Pere Escobar: "A soccer player came with his father to smash my face in."

BarcelonaFor nearly four decades, he has been one of the faces and voices of sports journalism in Catalonia. And he's been in the print media for a few years now. Pere Escobar is an endless source of stories. He tells it like it is, but he claims to be a snob. And he maintains a keen enough eye to see what has been lost in his field since communications directors have become established in football.

You retired this week. What did you do on your first day as a pensioner?

— Fighting with the Generalitat (Catalan government)! Literally! I've had the same phone number for twenty years and I wanted to keep it. Well, it was Kafkaesque and I still haven't resolved it, but at least I got an in-person appointment after a Vodafone operator called me and asked for the account number. Do you think I'm going to give it to you over the phone without even seeing that you're actually from the company? No.

Are you afraid that the phone will stop ringing?

— No.

Do you want it to stop ringing, maybe?

— No, it's just that the phone hadn't been ringing for a while. I've been through that before. Life is like that. In fact, I don't want the phone to ring at all, because it would mean I don't have any problems with any of my children.

You have five children. Five boys. Were you looking for the girl and insisting?

— No, no, it's just been like this. I got married, had two kids, and then I got married again and had three more. Man, I would have loved a girl, of course I would, but I'm in love with my kids.

I've heard you explain that you fell into that profession by accident, because you didn't have a clear calling. Put like that, it seems like everything just happened, like children.

— Exactly. Well, the process of having children is more fun, right? [Laughs]. Until I was ten, I lived in the Raval district, and when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd say a psychiatrist—don't ask me why.

Of course I ask why. Do you think it was to understand yourself or to understand others?

— Understanding others. Understanding things, understanding people. Helping them. But psychiatry back then was five years of medicine and another two years of specialty... and I've never been very studious. And I liked sports. I'd done a lot of them, always badly. I was an orange-green belt in judo, for example. So, I opted for journalism, which is a kind of psychiatry or psychology: trying to understand who's next to you, knowing their stories, finding data... I went for sports because politics interested me, but with my way of doing things, it would have lasted three days. Because if I have it here [points to forehead] I have it here [points to mouth].

How do you get to Catalunya Ràdio?

— I had been in the business for several yearsSport, covering Catalan football, and I worked hard but earned little. I was already twenty-five, and at that time, you were already thinking about leaving home and starting a family. And, of course, earning 18,000 pesetas a month... difficult. One day, while chatting with Eduard Berraondo, who was sitting at the table opposite me, I told him I was desperate and was considering folding and going to work at the bank. He told me not to be stupid and told me that the Generalitat (Catalan government) was opening some radio stations. Lluís Canut auditioned me, I got into the first one, and my salary jumped to 45,000 pesetas, with much reduced hours.

Almost 40 years at Corpo. What has been the sweetest period?

— I'll call you, one from the radio and one from the television. In radio, from when I joined in 1983 until 1991. That was a crazy time. We were all very young and we made it super fun. I remember that they didn't know us, so, to get interviews, I sometimes said we were Radio Nacional de Catalunya, hoping they'd confuse us with Radio Nacional de España, which had more standing back then. It was an extraordinary time. You were with the players, you talked to them, they got mad at you, you got mad at them... it was a different world. And on television, the 100x100 footballThis Sunday, the program I recorded on Monday, my last day of work, will air. They paid me a tribute, and it was wonderful. It was like being transported back to 1992: I enjoyed it like a baby.

And any bitter moments? You always transmit energy, but there have certainly been some disappointments.

— More than one, and more than two. Like when I decide to fold theSport Because I feel mistreated by someone who wasn't even the director, but who is above me. Or when I left the radio station. I didn't want to leave.

And then?

— My wife didn't work, we had a mortgage with 18% interest, and my first child was born: the situation was financially unsustainable. There were many colleagues in radio who were doing more. I asked to do it too, but it wasn't possible, and so I had no choice but to jump into television just to survive. I accepted a very generous offer the television company had made me, which almost doubled my salary, and I left. Reluctantly, because my home was on the radio. But I'm a lucky guy, and I went to a place where I found people who loved me and who I love a lot, and a very special mind, which opened the world to me.

Have you thought about your style? What do you think makes you unique?

— I don't know! It's cool, if you want to use modern words. I'm transparent, even if it causes me a lot of problems. I'm not a trench person, and, well, life is a trench these days. You're either with me or against me. Not me.

