Lakers Have ‘Very Strange’ Day

They were the moments before the basketball season would go on, however briefly, without Chick Hearn.

Compaq Center stirred around Stu Lantz, hunched over the press table, a microphone in his face. Acquaintances wandered up, curious. Soon, there would be a Laker game, and Lantz would team with Paul Sunderland, while Hearn recovered from Wednesday’s heart surgery in a Northridge hospital room.

Lantz looked up, shook his head, and said he could not grasp what was about to happen.

“It’s very strange,” Lantz said. “It’s strange and it hasn’t even started yet. I can’t even envision it happening. The one constant with this franchise, in its existence in Los Angeles, has been Chick. Players come and go. Jerry, Elgin, Wilt, Kareem, Magic, now we’ve got Shaq, Kobe. They’ll have to go at some point in time. But the one constant through all of that has been Chick. You’ve never heard a Laker broadcast without Chick. I can’t envision what that’s going to be like.”

Back at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, not long before tipoff, Hearn continued “to recover well,” said Dr. Michael Soltero, the Laker broadcaster’s surgeon. “I asked him, if I put a microphone in his hand, could he call a game?” Soltero said.

“He told me, ‘Probably.’ I asked him if he had anything to say to his fans, and he said, ‘Just tell them, I shall return.”’

Hearn planned to watch the game with the sound turned down, maybe do a little play-by-play just for the nurses. If he continues to progress, Hearn will be allowed to go home by Sunday or Monday, Soltero said.

At about the same time, in a Houston hotel room, in the middle of a day that began in Malibu at 2:15 a.m., Sunderland counted the minutes until his ride arrived. Exhausted, he would not nap. He had voice-over work at 4 a.m. in Studio City and a flight out of LAX at 9:30 a.m.

“It was the most whirlwind experience of my professional career,” he said, and then observed, “You know, sleep and food are often overrated.”

Sunderland will do the play-by-play in Hearn’s absence, estimated by Hearn’s doctors at four to six weeks. Lantz will work beside someone other than Hearn for the first time in 15 years.

You get to know someone in 15 years, and Lantz had seen a subtle change in Hearn. When it was time for dinner at an arena, Hearn often would stay behind at his broadcast position, sorting statistics, watching warmups, chatting with the people who pushed pens and banners at him. In hindsight, Lantz figured Hearn was conserving energy.

“I’d notice the fatigue prior to the light going on,” Lantz said. “But soon as that light went on in the camera, and we’re on the air, aw man, unbelievable. The energy was there again. You couldn’t tell it. He’s a marvel. I marvel at what he does, and how he does it.

“The professional he is, he came to work. No hangnails kept Chick out of the lineup. He came to work.”

That would be the streak, of course, Hearn’s run of 3,338 consecutive games over 36 years.

“Obviously everybody is happy that the surgery was a success and he’s going to be back shortly, but the streak ends, and the streak meant a lot to him,” Lantz said. “Everybody needs something to look forward to. I think that streak, it meant so much to him. He did a great job of keeping that thing alive.

“I think that’s Chick. Chick loves what he does. He absolutely loves what he does. The off-season is too long for Chick.

“If he had it his way, I think basketball would be 12 months a year. There’d be no off-season. You would just win the championship, have a parade and go right back to training camp.

“So, when he comes back, he’s just going to start another streak. It won’t reach the proportions of this one--what, three-three-three-eight--but he’ll start another one.”

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Times staff writer Steve Springer contributed to this report from Los Angeles.