El Veco: the man who did sports journalism without Google, radio without WhatsApp and TV without HD

We all waited for 8 p.m., with our backs to the Pentiums and the TV on but in mute, ready to hear your voice on PTR. If he said something definitive on the radio, it was cover the next day. And if he announced the last signing, the leadership movement that was hidden or linked live with Claudio Pizarro thanks to the Priest Martín Fernández —because Pizarro only spoke to him—, you had to record it on an old cassette player dolby stereo that today no longer gives. That audio became a trend, the video went viral and its column in El Comercio, days later, a collectible item. The person in charge was ‘El Veco’, Don Emilio Laferranderie, a journalist who never reported, counted. That he cared about observing, being a witness, collecting unpublished details and after that process, trying to understand the dreams that our sports hero placed on the pillow. Make school.

A time impossible to find today, when nothing is discussed in a bar anymore, with remote newsrooms where no one knows how to turn on a coffee maker.

Don Emilio Lafferranderie did all that from Monday to Sunday, then read García Márquez at his home in Grimaldo del Solar. He only moved audiences when they weren’t called networks. He only viralized news 20 years ago, when Twitter was not yet invented.

That is why this book about him is so important.

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Alonso Cantuarias is 29 years old and in 2010, when ‘El Veco’ passed away, he was in the third cycle of university. He listened to The Show of ‘El Veco’ on a local radio with the attention that one has with the seer who reads the future to you. “When you start practicing sports journalism, you look for references,” he says now. For me, ‘El Veco’ was ”. Cantuarias wanted to be a reporter and he was clear that the Uruguayan chronicler could be one of his models, perfect for a medium where the one who shouts more and reads less wins. In those months he entered the Dechalaca.com portal to work and he precisely had to write a note about his departure, which occurred on February 6, 2010. El Grafico de Argentina, where ‘El Veco’ was editor-in-chief, thus summed up the news : “Synonymous with good saying, gentle gentleman and delightful scribe, the world of sports journalism has just lost Emilio Lafferranderie, one of the men who built the best story in El Gráfico.”

So, Alonso Cantuarias decided it. And if one day I had to publish a book, dive into someone’s biography, retrieve it from memory, it was going to be about ‘El Veco’. Only one trigger was missing to help him.

—How was the process of convincing the family?

-Hard. Emilio Jr. was my professor of Psychological Processes in college, but whenever they asked him about his father, he never answered, never delved into it. The family was very reserved in the information when he passed away, basically, because of the way in which ‘El Veco’ always looked at his profession. In fact, only from close contacts I was able to learn that the story of the enmity between ‘El Veco’ and Pocho Rospigliosi was more of a third party issue. There was disgust, but not of the magnitude that is rumored. (N. de R. Pocho was the symbol sports journalist between 70 and 0 and who recruited him for Ovación, in 1982-. With Emilio Jr. we spent many afternoons at his house and in the end I was able to convince him to access the family archive of unpublished photos , which I have been able to include in the book and which also explain the type of journalist he was.

Friend, applauded and solemn. Acid, cultured and ironic. Egocentric, perfectionist and faithful. “El Veco, the man who played storytelling” (Editorial UPC, 2018), opens a door to rediscover the most influential sports journalist in the country between 1980 and 2000. And he did it so well that since 1982 they never let him go From Peru. “Impossible that it was inconsequential,” says the first line of the book. How he liked his chronicles to be.

THE BOOK