L.A. Fans Will Miss One of Their Real Staples

St. Peter swings the pearly gates open left to right across your radio dial. Francis Dayle Hearn strides toward the entrance of this infinite-by-infinite hunk of paradise. He asks, “Did I make the team, big fella?”

“Are you kidding, my good man?” the saint replies. “You could call it with Braille.”

John Thompson, Chino

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More than 20 years ago, my father and I agreed that to be a sports fan in Los Angeles was to be a fortunate person. What other city could boast of men of the quality of Jim Murray, Chick Hearn and Vin Scully?

My old man is gone now, and so are Murray and Chick. I will continue to treasure every chance I have to hear Vinnie. With him still calling games, I am still a kid.

Ron Davis, San Pedro

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Forget the championship, if there’s no banner raised for Chick Hearn come opening night at Staples this fall, then something definitely isn’t kosher in Lakerdom.

Chris R. Johnson, Hawthorne

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You tend to notice the best ones in absentia, and here in sporting America in the new century, the best ones we notice, often as not, never even suit up and play the game. What they do, these guys, at their very best, is make us want to watch it, to listen to it just a little bit longer.

Missing someone like Chick Hearn, whatever else gets factored into it, is fundamentally about liking the way he does his work. Oh, people long ago understood Chick was special, but after a while, he was renowned more for consistently showing up to work than for his actual game calls, and that’s a real pity. The man could announce a game.

Brian Goldenfeld, Woodland Hills

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I was born in Southern California and have lived here all my life, and although I was too young to understand what “The day the music died” meant, I was not too young to go to bed and hide under the covers with my trusty transistor radio listening to Chick or Vin Scully calling the play-by-play to my young life.

I felt I knew Rudy LaRusso, Mel Counts, Jerry, Elgin and all the rest personally through Chick’s magical accounts. I often fell asleep while the shot was forever circling the hoop in a roll-a-drome. And although I am deeply saddened by his passing I count my blessings that I was able to grow up in a time that it was the man who made the game, not his shoes or endorsements.

Jim Bonning, Oxnard

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Chick always used to humbly request, that for the games that were carried on television by another broadcaster, to tune in to the radio show for his play by play. He never needed to ask; for me, this was always a foregone conclusion.

David Jerrard Givens, Santa Monica

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In the past, comparisons were frequently made between Vin Scully and Chick Hearn, owing to their shared longevity, excellence and commitment.

Vin is a gracious, meticulous, lyrical, thoroughly enjoyable and devoted professional, who is unfortunately married to a sport with an apparent death wish.

But Chick Hearn had the good fortune to be immersed in an incredibly exciting sport, and was simply the best, most accurate, most effective, most evocative and most exciting play-by-play announcer in any sport that I personally have encountered in my nearly 60 years on the planet.

By all appearances, Chick was also a vibrant and caring human being whose energy and optimism infused those he encountered with what is sometimes trivially referred to as “the indomitable human spirit.” There was nothing trivial about Chick. Southern California was a better place for having him around all these decades.

If you can’t bear to see a grown man cry, avoid my house for a while. God bless you, Chick, and thank you.

Cay Sehnert, South Pasadena

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Chick Hearn was more than the voice of the Lakers. He was their heart, their soul.

Having worked with Chick on the Laker pregame program for KHJ and KCAL-TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I saw day to day what immeasurable, almost superhuman passion he had for the job.

In the late ‘80s it was one of my career gifts to host the Laker pregame show and produce a one-hour tribute to Chick when he had broadcast his then-astonishing 2,000th consecutive Laker game.

What moved me most was the love he had for the Laker family while he carried personal pain in his own family. Last year when he underwent critical heart surgery, and then recovered from a broken hip, I believe the thing that kept Chick Hearn alive was his joy at the microphone.

No one, not Jerry West, Wilt, Elgin, Magic, Shaq or Kobe, no one meant more to this franchise than Francis Hearn. The microphone will be passed to someone else. Surely that person will be competent. But the character and the conscience of this team will have been changed forever. We all loved you, Chick. I don’t say it often, but you were better than the game itself.

Roy Firestone, ESPN

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I moved to Oregon 16 years ago. When people ask me if I miss Southern California I always say there are only two things that I miss. It’s not the beaches, mountains, Disneyland, or even the weather. Although all of those things are nice.

What I really miss are Chick Hearn and Vin Scully. Listening to Chick call a game, you just knew he enjoyed it as a fan. He called it as he saw it and not as a “homer.” Los Angeles, you have lost what I consider to be one of your real major attractions.

Joseph Olguin, Eugene, Ore.

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When I departed Los Angeles four years ago, there were few things I missed more than listening to Chick Hearn. I am sometimes blessed with the pleasant weather, I occasionally see the Lakers on TV, I can even duplicate a decent burrito, but there was always one thing missing in my life come basketball season--hearing Chick Hearn.

Lendoan Wright, Charleston, S.C.

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Chick Hearn was without peer as a basketball announcer and gave us many brilliant descriptions of memorable games. But my favorite memory of Chick was not of a game, but of a pregame.

Sometime in the 1980s, when he was working with Keith Erickson, the Lakers were playing a road game. The poor woman singing the national anthem was just awful. After she finished there was a long, awkward pause. Then Chick, ever the truthful reporter, finally said, “My, she hit some notes in there.” After another long awkward pause Erickson added, “She sure did, Chick.”

It’s difficult to accept after all these years that the door is closed and the light is out.

