Long before his succesful career in the music industry, the legendary mellow, smooth, romantic Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias was, while attending law school in Madrid in the early sixties, for a short period goalkeeper for the Real Madrid soccer team.

In 1963, his career as a football athlete was cut short after a car accident. Iglesias started playing the guitar soon after he had been hospitalised. Still recovering from his injuries a nurse gave him a guitar, and Julio Iglesias began writing songs.

“I had a car accident, very, very strong car accident,” remembers Iglesias. “I had what they call paraparexia, which is not a paraplegic. It’s a compression in the cord, in the sense of the neck … my spinal cord, and I was very, very ill for three years.”
“Doctors thought that I would never walk again. But slowly, I started to recover. And to increase dexterity in my hands, I began to play the guitar.”

The soccer images of Julio Iglesias playing with a ball at the Estadio de Real Madrid are part of a presentation clip for his 1968 contribution to the Eurovision Contest Song Festival. This is the complete clip together with the song.

Thou Shalt Be Social :

Hide Sites

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under sporting musicians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.