After Basketball
Santori's popularity kept growing after he retired from the game. In 1982, he joined Manolo Rivera Morales as television broadcasters during WAPA-TV's transmissions of BSN games. He remained in that position until 1985, when he accepted a contract to coach the Gallitos de Isabela team. Apart from his television job, he started writing a daily column (during the BSN season) for El Nuevo Dia newspaper, where he predicted winners of BSN basketball games. In 1984, and taking into consideration his knowledge of the sport of tennis, WAPA-TV designed him as commentator of the Martina Navratilova-Gigi Fernández tennis game, one of the most widely seen sports events in Puerto Rican television history. He also held a daily basketball column at WAPA-TV's news show, Noticentro 4, during the BSN season. His job at Noticentro 4, just like his job at El Nuevo Dia, was to predict winners of BSN basketball games, but he occasionally talked about other things, such as the time he predicted Héctor Camacho would outpoint Edwin Rosario in their boxing fight, although Santori was a self declared non-boxing fan. Camacho did outpoint Rosario in their bout. He also had a five minute show named "Las guiritas de Fufi" ("Fufi's Lay-ups"), where he taught youngsters basketball fundamentals.
After leaving the Gallitos de Isabela, Santori was reinstated to WAPA-TV's basketball broadcast team. He left to coach the national basketball team for a short period of time. After his stint as the national team's coach was over, he predicted, in 1992, that Puerto Rico's team would beat the original Dream Team in Barcelona.
Santori was an active member of the Puerto Rico Chess Federation and became a relatively strong player in tournaments held in Puerto Rico. Santori is the father of María Eugenia Santori, who won a bronce medal in the Chess Olympiad representing the Puerto Rico National Chess Team.
In 2006, Santori was honored with an award recognizing his career as a basketball player and sportscaster.
Read more about this topic: Fufi Santori
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)