Passing of Beloved Broadcaster Means the Sound of L.A. Basketball Won’t Be the Same

Your radio was probably different. Mine was black with a large, white rotary tuner with little notches to help make the speed-spin dial from KFWB to KFI.

Your memories are probably different too, which was the beauty of it, no definitive television images to clutter the strokes Laker announcer Chick Hearn painted in your imagination.

“No image,” announcer Bob Costas says, “imposed on you by television or by tape.”

Hearn would broadcast thousands of games on television, yet that’s not where his legend took root. He belonged to an ever-shrinking pantheon of announcers whose fabulously formed words are best recalled flowing blindly out of a box.

Guglielmo Marconi invented radio, but these guys reinvented it.

It’s no accident Vin Scully’s most elegant dialogue with us, maybe baseball’s most memorable piece of masterpiece theater, was his description of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965.

Two-and-two to Harvey Kuenn--one strike away. Sandy into his windup, here’s the pitch. Swung on and missed, a perfect game!

Only 29,139 actually attended the game at Dodger Stadium. There was no Fox Television broadcast, no wrap-up on Fox Regional Report and certainly no raucous round-table discussion on “Best Damn Sports Show Period.”

Yet, somehow, thanks to one man at a mike, the game is forever etched.

Hearn had that hold on Laker fans long before television games were included in your basic cable package.

Most of us heard, not saw, Jerry West’s last-second, 63-footer to tie Game 3 of the 1970 NBA Finals against the New York Knicks, yet that moment is as imprinted in my mind as Magic Johnson’s baby sky-hook against the Boston Celtics.

Hearn calling West’s shot made your mind press the “record” button: picture a school kid pacing the kitchen with time running out on his Lakers, staring into his black-and-white radio, praying for a miracle and actually getting it!

It was Hearn who released the ball from West’s hands, Hearn who orchestrated the crescendo when West’s miracle shot went in.

Bring back that radio daze.

“The mystique was greater,” Costas said Monday of legends like Hearn and Scully. “The sense of romance, the innocence was greater. A guy was the voice of the team. There weren’t multiple outlets carrying games with a battalion of announcers. There weren’t all these places to get highlight packages. Their voice, their description, their point of view, that was baseball or basketball to you.”

It’s easy to cry “sap” when you hear elders gush about olden days, those pre-television Depression-era times when families gathered around a giant living room radio and “watched” the Jack Benny Show.

Yet, it’s fair to say that a lot of baby-boomers shared this kind of intimate relationship with their sports announcers.

It was different then, maybe even better.

That era is almost gone, likely never to return. Ray Scott, Lindsey Nelson and Jack Buck are deceased. Ernie Harwell is on a farewell tour after 42 years with the Detroit Tigers, and Chick Hearn is gone.

Who, other than Scully, is left?

These are, undeniably, different times. Today’s announcers are largely handpicked, spoon-fed and bred for television. They speak to a different demographic.

In 1991, the Tigers had the gall to fire Harwell, the team’s legendary announcer, only to face a public outcry that led to Harwell’s return.

The problem is most owners today think pictures really are worth a thousand words. Broadcasters don’t grow up with their teams anymore, and we don’t grow up with them.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported 70 of today’s baseball announcers have fewer than nine years experience with their current team.

Incredibly, some of today’s announcers are banished to radio. Even Vin Scully is a television-only guy, broadcasting via radio only on simulcasts.

“Vin Scully not on the radio?” Curt Smith, author of the book “Voices of the Game,” bemoans, “is like not letting Picasso paint.”

A recent Washington Times writer mused the New York Yankees “seemingly have more announcers than players.”

Chick Hearn was the best basketball announcer ever because he learned and worked his trade on a blank audio canvas. It was by osmosis and necessity that he shaped his delivery to the fast-paced NBA game. He and Scully brilliantly massaged their skills to fit their specific sports.

“Radio is intimate,” Curt Smith said Monday. “It’s portable. It’s daily. It’s ubiquitous. We become attached to the voices of the game on radio in a way that’s literally impossible on television.

“Lindsey Nelson said of radio that the voice is your eyes and ears. You are the star, the scriptwriter, the producer, director and salesman. On television, Lindsey says, he provides captions.”

Hearn remained a star on television because he never changed his rapid-fire act. He simply turned his broadcasts into radio-television simulcasts. Even though you could now see the Lakers on television, Hearn called games as though all his listeners were shut-ins at a rest home for the blind.

Chick faced a different challenge from Scully.

“Hearn was never faced with filling dead air,” Smith said. “The problem with basketball on radio is not having too much time but having too little. You have to have an economy of language, you have to have a dramatic voice, you have to very succinctly and plainly draw for your audience what is occurring as it occurs. And Chick Hearn was superb. He was the whole package, the complete goods.”

The devil, as they say, was in the details. Hearn was a master of description, from the way he noted Elgin Baylor’s nervous twitch at the free-throw line to explaining how a guard “hippity-hopped” the dribble up court. You always knew the score with Hearn, how large the court was, “94-feet of hardwood,” how large the crowd was, “capacity throng of 17,505,” and what kind of pass a player threw, “alley-oop.”

Hearn set his music to a backdrop that was at times desperate and apocalyptic: “Not even the Lord and all his disciples could have stopped the Lakers tonight.”

When a colleague asked Harwell why he announced the score of a ball game so often, Harwell reportedly told him, “Look, we all hope they’re listening to the whole ballgame, but most of them are not.”

Costas says this attention to detail was born of another era.

“I’ve heard tapes of Red Barber in the 1930s and ‘40s,” Costas said, “where he tells you there’s a line single to left-center and he tells you how many times it bounced before the center fielder picked it up. You needed that then.”

Costas says the great ones--Hearn, Scully, Harwell, Buck, Scott--announced the game as if television didn’t exist.

“Today, even the very good announcers, will very rarely describe a guy’s stance or the peculiarities of a guy’s windup,” Costas said, “because they’ve been subconsciously influenced by television even though they’re on the radio.”

Joe Buck, the announcing son of late Jack Buck, the legendary St. Louis Cardinal broadcaster, admits he was born of a different ilk.

“Some of the guys coming up don’t have the same objectives as the older radio guys did, which is to paint the full picture,” Buck recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I don’t think the younger guys--and I include myself in this--do as good a job as those guys did.”

Few would argue with Smith, whose book chronicled sports’ top announcers, when he says Hearn was a cut above in his field.

“You know in the movie ‘The Natural,’ where Roy Hobbs says he wanted to be referred to as the best there ever was?” Smith asks. “Well, Chick Hearn was the best there ever was in my view at doing basketball. Just as Ray Scott was the Roy Hobbs of pro football, and Vin Scully the Roy Hobbs of baseball, that was Chick Hearn in basketball.”

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“I wanted him to go on forever.” Al Michaels, ABC broadcaster

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“He left us a champion.” Dick Enberg, CBS broadcaster

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“There’s never going to be another Chick Hearn.” Magic Johnson