The greatest sports chronicler of all time knew that “the ball is a tiny, a ridiculous detail.” Reactionary – in this case full of reason to react – was fighting a growing strand of the football press, obsessed with tactical schemes.
“The players, the coach and the masseuse are in place. But who wins and loses the matches is the soul,” he wrote in one of his celebrated texts in the sports headline in 1956.
Nelson Rodrigues did not despise tactical concepts. It didn’t despise the ball either. He just knew, with his playwright, that a game involves more than strategy. “The most sordid naked is of a shakespearean complexity. Sometimes, in a poor or well beaten corner, there is a very evident touch of the supernatural.”
He could even simulate, to rhetorical purposes, disdain by the ball. But never affected contempt for the game. On the contrary. Read his text about a 1957 Flamengo x Canto do Rio, and you will be sure that the match was decided by a spit on the ball.
We are, of course, talking about a language genius. Who was vain and liked to nail his signature with a dagger. But, as much as the text was, full of personal references, was always about the game. Always!
The game is not a detail.
Well today it seems it is.
Even for live broadcast on television. In a world made of cutouts to social networks, the speaker of a game does not work to satisfy the loving viewer who is, see, following the movement of athletes and concerned about the result.
This announcer wants to find a moment to scream some barbarity – the type “I want to come”, real example – or repeat a staff. Transmit, in the purest semantics of the word, that it should be the basis of any communicator, it became an obsolete verb.
The dawn on Wednesday (26) had an important basketball game, for those who care about the sport. The score pointed to Los Angeles Lakers 91 x 91 Dallas Mavericks, in the fourth and last period, and developed a discussion of minutes between the narrator and the two commentators about Temaki.
Temaki, the Japanese food. That.
By this time, each of the trio had already chanting at least one song in the transmission, between parodies and hits like “Baba, Baby!”.
Already after 91 to 91, at an even more decisive moment of the basketball match that insisted on pursuing, one of the commentators began to describe the relationship he has with his psychotherapist. The ball was at stake.
There is a huge difference between treating the sport lightly and treating it with disrespect. The game matters. Nelson, the obvious prophet, knew that.
Radialist Osmar Santos, whose communicative weapon has always been the word spoken, not writing, also knew. It was another talented communicator with unmistakable style that did not put itself above the game.
Ask any Corinthian what is the best report of the biggest title in Corinthians. Osmar Santos, in 1977, will be the correct answer.
Osmar was never Corinthian. But without giving up his signature, he knew he was able to play hearts-Corinthians, Palmeirenses, São Paulo-without Temaki.
Just with respect to the game, which is not a detail.
