NBA Finals: Lakers vs. Bulls : Still the Fastest Gums in the West : After 31 Years, Chick Hearn Not Ready to Put His Career in the Refrigerator

Don’t expect legendary Chick Hearn, seventysomething, to retire anytime soon.

Hearn, the only play-by-play announcer the Lakers have had since they came to Los Angeles from Minneapolis in 1960, is no more ready to put the vocal cords out to pasture than he is to reveal his true age.

And why should he retire? He loves the Lakers, and most of their fans love him.

“When Magic (Johnson) retires, maybe that’s when I’ll retire, too,” Hearn said from Chicago.

Don’t bet on it, though. Chick without the Lakers, and vice versa, is hard to imagine.

Game 3 of the NBA finals at the Forum tonight, on NBC-TV but also on KLAC and the Laker radio network, will be Hearn’s 2,433th consecutive broadcast, meaning he’ll hit 2,500 next season.

Hearn hasn’t missed a game since 1965. It may be the most incredible streak in sports.

No telling when it will end.

Instead of thinking about retirement, or maybe cutting back, Hearn is taking on new ventures. It hasn’t been made public yet, but NBC plans to have Hearn covering basketball on the pay-per-view portion of its 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games coverage.

Wonder what his role at the 1996 Olympics will be?

Anyone who thinks Hearn might be slipping should have heard him on the radio during Game 1 of this series. He was as sharp as ever.

There were the usual Chickisms. “No harm, no foul, no blood, no ambulance,” he screamed when a foul wasn’t called.

But most impressive was that the fastest voice in the NBA was in high gear.

Late in the first quarter, James Worthy threw an errant pass to Sam Perkins--bam, bam and the ball went out of bounds.

Hearn was quick enough to call the play as it happened. “Worthy bounces a pass off the forehead of Perkins,” he said.

Over the years, the players in the NBA have gotten quicker, and so has Hearn.

But if there have been times lately when he has seemed on edge, when he has made mistakes he shouldn’t have, when he has snapped at partner Stu Lantz, you have to be understanding.

He has had to endure the memory of what happened a year ago.

It was on May 24, nine days after last season’s playoffs had ended for the Lakers, that Hearn and his wife, Marge, lost their 41-year-old daughter, Samantha, to viral pneumonia.

And as Hearn recalled the other day, it was on June 1, 1972, that they lost their son, Gary, at 27.

“Marge and I are decent people,” Hearn said not long after Samantha’s death, his voice cracking. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand why these things happen.”

Hearn can be moody, he can snap at people. He admits he has a crusty exterior. But, he also admits, he’s mush on the inside.

At Samantha’s graveside service, Hearn approached a friend who has two daughters. “Always remember,” he said, the tears welling in his eyes as he hugged the friend and his wife, “those two girls of yours are the most precious things in the world. Never forget that.”

The Hearns still mourn Samantha.

“Marge is with me here in Chicago, and it’s a good thing she is,” Hearn said before Game 2. “This has been a particularly tough time for her.”

And for Chick, too.

“I’m able to put Samantha out of my mind for a few hours and call a game,” he said, “but then Marge and I cry all the way home.”

In the autumn of their lives, the Hearns have no offspring, no grandchildren. But they have the Lakers, they have their beloved poodles, Oliver Twist and Lord Ashley, and, of course, they have each other.

This is a love story that has been going on since the two met at East Aurora High in Illinois. They were married in August 1940.

“Marge is a saint,” Hearn said. “I don’t know what I would have done without her. She is definitely the woman behind this man.

“She is the most giving person I’ve ever known. If your arm is hurt, Marge is the person you’d call to take you to the hospital. If you needed money, she’d give you her last dime.”

In the summer of 1988, Marge was attacked by a Great Dane in the Hearns’ Encino neighborhood and suffered a broken collarbone. Her arm was put in a cast and propped up in front of her.

About 10 days later, she was scheduled to make a trip with Samantha to Switzerland, to see one of the world’s leading clinics dealing with anorexia, an eating disorder that had afflicted Samantha since her early 20s, when she was a model.

