My worst flaw was getting rich, provokes Milton Neves at 50 years of career

“Miltinho, say something here on that microphone.” The boy refused. “I don’t know how to say anything.”

It was the only time Milton Neves, 70, said that phrase. Because standing in front of the microphone, knowing what to say and doing it nonstop became his life for decades to come. As a radio and TV professional, it’s been 50 years.

The first experience was at Rádio Continental in Muzambinho, his birthplace (421 km from Belo Horizonte), in 1968, a game he carried on only because he heard girls in the city say that his voice was beautiful. For real, as a way of life, it all started in 1971, when I was cold and hungry in Curitiba.

Perhaps because of that time, broadcasters, journalists and advertisers have no qualms about saying how much they usually receive from advertisements for their programs. He comments on salaries he has already pocketed on Bandeirantes radio and TV and the properties he has in Brazil, New York and Florida.

The ability to sell ads, earn commissions for them and not be ashamed, on the contrary, be proud of them, is one of the aspects that make him one of the most controversial, loved or hated characters in the history of the country’s press.

“I have several faults, including the worst of them being that I got rich. Very rich”, he challenges.

The phrase is a provocation to those who criticize him, but also a personal marketing. Milton Neves became good at it. The same goes for the rustic accent that his first boss at Jovem Pan, Fernando Vieira de Mello, said he had to lose to speak into the microphone in São Paulo.

Because he has the ability to polarize like few others in radio history, the presenter’s achievements can be forgotten. His verbiage and photographic memory for football stories transformed the role of the sports shift, the one that, before him, was limited to giving other results of the round. Neves attended the 1990 World Cup in this role, something unprecedented.

He revolutionized what was the post-game in sports broadcasts in a different way than what was done by Show de Rádio, an attraction led by Estevam Sangirardi that pulled by the humor and marked a time in the São Paulo press. The proposal of Terceiro Tempo, the program that followed, was to be more journalistic. Milton has performed it for over 20 years.

He was also the forerunner in airing foreign narrations of international goals, something imitated by sports TV programs nowadays. The final minutes of the match between Colombia and Germany, at the 1990 World Cup, in the voice of Édgar Perea, from Colombian station Caracol, became a classic for Brazilian radio because of Freddy Rincón’s goal, 49 minutes into the second half. who ranked the selection.

“I always thought that if I had a Volkswagen Beetle and a house financed, it would be too good. I didn’t have great pretensions. I did three public exams for Petrobras, two university entrance exams for dentistry. I got hit by everyone. What saved me was the radio”, he says .

If there is a strategy used in social networks to deliberately say controversial things because engagement, whatever it may be, brings benefits, Milton Neves was already using it even before the internet existed. One of the most epic fights in the history of Brazilian TV was played by him and Roberto Avallone, in 1997, at the Gazeta Roundtable. The enemies made up a short time later.

The formulas used to exhaustion today by sports programs to seek entertainment, the heated discussion at any price and the jokes that irritate some fans and delight others were created by Debate Bola, an attraction that Milton commanded on TV Record in the first decade of this century. In the last edition, he made a funeral for Corinthians, then relegated to the Brazilian Nationals.

“I started this business of playing because of my kids. They said I was too sullen and Debate Bola started at noon, when the teenager came home from school, at lunchtime. It had to be something more joyful.”

The current presenter of Terceiro Tempo on TV and Rádio Bandeirantes and with participation in other programs recognizes that he is a “very bad interviewee”. It can take more than 20 minutes to answer a question because it starts traveling in time. Weaves one story into another, changes the direction of the conversation until he realizes he’s lost and asks “but what was I really talking about?”.

His prodigious memory reminds him of childhood names, the text of the first ad he read as a professional broadcaster, the roster of teams from the 1960s and 1970s and the reprimands he took from Fernando Vieira de Mello, whom he considers the greatest name in history of Brazilian radio journalism. Tell them all at once, in a matter of minutes.

The transition from radio to TV was the leap for his career in the professional and financial aspects. He was invited to present the Super Técnico in 2000, at Bandeirantes. It was a round table that brought together only coaches. He started selling one ad after another. I was already doing that on the radio, but not so many and with so much money.

The program Panico, then on Rede TV!, created a character to mock him, Merchan Neves.
He does not care. He found the imitation funny because, after all, it was free advertising. Again, he took advantage of “engagement” when the word was not used as it is today.

Pânico was the creation of Antônio Augusto Amaral de Carvalho Filho, Tutinha, owner of Jovem Pan, the station where Milton stayed for more than 20 years and from which he left by indirect termination to transfer to Bandeirantes.

“Tutinha is vindictive, but he’s very competent”, beats and blows Milton Neves, then remember to have three floors in the same building on Avenida Paulista, central São Paulo, where Pan is located.

The transfer to Band was an opportunity. From staying on the radio, being in a company with a TV station, staying in the spotlight, continuing to trade ads and earning money. But it was also the fulfillment of a prophecy.

“There was a day in Muzambinho when I went to eat kibbeh in the store of the guy who would later become my father-in-law. I told him: ‘one day I’m going to work at Bandeirantes.’ He replied that I would only go if I was going to wash the toilet. that I work at Bandeirantes and every time I go to the bathroom, I remember him,” he says.

Milton Neves interrupts the interview with leaf to go live on the station’s afternoon program.

“Ask me what you want because I didn’t prepare anything”, he warns, over the phone, from his very comfortable house in Santana do Parnaíba, to the presenters.

And so he goes for the next 10 minutes, chatting live about any topic. The opposite of the boy who “didn’t know how to say anything” at the microphone in Muzambinho.