Life
July 03, 20269:30 AM
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus.
In one of my first months in São Paulo, Brazil, a taxi driver switched on the radio. It was a soccer game, and suddenly the game’s announcer was blasting out words in Portuguese like a firehose. X passes to Y, Y runs up the wing—the pitch and speed mounting—challenge from defender A but Y dribbles past, now he’s taking a long cross—pitch and speed crescendoing—it’s headed for Z who goes for the header—peak flow—but it’s blooocked by defender B—the last syllable of the name trailing off—and it’s a corner now—the speech slowing into an analysis of the play and then mounting back up as the action continued. In 10 seconds.
The sheer pressure of the words pinned me back against my seat. The announcer was speaking faster than I’d thought humanly possible, while still making complete sense. It wasn’t just sense, it was artistry. I was familiar with English-language commentary on television—the sometimes dry, sometimes poetic British, and the strained and pedantic Americans. But television commentary is inherently more sparse than radio commentary, in order to allow the images to speak for themselves. The radio announcer, on the other hand, needs to fill everything. And in Brazil, this has been elevated to the level of art—the general population knows the narrators’ names, they all have their favorites, and sometimes they turn off the sound on the TV in order to overlay a more dynamic radio commentary. There’s even a section in São Paulo’s Museum of Football dedicated to the country’s most famous commentators.