Who would you say has been the angriest with you?

— Man, a soccer player came with his father to smash my face in at the newspaper. I don't want to get the name wrong; I think his name was Caamaño, and besides, he's now a neighborhood resident. He was six feet tall and a beast. In a Third Division match, in a flash of genius, he kicked a player on the ground in the head: he needed seventeen stitches behind his ear. I wrote that he was crazy and that a guy like that couldn't play soccer. Anyway, one day the editorial secretary called me and told me there was a man asking for me, that his father was with him, and that they were coming to smash my face in. Luckily, we were able to talk about it.

And what about Barça's environment?

— Well, Barça hung a banner on me that said Perico Escobar. When I was reporting on TV3, one day I went to report a game—I don't remember which game it was—and I found that. I was just saying what I believed, and I had said that things were done wrong.

Sports journalism has changed a lot in recent decades. Players are now entrenched by the club, for example.

— It was different before, yes. I understand that life changes, and when I think about it, I say to myself, bah, you're a fucking grouch and you're already doing what our grandparents did. But objectively, I think it was much better before. Much better for the journalist and, ultimately, much better for the people, because we work for the people.

In what sense?

— Everything has been left in the hands of the communications heads. Some have been teammates and others had the air of being so, but they're the Gestapo of football. I'm very sorry because I have friends who are, and I love them madly, but it is what it is. Before, you had confidence. Maybe you found out that this player was drunk in that nightclub, or that the Urbana team had stopped him on Muntaner Street, and you didn't say anything. Rightly or wrongly, but you confined it to the private sphere. It's true that you can't project a certain image to represent the team. But look at Romario: he slept in training! Now, what did Cruyff say to me? "As long as he goes out on the field and scores two goals, what should I say to him?" That was the way to do it. If the player had a problem, he could say it, and if you had a problem, you could talk to the player. Not now. When I did The Midnight Club On the radio, we only had two or three interviews a year with a Barça player. Two or three a year!

Will you be following the matches now?

— Not at the moment. I'm hypersaturated. Now I say this, and on August 15th, I imagine I'll be incredibly busy, because I've been doing it all my life.

So I don't have to picture you on the couch with the volume turned down and streaming everything.

— No, there's no danger of that. If I'm watching Girona, I'll turn down the TV, sure, but because I'll turn on Catalunya Ràdio to listen to Solà, who I think has the best broadcast in the world.

You've played top-flight football... and not so top-flight football.

— I started out playing Catalan football. With this guy who wanted to beat me up, or those guys from Santa Coloma, who also wanted to kill me. If I were in charge of a newspaper or a radio station, that would be the first thing everyone who came in would do: I'd give them a ride there because that forces you to pick up the phone, it forces you to call the president. And the president isn't always a sensible guy...

I meant that you not only made these more modest teams at the beginning of your career, but also at other times, which at some point have punished you.

— That was because I repeatedly complained about not having a contract, on TV.

In any case, you've always enjoyed it, I understand.

— The last thing I'm doing on TV is Guardiola's first season. Then I'm going to do The Midnight Club And, five years later, when I finish, I take on the Real Madrid broadcasts and then I find myself the third, fourth, or fifth voice of Girona, but I don't mind because they're all important, and in the end I have a blast. And that's when they ask me if I want to do the Barça women's show. If you don't have the perspective of the times, you'd say it's great now. But four or five years ago it wasn't so great: there was a bit of a risk involved. Some people would say to me: "Man, you mean? You've done Champions League finals..." Nothing. The only risk is that, at my age, I have to adapt my vocabulary and be careful because I can screw up at any moment.

Has it happened to you?

— Well, there are people who get angry because I call the players "girls." But how the hell do you expect me to tell them when I'm 65 and I see a 19-year-old on the field? There's only one who's older than my oldest son. In any case, I've always been one to not ask permission, but if I make a mistake, I'm also one to apologize.

When is the last time you remember saying sorry?

— Once I joked that it didn't go well with a player who was Black, and I hadn't indexed him in my head as Black. I was wrong and I deeply regretted it. Or once during a Champions League match, I said that a player, also Black, was fat, and I was told during the broadcast that people were complaining. I apologized to anyone who might have been offended, but I added that this girl was as fat as if she'd eaten her little sister, and that was undignified in a competition like this. But I said this about Suárez when he had a little belly, and about Ronaldinho when he had a little belly. Now I can say it about this girl because it's not always necessary to hold her against a grain of salt.

