One to Remember

This month, I wrap up 40 years of covering sports in Southern California, the last 32 of them for The Times.

As retirement draws near, memories of great moments come into sharper focus:

* My first big-time assignment: Cassius Clay--now Muhammad Ali--knocking out Archie Moore at the Sports Arena in 1962.

* Jockey-sized American Gerry Lindgren blowing away Russian veterans in a memorable 10,000-meter race at the Coliseum in 1964.

* Jim Ryun beating Kip Keino at 1,500 meters and breaking Herb Elliott’s 7-year-old world record at the Coliseum in 1967.

* The Dodgers’ Bob Welch striking out the Yankees’ Reggie Jackson to end Game 2 of the 1978 World Series.

* Paul Gonzales, East Los Angeles boxer, winning a gold medal at the 1984 Olympics.

* Buster Douglas, a 47-1 shot, knocking out Mike Tyson in Tokyo in 1990.

* North Carolina’s Charlotte Smith making a three-pointer with seven-tenths of a seconds left to beat Louisiana Tech in the 1994 women’s NCAA championship game.

To be sure, a lot of great athletes.

But none of those is the most unforgettable athlete I ever covered. That distinction goes to Lanton Kame, the best athlete you never heard of.

He never made a dime from pro sports, never hired an agent, never went to arbitration and never flunked a drug test.

Today, he is a 42-year-old coach and high school science teacher in Grand Junction, Colo.

In the spring of 1977, he was a three-sport all-star at tiny Death Valley High in Shoshone, Calif.

What separated Kame from any other athlete I ever saw compete was his right arm. He has only half of it. It ends just below the elbow.

Kame was a thalidomide baby, born in 1959 to a mother who took the drug during pregnancy to ward off morning sickness. Later, it became known that the drug caused birth defects in roughly 6,000 babies born in Europe and the U.S. .

So, of course, the assumption was that there would be no sports for Lanton Ty Kame.

Wrong.

Instead, the red-headed kid became a marvelous athlete, growing to 6 feet 2, 170 pounds and with an overdeveloped left arm and a massive, powerful left hand.

Crush a beer can? Kame could crush it, then bend it in half.

He could dunk a basketball in gyms and on the asphalt court behind his house in Shoshone. I saw him do it.

He was a smooth, graceful player who had power in his game. He was fit and bronze-skinned from working summers in blazing hot lead, zinc and bentonite mines on the edge of Death Valley.

Sometimes, in a basketball game, unless you were actually looking at his half-arm, you weren’t really aware he was playing with the handicap, so naturally did he cradle and manipulate the ball.

He was an all-league tight end in football, once catching a 45-yard pass to defeat Owens Valley High. At linebacker, he intercepted two passes against Big Pine.

He was a center fielder for the baseball team and hit .250 with a one-armed swing.

So no one ever shed any tears in Shoshone for Lanton Kame, particularly not in the presence of his burly father, John Z. Kame, a onetime bit-part actor in Hollywood. When Lanton grew up in Shoshone, his father was a caretaker for an abandoned talc mine and prospected on the side for lead, silver and zinc.

Recently in Grand Junction, Lanton Kame talked movingly about his father, now 84 and battling cancer in Lewisville, Texas, where he lives with Lanton’s mother, Katherine, 71.

“My dad, bless his heart, never struck it rich,” he said. “He’s a battler, though. The doctors told us in May of 2000 he had three months left.

“I do volunteer work with amputees and kids born with missing limbs. And I can tell you, parents are huge. My dad was perfect for me, a wonderful father. If he ever caught me using my having one arm as an excuse for anything, he went ballistic. I was cut no slack.

“The hardest thing I ever had to learn--harder than sports, in fact--was to tie my shoes. My dad taught himself to do it with one hand so he could teach me. I was 8 or 9 before I could do it.

“My mom was a waitress her whole life. While I was going to Death Valley High, she worked most of that time in Las Vegas.”

My most vivid memory of my visit to Shoshone--it was April, 1977--for a Times story was listening to Kame discuss his sports career while appearing oblivious to being an arm short. The subject came up only when I raised it.

“I never had to overcome anything,” he said back then, an amazing 18-year-old responding with merely a shrug.

“It’s not like I lost my arm in an accident. I was born this way. I learned to compete in sports with what I had, just like everyone else.”

I wanted my last Times story to be about the kid I never forgot.

When I tracked him down in Colorado, he told me the profile I’d written about him 24 years ago, which ran in Times-Washington Post news service newspapers around the world as well as in The Times, elicited mail from readers for more than a year.

I asked him about his college sports career after Death Valley High and he gave me a condensed, five-minute summary. There was almost no discussion about his missing arm.

So nothing had changed.

An arm short?

Still no big deal.

Two weeks later, in the backyard of his home, he talked about sports after Death Valley High.

“I went to Victor Valley Junior College [in Victorville] and went out for football, still weighing 170 pounds. In two weeks of spring ball, I was getting killed. Seemed like everyone was bigger than me. I got a kink in my neck and I sprained my thumb. I decided to put football to rest and concentrate on basketball.

“I was a shooting guard and I started, but I was having trouble academically. Death Valley High just didn’t prepare me. I had to take algebra twice.

“After Victor Valley, I walked on at Mesa State College here [in Grand Junction] and made the team. I never started, though. That first season, I broke my thumb. When a one-armed guy breaks his thumb, that’s pretty much a career-stopper.

“It healed, but I broke it again--the second time it was a compound fracture. That was it. I never played again.”

Over four decades of covering sports, the values I held for competition slowly eroded, blurred by the drug scene, skyrocketing salaries, recruiting scandals, the incorporation of sports and prima-donna athletes. I’d lost sight of sports as a vehicle by which people can experience the joy of competition.

Kame restored me.

In the last 24 years, I often thought of him, wondering what happened to the one-armed kid from Death Valley, and if he still so passionately believed in the values of sports.

Now, in the backyard of his home, he was speaking about that again.

“Everything I’ve learned in life about taking a lot of hard knocks in stride, about going down and getting up again, about staying focused, I learned from sports,” he said.

“A few years ago, I went through a very painful divorce. I don’t know how I’d have gotten through it without that knowledge.”

Kame has four children. The oldest, daughter Lindsey, 16, is a basketball player on her way to a college scholarship.

There are two other daughters, Erin, 13, and Amy, 9, and a son, Clayton, 10, whose Little League team recently won the Colorado state championship.

“I think sports also teaches you that life is about making the right moves at the right times; that it’s just like in a game, where you make a decision to go right or left,” Kame said.

Like all of us, Lanton Kame grows older. Hopefully, like all of us, he has left a mark. His would be determination.

In the spring of 1977, before a Death Valley High assembly, he did 161 push-ups. One-armed, of course.

Why?

Because the school record was 160.