Paul R. Graves, Lake Orion, Mich.

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Sixteen years ago I was a bartender at a Marina del Rey restaurant, attending broadcasting school. One Tuesday afternoon Chick and his wife Marge came into an empty bar and chose to sit right in front of me. As a fan and aspiring sports broadcaster I was in heaven.

Chick gave me a good 45 minutes of his time in conversation, and ultimately offered me only one piece of advice--be yourself.

That advice has stuck with me over the course of my life. I later received a phone call at home from Chick giving me a telephone number of a man who gave me an opportunity to announce the NBA Summer Pro League at Loyola Marymount. A few days after the call I received a pair of tickets to see the Lakers play Portland.

What a wonderful man Chick Hearn was. He touched my life in a very special way, and, of course, taught me everything I know about the game of basketball. He did it all by simply being himself.

Bob Powell, Fallbrook

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When I was on the college paper at Loyola Marymount in the late ‘70s I had to take the stats and roster to Chick before a UNLV/LMU game at Vegas. Chick was announcing the games on Channel 9. I approached him along with a girlfriend of one of the LMU players who was also a big Chick fan. The stats were on hard-to-read mimeographed paper. When I gave them to him he yelled at me: “What the *&%$ is this? You people want to go big time and you give me this @#$%? I can’t read this @#$%!”

The girl and I cringed. We sat by Chick and printed over the names and stats by hand. When we were finished he softened a bit, signed an autograph without looking up, and mumbled, “Thanks.”

Mike Amodei, South Bend, Ind.

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In 1978 I was seated next to Chick on a flight from LAX to Denver. He asked why I was going there. I told him that my son was graduating that day from the University of Colorado and I had flown from an Asian city, where I had been on business, to be present at the graduation. However, because of plane delays it was apparent that I would miss the graduation ceremony, but I might arrive in time for the party to follow. Chick commiserated with me.

When I deplaned, an attendant gave me a package, saying it was compliments of Mr. Hearn. It contained a bottle of champagne with a note that it was for the graduation party! I have never forgotten this thoughtful act from a man who had never met me before and probably never expected to see me again. From what I read, this was a typical Chick Hearn gesture.

Harold Lian, Los Angeles

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The last Laker game I attended was in the playoffs this year when Robert Horry made the incredible game-winning shot. But the highlight for me was something else.

Before the game my friend and I were in the customer service office at Staples. My friend is handicapped and we were exchanging our tickets for wheelchair accessible seats. I glanced over and Chick Hearn was sitting on a sofa. We approached Chick and I told him I’d been listening to him for 35 years (I’m 41). Chick asked us our names and said it was a pleasure to meet us.

About 10 minutes later Chick got up to start the game. He looked extremely frail struggling with his walker. But that didn’t stop him from going out of his way to tell my friend and I to enjoy the game. Incredibly, he addressed us by our names. What a class act.

Greg Steinberg, Los Angeles

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Thank you, Marge, for letting us borrow your best friend. He became ours as well. Many of us learned to play basketball from our fathers. But we learned to have the passion for this great sport from one man. He wasn’t a famous athlete. He just called an honest, straightforward game.

Chick Hearn would scold the Lakers and praise the Lakers. I met him one time, like many others. Little did I know just how special a friend I had made that day. So now when I order a hot dog, mustard will be too hard to swallow. Opening the fridge and seeing the Jell-O jigglin’ will have a different effect on me.

Scott Torney, Huntington Beach

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Every time I listened to Chick Hearn, he taught me something new about the nuances of the game of basketball. After thousands of broadcasts, that’s saying something.

Richard Murphy, Whittier

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Chick was basketball in this town. More than the stream of great players and coaches we’ve had: Chamberlain, West, Kareem, Nixon, McAdoo, Magic, Worthy, Scott, Coop, A.C., Clark Kent, Vlade, Shaq, Kobe, Fox, etc. They are/were great players, and they stay in the Laker family, but Chick was the Voice.

He was the best thing for cable TV too. Who could think of dropping it and lose Chick and the Lakers?

Tony Esporma, Irvine

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A little-known fact: Early in their tenure in Los Angeles, the Lakers were playing a preseason game in a high school gym (basketball wasn’t the major league event it later became), and a player was, indeed, faked into the popcorn machine that was situated next to the exit. I think it might have been the only time Chick wasn’t ready with a colorful description.

Frank Robinson, Ridgecrest

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After moving to L.A. from Detroit in the late 1990s, one thing I’ve learned is that you can be a Chick fan without being a Laker fan.

Alan R. Hopkins, Los Angeles

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I was thinking how deeply moved Chick would have been by all the accolades of the last few days. Had he retired a year or two ago, the accolades would have been much the same, and he would have been around to enjoy them. I was thinking how sad that was, until I realized that Chick would not have traded a chance to call the Lakers’ recent championship--or possibly, any Laker game--for all the accolades in the world.

Rip Rense, Los Angeles

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Laker General Manager Mitch Kupchak mentioned the way three generations of families listened to, and loved, Chick Hearn. In my family, it’s actually four generations: My 93-year-old grandfather (who has been known to turn down a dinner invitation if it conflicts with a Laker game), my father, myself, and my two sons, 8 and 11.

If I’m ever lucky enough to have a grandchild, and we’re watching or listening to a game together, I can already imagine myself saying of the announcer, “Yeah, this guy’s fine. It’s just too bad you never got to hear the best ever, Chick Hearn.”

Barry P. Gold, Los Angeles