I almost didn’t work together with Márcio Guedes at TV Manchete: I left days before he was hired. We saw each other a lot on a daily basis at the clubs, but we were just two journalists who knew each other. Until the Seoul Olympics came, in 1988, and there we got closer.
I was on Jornal dos Sports, and he was on Dia, and we’d meet at the press center to send our stories to Rio de Janeiro. From then on, the friendship deepened. I was already working at TVE in Rio when Márcio participated as a guest on the Debate Esportivo program. In 2001, he was hired by the broadcaster to present the debate table called “Ataque” – a reference to the sports section with the same name in the newspaper O Dia. At the time, he invited me to continue on the program, taking care of the interactivity. Okay, now the dating routine was almost daily. And so it was until last December, when he participated in the last program, rebranded as No Mundo da Bola on TV Brasil, analyzing the World Cup final.
I wrote this to share a little of what I lived with him, because Márcio was much more than a sports commentator. He also liked and talked about cinema. He was the nice, good-natured guy, always smiling and ready to crack a joke, or ask a double-entendre question, at which he himself was the first to laugh. With large hands, he gestured a lot, teased, with refined humor. It was always fun to participate in a discussion in the newsroom, when the subject, of course, was inevitably football. His hands were also a “problem”. A Facebook follower once teased that he didn’t include punctuation in texts. And he came to complain to me. “I have a big hand, the phone keypad is small, I go over the punctuation. The guy comes to complain, seriously! Just don’t read it.”
I remember Márcio as a heartthrob. Green eyes, a big mustache that caught the eye. He was vain and liked to be compared with movie stars. Actor Tom Selleck was his favorite, but many saw him as Charles Bronson. He was up for the jokes and that’s how the challenge every Sunday began, when he asked what state the city was from where the viewer of No Mundo da Bola sent the message. He even got a booklet with the names of all the cities, as if he were going to study.
We will miss you very, very much. On my part, it’s been 35 years of friendship, of learning, of affection. It was a great honor to have shared the bench with him.
* Sergio du Bocage is host of the program No Mundo da Bola, on TV Brasil.
