Rebenstorf Died One Month From His Dream Game

For John Rebenstorf, life began at 40. It seemed.

Rebenstorf was 40 when, after years of beating the bushes, he finally got the job he always dreamed about. It was a year ago, after one season as the football commentator, that he became the radio play-by-play voice of UCLA football and basketball.

He was looking forward to his second season of football play-by-play with great anticipation, particularly to the Bruins’ opener against Cal State Fullerton on Sept. 12.

This game figures to be about as competitive as the Dream Team vs. Angola. But Rebenstorf didn’t care.

To him, this was a dream match. That’s because he came to UCLA from Fullerton, where he was a one-man show. He bought the rights, sold the commercials, served as engineer, did the play-by-play and swept out the broadcast booth.

He developed close ties to the school and maintained them after moving on to UCLA.

Wednesday, exactly one month before his “big game,” John Rebenstorf was laid to rest.

Rebenstorf had a history of heart problems. He suffered his first heart attack at 28.

In the fall of 1985, at 35, he had triple bypass surgery.

The surgery was voluntary. He probably wouldn’t have undergone the operation had he not lost the Cal State Fullerton rights that year.

A smooth operator from the Midwest came in and offered the school $8,000 for the rights, twice what Rebenstorf was paying.

However, the new guy went belly up nine games into the football season.

And Rebenstorf, telling friends the time off and subsequent surgery may have saved his life, went back to work.

The chest pains Rebenstorf felt the morning of Aug. 6 were severe. He was admitted to the the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Anaheim, treated and transferred by ambulance to Humana Hospital in Anaheim, where he underwent extensive tests.

He then went to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles to have bypass surgery Saturday morning. After surgery, he gave his wife Linda a thumbs-up sign and told her he loved her.

Linda Rebenstorf, a nurse, went home to Fullerton confident that her husband had come through the surgery fine. She was awakened about 1 a.m. and told to come back to the hospital immediately.

At 1:30 a.m., John Rebenstorf, 41, died.

Executives of the American Network Group, a national radio syndicator that now owns the UCLA broadcasting rights, will meet with KMPC General Manager Bill Ward, program director Len Weiner and UCLA Athletic Director Peter Dalis on Monday.

The meeting has been planned for weeks, supposedly for routine business. But now a successor for Rebenstorf must be found.

The odds are it will be Chris Roberts, one of Rebenstorf’s best friends.

Rebenstorf and Roberts announced Cal Poly Pomona baseball together in the late 1970s. In 1980, Rebenstorf acquired the rights to Cal State Long Beach football and basketball. He still had the rights in 1981, when he also acquired the Fullerton rights.

Rebenstorf couldn’t do both, so he hired Roberts to handle Long Beach play-by-play. Rebenstorf later gave up the Long Beach rights, but Roberts continued to work Long Beach football and basketball. Roberts announced Long Beach football for 10 years, until the school dropped the sport last year, and was still the voice of Long Beach basketball last season.

Roberts is now employed by KMPC, which no longer owns the UCLA rights but maintains considerable control as the Bruins’ flagship station.

Other names will be thrown into the hat, such as Geoff Witcher, also a KMPC employee, but Roberts, a solid play-by-play man, seems to be the logical choice.

KMPC has solved its problem of what to do with its morning drive-time show. Jim Lampley has agreed to move from afternoons to mornings, beginning Monday.

Lampley will drop the “Let’s Get Serious” tag, and go with something like “Let’s Get Going,” or “Let’s Get Up.”

Although Lampley was given a new two-year contract that will pay an average of $400,000 a year, Lampley said money was not the main reason he accepted the early-morning hours.

“This is a plus for my personal life,” he said. “I’ll be home most the the day, allowing me to devote more time to my marriage and our two children.”

Lampley and his wife Bree Walker have a son, Aaron, 1, and also living in the Lampley household is Andrea, 4, Walker’s daughter by a previous marriage.

With Lampley accepting the morning job at KMPC, Joe McDonnell and Doug Krikorian will become permanent hosts in the afternoon.

Brian Golden, who has been working with Roberts, has been penciled in as one of the two midday hosts, with a permanent partner to be named later.

The Times’ Thomas Bonk, who is the top candidate for the position, will work with Golden next week.

Fred Wallin has pretty much taken himself out of the running for a daytime job. Wallin appears to be stuck on the graveyard shift until he loses the chip on his shoulder.

TV-Radio Notes

Ratings for the Olympic Games dropped 20% in the second week, indicating that viewers might have been turned off by NBC’s “plausibly live” format, in which the network pretended the coverage was live when it wasn’t. But Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports president, doesn’t see it that way. “I think the live-tape issue or the plausibly live issues are really press issues and not issues of the audience,” Ebersol told Associated Press. Talk about losing touch. . . . About NBC tape-delaying the men’s basketball final in the West, here’s the official line from an NBC spokesman: “In the East, we had four hours of taped coverage before the live game. If we had shown the game live in the West, we would have had to go from tape to live and back to tape again. It also would have forced us to produce two entirely different shows at the same time.” Why all the whining? All NBC needed to do was start its Olympic coverage three hours earlier in the West. . . . Olympic fever hasn’t hit Atlanta. The site of the 1996 Summer Olympics, which ranked 24th among the 25 largest U.S. cities in television viewing of the Barcelona Games, averaged a 13.6 prime-time Nielsen rating, 22% below the national average of 17.5. Portland had the highest average, 22.5. Chicago got a 21.6, Los Angeles a 21.0 and New York an 18.5.

TBS offers six more hours of PGA coverage today, beginning at 9 a.m. TBS will also have two hours of early coverage Saturday and Sunday, beginning at 8 a.m. CBS’ coverage starts at 10:30 a.m. both days. . . . There will be lots of exhibition football on television this weekend, highlighted by Rams vs. Raiders on Channel 9 live at 7 p.m. Saturday. . . . Because this is only exhibition football, having Raider executive assistant Al LoCasale serve as the commentator, as he has for years, is no big deal. At least he knows the personnel. But having him hawk season tickets between plays, as he did last Saturday during the San Francisco exhibition, is really bush. . . . After its telecast of the Cleveland Browns-New York Giants exhibition Saturday night, CBS will show Randy Cross’ interview with Joe Montana, who admits he tried to come back too early from his elbow injury and also says he believes the 49ers at one time put him on the trading block.

Speaking of quarterbacks, 11 of the best, including the Rams’ Jim Everett, test their skills in the taped Upper Deck NFL Quarterback Challenge on NBC’s “SportsWorld” Saturday at 1 p.m., after the Denver Broncos-Miami Dolphins exhibition in Berlin. Also on “SportsWorld”: the first two days of live coverage of the Pro Beach Volleyball competition from Seal Beach and the taped NFL’s Fastest Man competition. . . . A moving half-hour special, “Training for Life: California Special Olympics,” was shown by Prime Ticket last Sunday but will be repeated tonight at 8:30 and Sunday at 7:30 a.m. The hosts are Steve Garvey, Christina Ferrare and Bill Macdonald.