Column: Writer-director-pitcher Garry Marshall was the ultimate Hollywood hyphenate
Measure your life in laughs — not money or memberships or vacation condos. Measure it in laughs, the most unsung sabermetric of them all.
That’s what Garry Marshall did. A talented softball player, a fan of the Raiders and the Rams, he was the eternal wise guy who grew up playing ball in the streets of the Bronx and eventually on diamonds across Los Angeles.
Marshall died Tuesday, or so they’d like us to believe. When you measure a life in laughs, you’re an eternal kid. In movies, in reruns, even within the milky twilight of the scruffy softball fields he loved, Marshall will run the bases forever.
Tip your cap, kid. Take a bow.
Has anyone ever made more Americans smile than Garry Marshall? Did anyone ever have a better and more varied career? You’d maybe say Orson Welles, or Steven Spielberg, or Woody Allen, or maybe even Derek Jeter, but when you’re counting up punchlines and feel-good endings, Marshall tops them all.
He had more hits than Pete Rose, this guy. “Happy Days.” “Mork & Mindy.” “Laverne & Shirley.” “Pretty Woman.” With a career record like that, we’ll even forgive him for “Beaches.”
Then there was “The Odd Couple,” which he adapted from the Neil Simon play about a slob sportswriter and his fussy, meticulous roommate. In fact, almost all of his biggest successes involved some version of that — the odd-couple dynamic, two opposites attracting. The naive hooker who schools the slick businessman. The space alien who falls for the young Denver woman.
Did anyone ever have more fun in this town than Garry Marshall?
Has anyone ever made more Americans smile than Garry Marshall?
No, I don’t mean on a soundstage. I mean on the playing fields. Marshall was famous for closing down a movie or TV shoot so he could go off to pitch for one of his many softball teams.
Like so many of us, he needed sports to relax.
“He knew more about the game than anyone else,” Robert Sheahen, his most recent manager, recalled Wednesday. “He was always more competitive than anyone else. But he always deferred to me.”
He said Marshall had led the Indians of the 55-plus senior league to four championships since 2009. As crafty on the mound as he was behind a camera, Marshall would continually outsmart hitters, Sheahen said.
His manager recalled how he wouldn’t give a decent pitch to the one through five batters in the lineup, because he knew their egos wouldn’t allow them to settle for a walk. When he got lower in the order, Marshall would throw straight strikes.
How many teams did he play for over the years? No one quite knows. There were the Pacemakers in the North Hollywood League and other teams in the Burbank League — one team on Saturday, another on Sunday.
In recent years, he’s played solely for the Indians in the senior league.
“It’s a nice league too,” he once told The Times. “If you get a double, they let you take a nap.”
In truth, it’s more more intense than that, a 16-team league that competes hard on city of L.A. fields. Besides winning a lot, the Indians also distinguished themselves by opening the team to female players.
“At one point, we had three women on the team, in a league with very few women,” teammate Caren Blumfield said Wednesday.
Marshall’s motto — professionally and otherwise: Never retire, never quit.
His last time on the mound, a complete-game victory June 23, came just before he fell ill. He was 6-1 on the season. Seems this master of feel-good endings had the best possible one himself. The city should quickly name a field in his honor, in time for the November memorial.
“He was the best clutch player of any ability on any team I’ve ever played with,” said Sheahen, an attorney. “If you were in a playoff game, you wanted him at the plate.
“The guy was a titan in this town and you’d never know it,” Sheahen notes. “He’d go out of his way to say hello to people he met once.”
Marshall was also known for writing charity checks. He once wrote a significant one to support a struggling youth league on the far side of town, explaining, “Sports is that extra dream.”
No, kid, you know what that extra dream is? It’s a long life like yours, marked by both success and class.
He was a loyal teammate and a better man, who measured life in laughs.
Twitter: @erskinetimes
Get our high school sports newsletter
Prep Rally is devoted to the SoCal high school sports experience, bringing you scores, stories and a behind-the-scenes look at what makes prep sports so popular.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
