Before Jose was “On Setanta Sports.” Some History.

By: Laurie | April 16th, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDBUCbohk_o

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Ever wonder where the Jose Mourinho puppet character from “I’m on Setanta Sports” came from? And whether he has the real Jose’s approval?

The answer to the second question is “yes.” And the first?

Before Setanta’s Jose Mourinho was a puppet, he was a figment of Mario Rosenstock’s imagination.

Rosenstock is the manically creative mind behind the series. And he didn’t start with Jose. He’s been doing this kind of thing for almost ten years on an Irish radio sketch series “Gift Grub.”

The NYTimes’ Goal.com blog recently wrote an article about Mario and the series, including some history.

“I had done sketches on José and they found their way into his dressing room to the extent that he contacted me himself and asked me to go to Stamford Bridge to perform for the team,” Rosenstock said by telephone from Dublin. “I had to sing as José and did an interview as José. Only halfway through did I realize that half of the players didn’t speak English and no idea what I was doing. They were just looking at me.”

So who is Rosenstock? From a TimesOnline article form 2006:

In person, Rosenstock is intense, driven and an irrepressible talker. As well as being able to do the voices, he is also possessed of the ambition and sense of self-worth that every celebrity, footballer or politician needs to make it to the top. Rosenstock understands what makes these people tick because, in his own head, he is one of their number. …

“I was not doing well in Newpark (his previous school). I was a tennis freak and missing a lot of school, and my parents wanted to put manners on me. But I was obsessed with the rivalry between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe and wanted to do nothing else with my life except become a tennis pro. But I abandoned my dream in 1985, when I was under-15 and an under-12 girl from England came over here and beat me. That’s when I realised I needed something else. But I was a jock, I had hardly read any books. Then, I saw my brother in a school play, and I saw everyone in the audience looking at him, and I thought, ‘I gotta do that’.”

He eventually moved from acting into writing for the “Ian Dempsey Breakfast Show” in Ireland. That’s where the Jose Mourinho character was born in a series of radio sketches like the one above, which was made back in Mourinho’s Chelsea days.

And the rest is footballing history.