Since we're comparing then and now, there were many sports rights before. Does it make sense to maintain such a large sports department when the rights have gone en masse to paid rights?

— Yes, of course it makes sense. What Dani Barcón, who's the current head of sports, is doing is enough to ruin his fortune.

What's wrong then?

— I was fortunate that Paco Escribano was the director of TV3 when I joined, and, despite the lack of criteria in choosing me, they believed in sports. We had it all and did everything. And the general director, Joan Majó, also had a clear vision and mission: to make Catalan a strong language. If you wanted to see Dallas, by your holy balls you had to go on TV3 and watch it in Catalan.

Has this been lost?

— This isn't the case anymore. Before, if you wanted to watch football, you looked at me. But because I was the one lucky enough to be sitting there at the time. You had to watch it in Catalan, and that's precisely why television and radio were made. I remember, for example, a huge argument with Coll, from the duo Tip y Coll, because he didn't want the earmuffs. And I told him I wasn't going to switch to Spanish. Some people tell me I was his Catalan teacher. Oh! I'm a son of Raval! I get motion sickness and everything. Well, we had all that strength.

And now?

— Look, the last thing I tried to do on TV3, but I didn't get it, was a Goal by goal soccer miserable.

Sorry?

— Let me explain, because the word might not be appropriate, but we understand each other. There's a lot of football you don't see anywhere. Why don't we bring in a guy who knows Moroccan football and watch Moroccan goals and have him explain to us that Raja Casablanca is leading and that other guy is last? The rights to the highlights would cost four cents. Of course, a guy from Morocco who speaks Catalan has to explain it. Because more than 50% of the immigrants we have in Catalonia are Moroccan. And do the same with Ecuador. Or with Romania. An analyst from each country, and they speak Catalan, so that viewers of those origins can tune into TV3. I would have been very excited, but I was left without the possibility of doing it. This would be to be clear about the objective.

You've spent the bulk of your career at the Corporation, but there's a three-year hiatus at Ona Catalana. Why did you leave public security?

— Ona Catalana and RAC1 launched at the same time. Things have gone as they have, but the big bet was on Ona Catalana. He ended up in jail and completely ruined a wonderful project, which included Josep Cuní and many other people.

I know it's not very Catalan to talk about it, but do you remember the figure?

— Well, look, I'll put it in pesetas: it was 25 million pesetas per season, less taxes and all that. But leaving had more to do with something else. I'm convinced that whoever takes the spotlight on a program should be, at the very least, a co-director. Because the one who'll get the beating will be him. And I'd been getting beatings like the one on the banner for two years, without deciding who came or stopped coming to the show. Goal by goalI had a pretty rough year, and then the offer came. It was wonderful.

A fleeting wonder.

— They wanted to move really fast. There was a feeling of being a nouveau riche, you know? We had more repeat employees than anyone else, delegations to I don't know how many positions when we were still starting out... They took out a loan for a whopping millions of pesetas without going through the board of directors, and, well, the police ended up coming to the manager's office one day, and it all ended.

Well, we're done too. Once you sort out the phone issue, they tell me your retirement goal will be to lower your handicap to pitch and putt...

— [Laughs]. Well, whether I go down or not, it's all the same. But going to play is fine, because it will force me to move and walk. That's what worries me most right now. pitch and putt Social Security should prescribe it. Really. You go to a field and see a group of eight or ten grandparents, so broken that you think you'll have to call an ambulance at any moment, and there they are: they can't stand their fate, and their fate can't stand them. If they have time, they'll have a beer and a game of dominoes afterward. And they do that maybe once, twice, or, if they can, three times a week. Do you know what it's like for these people?

I haven't tried it, but if Social Security subsidizes it...

— It's not elitist, right? What's elitist is the structure of the gulf. The same people who ruled are in charge as were in charge a hundred years ago. But it's not expensive. Then you go to the club and buy balls recovered from the water.

The cycle of life!

— Well look, I can play pitch and putt with my kids. And I can't play anything else with them because they destroy me, but I still win here. Of the five, only one has beaten me once, two or three years ago. And he's still making a living off of it, the bastard! [Laughs]