998 World Cup, football was not necessarily popular among writers. “The head and the legs”, it was definitely not worthy of “Apostrophes” for some. Pivot assumed and loved to romanticize the life of the Saint-Etienne club. “My head is a stadium where dozens and dozens of green jerseys run,” he wrote nicely.
The more the years passed, the more he went to Geoffroy-Guichard stadium to stay young. Unwittingly, Pivot also contributed to loosening the shackles of preconceptions about football and proved, through his words and his passion, that the feet of footballers sometimes wrote sentences as strong as certain literary flights.
He explained that Michael Platini “gave spirit to the ball”. And saw Dominique Rocheteau a “Pasolini character, a complex angel whose dark aura fascinates rednecks who have no other relationship with light than that of being a subscriber to 110 volts”. How can you not be proud to love football after reading this?
He sent the books to the players of the French team
Pivot’s passion for football sent him to Mexico in 1986 to comment, for Antenne 2, on the World Cup alongside Michael Drucker. But we know less that he had long been the anonymous provider of books for the players of the French team. Before the 1978 World Cup, he had the idea of offering works, sent by the publishing houses before “Apostrophes” then “Bouillon de Culture” to the Blues. And until 1998, the tradition continued.
Three months before the major international meetings, the steward of the French team sent a courier to Pivot who had selected nearly 200 books for him. To nourish their head game a little between two matches. Pivot was therefore the selector of the library of The french team. The child from Croix-Rousse with a green heart had been happy about it.
