With endangered style, Jota Júnior does not want to retire – 03/22/2023 – Sport

José Franciscangelis Júnior talks the same way he narrates football. The tone is relaxed, unfussy, and authentic. It is the certainty of those who have space elsewhere in the sports press. But it is also the calm of those who were already waiting for the dismissal.

Jota Júnior, 74, knows he has his audience, but this one is no longer at Grupo Globo, which fired him last week after 24 years at the station. People who follow him and like his way of narrating, an endangered style on Brazilian TV.

He’s an announcer who doesn’t scream with desperation, as if he wants to draw attention to himself and leave the game in the background. No catchphrases, because he sees football broadcasting as a journalistic event, not entertainment. With emotion only where there really is emotion.

Jota also narrates without being concerned with Twitter messages, a social network he is not part of, by the way.

“We realize that this change has been happening. But there’s one thing: I wouldn’t change just to fit in this new style of narration. I’ve never been asked to change either”, he says, in an interview with Sheet by phone. He was at his home in Americana (115 km from São Paulo), where he is resting for a few days.

It will be a short break because Jota makes it clear right away: he won’t stop. He wants to continue in the same profession he started in the early 1970s. He worked on radio stations in Americana and Campinas until he arrived at Gazeta, in the capital, in 1976. That was when he entered television, with sporadic jobs.

He settled on the platform from 1983 onwards, at Bandeirantes. He left in 1999 to join SporTV, from Grupo Globo.

“I’ve been receiving a lot of affection, polls and possibilities here and there. I’m looking forward to it. I’m still hungover from the layoff, but hoping that something might come up, whether on web radio, web TV, YouTube, traditional TV. There’s a lot of things,” he speculates.

Jota Júnior had already noticed narrating against the tide. His style and his way of seeing how a football broadcast should be done is not the same as the current standard.

“Broadcasters are very concerned about the young audience. But if there is a young audience, there is another that is in the 50s or 60s who have a preference for narrations that come from another, older school. my work. It’s a type of narration, of communication, different from mine, from what I understand television narration to be. That’s always been my style and I think I have an audience, otherwise I wouldn’t be on the air all this time”, he opines.

Not that the dismissal was a surprise. He realized which way the wind was blowing when he saw that he was no longer scheduled for the main games in the country. It was as if he had been demoted. But he does not denote any grievance about it. He sees it as a right of Globo’s management. He believes there was also an age issue.

“I realized that at any moment I could be discarded. It was being very little used. For some time now, it had been relegated in the scales of big clubs, of classics. It was scheduled for smaller matches, not that they were not important. They were a lot. But I was coming from a different rhythm of use”, he emphasizes.

The thought was immediate: they won’t hold me much longer.

“I was expecting this and getting ready.”

In a post on an old blog, where he wrote little, Jota commented on requests to talk about football, comment on club rivalries and big matches. He replied that he had other concerns, such as the issue of education in the country and the water crisis that São Paulo was experiencing at the time. His thoughts were on bigger things.

It would be more logical, for those who want to appear, to surf the wave of any football controversy. It’s not your style. He is even reticent about the urgent need for broadcasters to read messages from viewers, as if they were part of the broadcast.

“What we hear a lot is that we need to give voice to those who follow our work. Interactivity in life has always existed and it’s really cool. I like it and always have. The problem I see, sometimes, is that there is a very great at prioritizing interactivity. Especially on the radio. The narration is in the background. That bothers me a little. Everyone is looking for the click, the likes to give visualization. The show itself is in the background.”

Because of this, he didn’t last long on Twitter. He stayed for a while, but decided to close his account when he noticed the level of comments.

“I have Instagram, I have Facebook. respect. But I started sifting through it and saw that there was a lot of hate and resentment”, he notes.

Without surrendering to fashion and true to who he is, Jota Júnior, when he returns to narrate, will be the same as always. Sober, without exaggeration and giving prominence to the football game, not himself.