Issue: Winter 2002

Man with a Gooooooooal!

In just two months, Andres Cantor ’85 jetted to Korea for the draw for the World Cup soccer tournament, then on to Zurich for a meeting of FIFA, international soccer’s governing body. He flew to Los Angeles for an appearance at a promotional party, to Honduras for a family gathering, and to New York for a meeting of his radio syndication company. The frantic schedule reflects Cantor’s position in the soccer world: not only as the game’s top announcer, but also as one of its rising entrepreneurs.

Cantor called the 1990, 1994 and 1998 World Cups in Spanish and the 2000 Olympic matches in English. His fame has a lot to do with his trademark “Gooooooooal!” cry after every score. Growing up in Argentina, he heard such calls over the radio.

“I don’t want to claim I invented it,” he says, speaking from his office in Miami. “I just popularized it here in the United States. It’s an expression of joy. You’re pumped up and you’re going with the flow of the game, and whenever a goal is scored, you’re going with an outburst of emotion.”

How long he yells, Cantor says, depends on what type of goal it is. “A beautiful play and an important goal – a game winner in the last minute – usually merit a longer shout than the last goal in a 5-0 blowout,” he says.

Announcing the three World Cups, says Cantor, “was certainly my greatest thrill. The World Cup is like 64 Super Bowls in one month.” Calling the matches from the Olympics for NBC – his first English-language broadcast – was another big break. “I felt quite comfortable,” he says.

Today he broadcasts between 100 and 150 matches a year. Last summer, he did play-by-play for the World Cup in Japan and Korea. His radio syndication company bought rights to the event and transmitted Cantor’s call to more than 100 stations.

Andres Cantor was 13 when his family left Argentina for California. Graduating from San Marino High, he entered USC in 1980 to study journalism, all the while writing for Spanish-language magazines. After graduation, he continued his magazine work. Cantor had never been inside a TV studio before he auditioned successfully in 1987 for a job as a soccer announcer for the Spanish-language TV network, Univision. He worked out of the company’s Laguna Niguel offices until 1991, and followed Univision to its current headquarters in Miami. In 2000, Cantor moved over to Spanish-language rival Telemundo, also based in Florida.

Though his broadcasting career is the stuff of fantasy, to Cantor it’s still second-best. “If I could have played [soccer] professionally, that would have been my first choice,” he says. “But unfortunately I wasn’t good enough. So I decided the next best thing was calling games and being around the players.”

– Gary Libman