The life of Enrique Macaya Márquez can be told in ties, advanced positions, world.
Also in Telebeam orders, passport stamps, reports of murder plates, but never in outbursts.
He will be remembered as a
Lord of football
, unchanging, impassive, perhaps even cold.
One of those gentlemen who doesn't even slip an accidental curse word or cry in front of a World Cup.
The rare bird that did not break at the Lusail stadium did not want to beat anyone, but it beat the trio of majesties, Pelé, Maradona, Messi.
He has more World Cups than the sum of those who played each.
Not for nothing
in Doha international journalists were looking for him to see if he really existed.
The man who has been gray-haired for half a century was not a hologram that drew the air of Qatar.
Flesh and blood, dressed as he was 64 years ago, in his first World Cup
on site
, he received a FIFA distinction for his perfect attendance at
17 World Cups, since 1958.
The British newspaper
The Guardian
highlights him as
the Argentine of the "
hat trick, the Legendary Broadcaster,
Argentina's Voice of football
".
The journalist Dave Hytner, the main soccer correspondent in that medium, was captivated by his 17 adventures and dedicated an anthology article to him.
The same thing happened in domino effect with Hungarians, Croatians, Belgians, Danes, Koreans.
Youth, divine treasure.
At 23 he covered his first World Cup, Sweden 1958.
The body has memory.
In the month in which he rattled with his soul through the streets of the Qatari capital, he felt the past project itself, as if he could see himself disembarking as a rookie, with his young 23 years at the World Cup in Sweden.
After a huge "bird" (the DC-7) landed half a dozen times before its destination, he had to continue his journey by train, bus and ferry.
"More than 30 hours. On the flight I discovered that we were not going to Hamburg, we were going to Frankfurt. A lady taught me the phonetics to request a train ticket from Frankfurt to Hamburg," she recalls.
This time, the journey was more generous.
Travel the world at 88
-Many would have gotten off a trip of that magnitude at 88 years of age. Did his family try to keep him at any point?
-No.
I wasn't going to stop going crazy.
They had already called me FIFA, Conmebol, it was not in my mind not to go.
And I was accompanied by my son Gabriel.
-Did you travel with the faith of a champion?
-No, with a measured faith.
I had learned my lesson from the first World Cup, in which I traveled to cover Radio Belgrano.
They passed us over in what became known as "the disaster in Sweden", with the Argentine team eliminated in the first round (a 6-1 defeat of Czechoslovakia).
From that moment
I understood that anything can happen
.
With the ball with his portrait that they gave him in Qatar.
(Ferdinand of the Order).
-Which was the best of the 17 World Cups you witnessed?
-It is almost impossible to determine that by the quality of individualities in each one that can respond or not to the collective.
If it has to do with sentimental interests, I will say that I choose Qatar.
-But he did not shed a tear the second he understood that Argentina had become champion...
-No.
-Couldn't you leave your impartiality even at that moment?
-I take refuge in analysis, in observation.
I leave the emotion for the familiar only.
In Mexico, as soon as Argentina was consecrated and I worked alongside José María Muñoz, I remember that South American colleagues came to hug us, to thank us.
The first thing I told them is: But I didn't play!
In Qatar I was focused and attracted by the Messi phenomenon, this National Team that made Messi a leader, could take that previous matter or keep the debt, but ended up rounding off, crowning a task.
-A year ago, when I imagined Qatar 2022, I said that I had never been able to speak with Messi. Did you finally settle the matter?
-No.
Amazing.
I went to give a report one night where the National Team was concentrating, but I couldn't talk to him.
I would be interested in asking you many things,
why, for example, do you stop suddenly
, that habit, whether it is to rest, to find the perfect place.
There are concepts that I would like to hear from him, I would like him to teach me to see it in another way.
The "Señor Fútbol de Primera" and an award from Ronaldo, a former Brazilian star.
(Photo: FIFA)
For the one who got into the Guinness, not everything was a bed of roses heading to West Asia:
when he made a stopover in Madrid, they told him that due to some omission he did not have access to Qatar
and he saw his trip in jeopardy.
"The production of Tournaments solved the issue right away," he laughs at the scare that could have clouded everything.
For a month, her neighborhood in Doha was surreal, with neighboring journalists at every window.
The company he works for rented a building, "a kind of modern tenancy" that made him think about the simplicity of
Directorio y Carabobo, that Flores from the 1930s where he grew up
with four siblings and his parents, Ricarda Romualda and Ernesto.
Useless to argue with him.
Perhaps taken by nostalgia for that world he inhabited through the eyes of a child, he turned around with the conviction that Alfredo Di Stéfano, his former neighbor, is still "the best of all."
Birthday in Qatar
He did not have a conventional birthday celebration.
On November 20, he celebrated his 88th in the opening World Cup match, Qatar-Ecuador.
That day also marked another amazing anniversary,
80 years of work
, since she made her debut in the world of work as a newsboy in a position in Flores.
At 15 she was already an administrator at Radio El Mundo.
The one who played as a centrojás in the Nacional de Flores and in the Evita tournaments, is proud of everything he achieved with a Mercantile Expert title.
He knows that for one generation he will always be
First Class Soccer
and for others the witness of unthinkable cycles: from black and white TV to color and from there to the pixels capable of denouncing the most imperceptible acne of a player;
from the first interview with Diego Maradona in his house in La Paternal, to that death in solitude, still incomprehensible.
Moved these days by the farewell to Pelé, whom he treated on so many occasions when he landed in Argentina with Santos, he is in charge of clarifying that he was never united by a friendship, nor was it the case with Maradona.
For something
Cacho Fontana saddled him with the invention of the "usteo"
: "I avoid the link so that it is not misunderstood. It can lead to confusion, when there is friendship involved,
a journalist's opinion can seem like treason. This is better by far: I have absolute independence."
A DirecTV commentator, he does not think of updating that book (
My vision of football
) that he wrote almost 30 years ago, at the height of Telebeam, when VAR was not even a premonition of science fiction.
Sweden 1958, Chile 1962, England 1966, Mexico 1970, Germany 1974, Argentina 1978, Spain 1982, Mexico 1986, Italy 1990, USA 1994, France 1998, Japan and Korea 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014, Russia 2018. ..
His signature in each World Cup is already a record that it is difficult for any colleague to beat.
"Marche a Telebeam
, Macaya", they yell at him as a nod to the one who popularized that grandfather from the Var.
"The Telebeam was an invention that we made, rewinding, image analysis, it required more human effort. I spent hours looking back at the images before each program. It was less precise," he laughs.
"Look, I have a chair at the University of Palermo: I always tell students that they have to learn technology, not just know the soccer regulations in depth. If you put a crooked camera, it changes everything."
Macaya and José María Muñoz (RTA historical archive)
Will we ever return to that football without pre-Var interruptions?
I think there is no going back.
I think so because I think about the guys who make technology.
I was fortunate to work in times when dedication to the regulations was needed and when making a link from the Banfield field was an epic.
Now the images can lie, but I am in favor of technology, which modern football requires.
-He is not an absolutist nostalgic....
-No.
The more technology, the better for the verdict.
You can't deny it.
The problem is the interpretation.
I want a well-applied, adult technology that is closer to the truth.
The question is the approximation to the truth.
-Do you fantasize with 2026, with even enlarging the record?
-I don't even think.
It is better to live than to think too much.
WD
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