Now This Is a Streak Worth Talking About

In streakdom, we’ve had Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripken, Oklahoma winning 47 consecutive football games and John Wooden’s basketball teams winning 47 and then 88 straight games.

But let’s see someone top this: When the post-lockout NBA season begins, Chick Hearn will broadcast his 3,057th consecutive Laker game.

Imagine it--three thousand fifty-seven in a row. Not once in all that time did he sprain his larynx? Not once did he catch tonsillitis? What about laryngitis? Or strep throat? Didn’t his car ever break down on the way to a game? Not once?

On Nov. 21, 1965, Hearn went to a football game in Fayetteville, Ark. Bad weather moved in, stranding him at the airport. He missed a Laker game that night. That’s the last time he’s failed to show up for work.

He’s coming up on his 39th season as the voice of the Lakers, this 80-something guy who has enriched our sports language with such as “yo-yoing up and down,” “dribble-drives,” and “faked into the popcorn machine.”

A year ago today, Laker Executive Vice President Jerry West summed it up for most in a halftime salute to Hearn on the night marking his 3,000th straight broadcast when he said, “Players can always be replaced, Chick, but we’ll never be able to replace you.”

Also on this date: In 1985, Lenny Wilkens became the first in the NBA to have played and coached in 1,000 games. . . . In 1972, at 36, Sandy Koufax became the youngest player ever elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. . . . In 1952, the PGA voted to allow blacks to compete in its tournaments. . . . In 1931, college basketball moved into big arenas with a tripleheader at Madison Square Garden: Columbia-Fordham, Manhattan-NYU and St. John’s-CCNY.