MATIAS PRATS, famed for his trademark dark glasses and pencil moustache, was a household name in Spain for 40 years thanks to his memorable radio and TV commentaries on the top football matches and bullfights. His career peaked during the Franco dictatorship, a time when football and corridas were the opium of the masses.
His name is forever linked to the famous goal by Telmo Zarra, with which Spain knocked England out of the World Cup in Brazil, in 1950. Thanks to Prats’s jubilant rhetoric, the phrase “perfidious Albion” entered the national lexicon. “Zarra put the ball in the net and I put it in the head of the Spanish people,” Prats later recalled.
He was the last reporter to interview the legendary bullfighter, Manolete, before he died in the ring in 1947 in Linares, and he boasted an encyclopaedic knowledge of bulls and bullfighters.
“It seemed that all the genealogical trees of bullfighting fitted in his head,” the newspaper El Mundo said, describing Prats as a natural storyteller who relished one particular gaffe in which he got his sports mixed up. During one bullfight, the animal jumped over a barrier and out of the ring. “Ladies and gentlemen, the bull just went out of bounds,” Prats broadcast.
He was born in an Andalucian village near Córdoba and from an early age he wanted to be a journalist, entertaining his family with vivid accounts of the day-to-day adventures of his four brothers. Prats joined Spanish National Radio’s office in Málaga shortly after the Civil War. He had fought on the Francoist side and it was because of an eye injury caused by a rebounding bullet that he always wore sunglasses.
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Prats suppressed his soft Andalucian accent and became one of the Franco regime’s symbols, with nearly 30 years’ service in No-Do (an abbreviation of Noticiarios y Documentales, meaning “News and Documentaries”).
With the death of Franco in 1975 and the transition to democracy, Prats drew back from the microphone, conscious of his association with the former regime. But his popularity overcame any risk of popular resentment and he was regularly prevailed upon to commentate on major soccer matches. His last was for Antena 3, the private TV channel, in 1995 when he was 82, when he commentated on the European Cup games.
Matias Prats, sports commentator, was born in Villa del Rio, Córdoba, on December 4, 1913. He died in Madrid on September 8, 2004, aged 90.