Cult Heroes and Club Icons: The life and death of football's 1st rockstar, Gigi Meroni

There has never been a footballer who was more rock and roll than Gigi Meroni. A footballing genius and style icon, he was as much unsuited for his time as he was a model for the forthcoming.

A life cut short scars a story so fantastic that it borders on urban myth. Meroni was a legend in every sense.

Humble beginnings

Reared by a widowed mother with modest means in tranquil Como, Italy, Luigi "Gigi" Meroni got his first shot with the local Calcio Como, first with the youth set-up, before making his first-team debut for a side that was bandied about Italy's second and third tiers.

A move to a Genoa side in decline in 1962 marked his transition from a teenager with promise to a professional footballer noted for his individuality. Meroni quickly became a fan favourite for his wizardry on the wing and penchant for the impossible.

The last match of his first campaign with I Rossoblu nearly sidetracked a blossoming career. Four Genoa players were slated for a drug test before the season's final fixture. Meroni was noticeably absent from the mandatory check, and was banned for the first five matches of the following season. The three other players tested positive for amphetamines.

Despite the blunder, Meroni played one more season for Genoa before, to the discontent of supporters, he was sold to Torino for a then-record fee for a 21-year-old of 300 million liras.

An emerging star who blended style with substance was about to meet his first match in Il Toro's uber-disciplinarian, Nereo Rocco, and for all of the ever-growing wrangling surrounding Meroni's aesthetic, Torino needed the undersized Lombardian to rescue a club hamstrung by catastrophe.

The Superga disaster

Fifteen years before Meroni first pulled on the maroon kit, Torino lost everything.

Returning home from a friendly with Benfica in Lisbon, the Fiat G.212 carrying the team smashed into the Basilica of Superga outside of Turin. Thirty-one people perished, including the team, its training staff, and three prominent journalists. A faulty altimetre and dense fog were to blame for the destruction of the era's most successful club.

The Grande Torino side had won five consecutive Scudetto titles, marking the club's most successful stretch. A tragedy that echoed nationwide, it affected both club and country, as the majority of the Italian national side was comprised of Torino players. They were the first side to capture the domestic double, and, led by Valentino Mazzola, the Grande Torino was an unbeatable side that only disaster could stop.

Torino's saviour

Amid a gradual ascension on the heels of tragedy, Borgoforte-born businessman Orfeo Pianelli became club president in 1963, and hired Rocco during a sabbatical between AC Milan gigs for the authoritarian gaffer.

With the club rebuilding brick by brick for a return to prominence, like restorations of Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes, Meroni would become the club's stylish stimulant for revitalization.

He was flashy and sprightly, while Rocco, a symbol of the state of Italian football during the time, was austere and disciplined. Footballers were regarded more as the property of a club than individuals.

In a time of rigidity and functionality, Meroni was loud and unconventional. As adept marauding down the flanks before cutting in and scoring a cracker as he was in a sports car dressed like a cult hero, he was the exemplar of the trope "ahead of his time."

A trendsetter among the traditional

Off the pitch, Meroni was equal parts dapper and outrageous. Loud suits and offbeat hats paired with dark sunglasses and convertibles complimented a superlative moustache and sometimes beard. His relatively long hair and dangling fringe was deemed as insubordination, and his image became that of a revolutionary icon for a country on the cusp of social and cultural transformation.

On the pitch, he dazzled alongside attack partner Nestor Combin. With socks around the ankles, Meroni, nicknamed "The Purple Butterfly" was a bandit with a ball, loved by Torino supporters and considered a tramp and a gipsy by those of his opponents. His popularity aroused an offer from city rival Juventus, as the two sides agreed to a fee of 750 million lire. Met with widespread derision from fans, many of whom worked at the Fiat factory and threatened to strike, Pianelli was forced to rescind the sale.

Meroni experienced national stardom, capped off by a sublime lob against Inter Milan at the San Siro in 1967 that led to I Nerrazzurri's first home defeat in three years. It would be one of his last displays of footballing genius.

A legend's demise

On Oct. 15, 1967, Meroni and teammate Fabrizio Poletti were crossing a busy Corso Re Umberto in Turin when a 124 Fiat Coupe struck the pair. The full-back Poletti escaped with a broken leg. Meroni wasn't so fortunate, as the car dragged the prodigious footballing hippie for 50 metres before coming to a stop. He was rushed to the hospital, but later died. Meroni was 24.

The car's driver was 19-year-old Torino supporter Attilio Romero. He lived on the same street as his footballing hero, had a poster of him in his room, and would later share far more with Meroni than even the most unimaginable script could write.

Meroni's death shook a city. The local paper's front page read "All Turin Cried." He was a hero and a rockstar, celebrated as "freedom in a country of conformists," and his funeral was attended by 20,000 people.

The influence and the myth

It was Torino's second disaster in two decades, and the priest who led the mass, Don Francesco Ferraudo, exclaimed that Meroni "was not just body, muscles, and nerves ... but also genius, kindness, courage, understanding, generosity."

Days after his death, the flowers that marked the place where he died were matched by those dropped by plane on the pitch ahead of the Turin derby. Combin started up top, but without his other half.

The Argentine scored a hat trick as fans chanted "Gigi, Gigi," and, to this day, it's Torino's biggest margin of victory over its hated rival Juventus.

Still in the top flight but in the shadow of Juventus, Torino hasn't experienced the same successes of the Grande Torino sides, nor has it witnessed the same brilliance since Meroni died.

In 2000, the club named a new president, Attilio Romero. Yes, that Attilio Romero. The man that killed one of the club's greatest was now at its helm. Nearly 50 years after that fateful night in October, Meroni's myth lives on.

Football's first rockstar was unequalled as an innovator both on the pitch and off. There will never be another Gigi Meroni.