He is 18 years old and has already made his debut in the Euroleague with the Blaugrana and the Azzurri of Pozzecco: at the roots of the boy who could take over Italian basketball in the coming years. The substitute teacher who discovered him at school: “I saw him long and thin, perfect for this sport, like this…”
Italdream. Because there are not only stars and stripes dreams. There is a world of blue and ambition inside Dame Sarr’s debut with the national team. He, a little embarrassed, amused, smiling, on the eve of the match in Iceland for the qualification for the European Championship had come clean: “I didn’t expect it, but I’m here”. Let’s believe them, they’re kids. Certainly the projects of this play-guard, as he called himself, have always been there for all to see. Athletic, technical and character skills: Dame is a caterpillar who knows how to shoot threes. Sarr’s father says that Dame “only loves basketball, even as a child he got up at five to watch the NBA, Golden State, and at a certain point I started doing it with him: I became passionate about it.” At 18, Dame is no longer on the launching pad, he already lives in the hyperspace of basketball. And not just because he plays in the Euroleague with the Barcelona shirt, the team that took him away from Bassano two years ago. Dame is part of the new all Italian boys. The kids of the present, those who have already taken the future and don’t want to stop enjoying it. He was born in Oderzo, thirty kilometers from Treviso. His father had arrived from Senegal in the mid-1990s. “I’m from Dakar, the capital – he says -, many cousins were already in Europe and so I left too. First Marseille, then Italy.” He works as a worker in a Venetian company that produces wood and sheet metal. The Sarr are quality people, they know what work, perseverance, kindness and sacrifice mean. “My dad, Elhadji, Dame’s grandfather, was a trade unionist. Dame also bears his name.” And then there is the emotion, that of parents who see a child cultivate his talent: “Seeing my boy in the national team shirt is a great emotion, a very important goal. We are all proud of him.”
