Ernesto Cherquis Bialo, master journalist, dies aged 85 | OneFootball

From the historic magazine El Gráfico, over the course of 30 years (8 as director), his pen left behind unforgettable texts forever. A career he completed with radio, TV, and outstanding articles in Infobae. Without a doubt, one of the greats of Argentine sports journalism has left us.

The great and renowned journalist Ernesto Cherquis Bialo today wrote the final period of his life’s page at 9:56 p.m. He was 85 years old and suffered from leukemia.

Last year, he had to be admitted to the Alemán Hospital in Buenos Aires because of this illness. The seriousness of his condition prompted public requests for blood donors and generated a wave of support and prayers among colleagues and followers.

But that time, his strength and spirit worked a miracle. He himself recounted the words his doctor told him: “‘I don’t have good news. The bone marrow isn’t working. Do what you have to do. Say goodbye to whoever you need to say goodbye to, sign the papers you need to sign.’”

However, Cherquis himself managed to pull through for a few more months. And on that occasion, he explained what ultimately got the better of him: “I caught a chill that turned into bronchospasm, which became pneumonia and ended up, well, with, with bilateral pneumonia. The bilateral pneumonia caused me to have absolutely no defenses, and the lack of defenses made my bone marrow stop working. And when my bone marrow stopped working, my body reacted with leukemia.” This time, the miracle did not happen. And it’s time to say goodbye.

Journalism

March 1963. A young Ernesto Cherquis Bialo arrives at Azopardo 579 (corner of México, near San Telmo), the polished bronze plaque read Editorial Atlántida, and as soon as he enters, at the front desk, Ranea, the doorman, always attentive and dressed in his gray flannel uniform, told him: “Take the elevator to the third floor and wait in the hall; Mr. Fontanarrosa will send for you.” Carlos Fontanarrosa ran El Gráfico, the leading sports magazine not only in the country but on the continent. The written medium where any sports journalist dreamed of seeing their byline.

“Fontanarrosa made me feel so comfortable in that first interview, treated so warmly that it broke down my formal speech about future commitment. In person, he was as pleasant as he was on TV when he hosted Polémica en el Fútbol on Channel 13,” Cherquis recalled in one of his memorable Sunday columns in Infobae. “The conversation lasted just a few minutes. Just enough to know that the magazine was selling 78,000 copies out of the historic 165,000, that they needed to recover them, that it was in a process of change open to new ideas, that it wasn’t made for friends or, much less, for enemies, that heroes and villains had to coexist in its pages, and that the most important thing, Law 1 let’s say, was respect for its readers. Impossible not to understand that forever.”

Piri García, the magazine’s coordinator, laid out the situation for him, how things worked: “You’re on trial for 28 days; if you do well, you’ll stay on as a contributor—the lowest union category—and you’ll get paid 1,500 pesos (a little less than 10 dollars at the time) per article.” And he added: “The same goes for if you stay to proofread on Sundays (referring to style or fact-checking all the texts by each author) or if you have to come in at dawn to check the ‘glass’,” the final review with the pages laid out on transparent sheets that allowed you to see headlines, texts, photos, and illustrations before sending everything to print.

More Porteño than Uruguayan

Tango lover (a regular for years at Viejo Almacén or Caño 14), football fan (a San Lorenzo fanatic), and of course, a boxing enthusiast (Luna Park was his second home, and Tito Lectoure’s office, a great friend, was always open to him), he was as porteño as the Obelisk, except for his ID. His parents—Polish and Russian immigrants—arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, where Ernesto was born on September 30, 1940. Montevideo’s Yi street would become just a memory when the family decided to move to Buenos Aires, where he lived in several tenement houses (Corrientes and Yatay, and later Potosí and Rawson), studied, and at the same time joined Club Desarrollo as a boxer; there he trained with the great Luis Ángel Firpo, already retired.

After a brief internship at Clarín in 1962, a year later he arrived at El Gráfico for that initial interview with Fontanarrosa. Through its pages, the magazine founded by Constancio C. Vigil in 1919 would, over the years, become the true official history of sport. With a lineage of historic writers who shaped sports narrative, starting with football, auto racing, and boxing—the three most popular disciplines—until, in the mid-70s, with the Vilas boom, tennis began to regularly appear on its covers. In fact, until the 80s, when television imposed its dominance every Sunday, appearing on the cover of El Gráfico meant you had made it. A dream, a goal, an achievement in itself.

He covered countless events. But above all, the signature of Cherquis Bialo is synonymous with boxing. In 1968, the popular Peñaflor wine began sponsoring boxing broadcasts on Radio Splendid. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he liked to say in Marlon Brando’s The Godfather style. For that reason, until his definitive return to the magazine, for years he signed as Robinson (the pseudonym he used out of admiration for Ray Sugar Robinson) since the magazine required exclusivity.

Asked by El País of Uruguay, this is how he summarized Argentine boxing: “Carlos Monzón was the greatest world champion Argentina ever had, clearly. Ringo Bonavena was a titan in an era of huge world champions like you don’t see anymore in the heavyweight division. Víctor Galíndez was a great, with an unforgettable epic against Richie Kates in South Africa. Santos Laciar, Horacio Accavallo were great too, as was Uby Sacco, although he lasted as long as a match flame because his life wasn’t easy. Boxing was the number two sport, in competition with auto racing. And the covers of El Gráfico reflected that.”

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.