Marge could have postponed the trip, but fearing the difficulty in making another appointment, insisted on making the long flight with her arm in the air.

“It just shows you the kind of person she is,” Hearn said.

Another side to Hearn is his penchant for practical jokes and his boundless supply of quick quips.

If your clothes aren’t quite color-coordinated, look out. He’ll spot a victim and say something such as, “I see you’ve been to a Holiday Inn. It looks like you made your jacket out of one of their bedspreads.”

No one is safe. A few years ago, Laker owner Jerry Buss presented Hearn with tickets for a cruise. The tickets, however, were a cut below first cabin.

When someone asked where he and Marge were going on the cruise, Hearn said, “Oh, about as far as Marge can row.”

Then there’s the sensitive side to Hearn as well.

Last season, a fan, after working up his nerve, approached Hearn at the Forum and handed him a piece of paper with a name on it.

“Chick,” the fan said hesitantly, “my mother is in her 70s and she loves basketball. She loves you. Could you mention her name on the air.”

Said Hearn: “Of course.”

The fan went away and, for the benefit of a few people who were watching, Hearn mumbled something like, “Yeah, fat chance,” and ripped up the piece of paper. It got a good laugh.

But as soon as everyone went away, Hearn dug the pieces out of a trash can, put them together and read the name on the air.

“I thought, my God, what have I done?” Hearn recalled on the phone from Chicago. “I can’t read everyone’s name on the air, but in this case I was glad I did. I got several nice thank-you notes from those people.”

Chick Hearn, just an old softie.

“You can’t please everybody all the time, but you can please a majority,” he said.

Francis Dayle Hearn was born in the little town of Buda, Ill., one of two sons of an Irishman who worked for the railroad. The family moved to Aurora, near Chicago, in 1925, and Fran Hearn, as he was then known, played basketball at East Aurora High. He might have gone to college on an athletic scholarship, except that his father was seriously injured in an auto accident, and young Hearn was forced to get a job and forget college.

When Hearn was 19, he was involved in a car wreck and was put in a body cast to heal broken ribs. But soon afterward, he had to have the cast removed for an emergency appendectomy. He then developed pneumonia. The prognosis was so bleak at one point that he was given last rites.

Hearn became known as Chick at 22, when some teammates on an AAU basketball team in Aurora turned the tables and played a practical joke on him. They handed Hearn a shoe box, but instead of new shoes, it contained a dead chicken, covered with bugs.

“I got it all over me; it was awful,” Hearn said.

His teammates started calling him Chicken, which eventually was shortened to Chick.

Stationed in the Philippines during World War II, Hearn did some work for Armed Forces Radio, and when he was discharged in 1946, he decided to give broadcasting a shot in Aurora.

He failed to get the first job he applied for and began selling pharmaceuticals. But the same station manager who turned him down the first time came back and offered him $5 to announce the second game of a high school basketball doubleheader.

Hearn worked the game but told the station manager to keep his $5. He wanted a full-time job, and got it--at $47 a week. He did a little bit of everything--disc jockey, religious programming, news, sports and weather.

Hearn recalls his father’s reaction when he told him he was giving up the lucrative pharmaceutical business to go into radio. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Do you think radio is really here to stay?’ ” Hearn said.

By 1950, Hearn was announcing Bradley University basketball for a station in Peoria, Ill., and a year later he came to Los Angeles to work for CBS Radio and announce USC football, an assignment that lasted until 1963, although he also did some USC play-by-play for Channel 5 in the mid-1970s.

In his early L.A. days, he also worked for the NBC network and the local NBC station.

When Bob Short brought the Lakers to town, they had no television or radio contracts. But in March 1961, before the Lakers’ first playoff game in St. Louis, Short called Hearn at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and persuaded him to fly to St. Louis and broadcast the game on radio.

“The broadcast went well,” Hearn said. “It was a great game (the Lakers won, 122-118, but lost the series). I guess they liked my work because I’m still stuck with the job.”

It’s hard to imagine it any other way.