City of Angels Blessed to Have Him

Maybe listening to Laker games with Chick Hearn at the microphone wasn’t quite a religious experience, but there sure were times it reminded you of a church.

He throws up a prayer-- it’s not answered.

Chick and religion crossed paths again Friday. In the midst of all the celebrations of his life, there was a bit of formal business. It was time, as the Funeral Mass program said, “to commend the deceased to God’s tender mercy and compassion.”

His family, friends, admirers and legions of the players whose accomplishments he ingrained in so many minds gathered at St. Martin of Tours Church in Brentwood.

Chick was the very essence of religion, if you consider the origins of the word. Its roots include the French relier: to connect, or the Latin religo: to tie, or to fasten.

That’s what Chick did to the people in this city, in an unprecedented way.

Chick connected everybody to the Lakers and, in the process, to one another. He assembled the elite and he brought the masses together.

The biggest names in any field you could name came through the doors at St. Martin’s. Politics (Gov. Gray Davis and Mayor James Hahn), religion (Cardinal Roger M. Mahony) entertainment (Jack Nicholson), medicine (Dr. Frank Jobe), sportscasting (Vin Scully) and, of course, athletics (they’ll get their paragraphs later). Put it this way: any time the first name on the check-in list is Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, you know it’s going to be a star-studded event.

Magic Johnson chose an appropriate Bible verse.

“Seest thou a man diligent in his business?” he said, quoting from Proverbs 22:29. “He shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men.”

Forty-two years of working at the same job, including 3,338 consecutive games, qualifies as diligent.

I think one of the reasons Chick’s loss was felt so deeply throughout the city is that he was a part of childhood for people age 50 and below, and you’ll feel a strong attachment for anything that brings you back to your youth. There were different names and decades for different people, but the common denominator was Chick.

Three generations of childhood heroes were there Friday. Elgin Baylor and Jerry West from the early days in L.A. Kareem, Magic, Norm Nixon, James Worthy, Michael Cooper and Jamaal Wilkes from the Showtime era. Current Lakers Kobe Bryant, Rick Fox, Derek Fisher, Brian Shaw, Samaki Walker and Mark Madsen.

And the Laker family. Coaches (including Bill Sharman, Pat Riley and Phil Jackson). Trainers, secretaries, equipment managers.

Chick brought them all together.

You could have had an all-UCLA section of John Wooden, Bill Walton, Walt Hazzard and Keith Erickson.

The themes Mahony stressed were faith, commitment and community. He quoted Luke 10: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

In the passage, when a man asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the tale of a man who was robbed and beaten by thieves and left on the road. Two men passed him by, but a third saw him, bandaged him and poured oil and wine on him, took him to the inn and cared for him.

Who was the neighbor? The answer was clear. So was the message.

Chick Hearn was a neighbor to all. When Magic announced he had HIV, he recalled Friday, Chick reached out and put his right hand on his face and asked how he was doing.

A simple gesture that meant so much--in that time of ignorance about AIDS, he reached out to touch someone carrying the most feared virus on the planet.

He reached out to so many sick people throughout the years, complying with requests to say hello on the air to people’s ailing relatives. He stopped to say hi.

And he reached out to so many Laker fans he met; sometimes merely making eye contact was enough.

Each person who stepped up to share his or her memories only bolstered Mahony’s themes. Fox, fighting through tears, talked about how the strength of Chick’s wife Marge enabled Chick to keep going for all of us, so now it was our turn to be there for Marge.

West described Chick as “an icon to the city of Los Angeles.”

Think about that: The NBA logo called Chick an icon.

But the best words of all came from John Werhas, an anonymous man to most of the people watching the service on TV, who had the task of following Hall of Famers Johnson and West to the podium.

“Chick Hearn finished with the same passion he had when he began,” said Werhas, a family friend and former Dodger who played basketball at USC when Chick called the Trojans’ games in the late 1950s. “He didn’t leave anything unfinished.”

The tissues came out when Chick’s granddaughter, Shannon Newman, and great-granddaughter Kayla came to the podium.

But throughout the day it had to be a 10-to-1 ratio of smiles to tears. How could there not be good memories when the subject was Chick Hearn? How could you not smile when Cardinal Mahony--the Archbishop of Los Angeles--wrapped up his sermon by saying: “This one’s in the refrigerator.”

“The service was very beautiful,” Shannon Newman said. “It’s been a very uplifting day.”

Over at Staples Center, how could you not smile and shake your head in wonder at the thousands of people who came by to pay their respects to Hearn?

Hearn’s TV monitor, his headset, microphones and hand-written notes were set up on the desk. The line stretched past columns of seats, into the concourse, out of the building, through the Star Plaza to Figueroa and halfway down the block toward Pico. Staples Center officials listed the final tally on the day at 18,997--the figure of a Laker sellout.

The line was respectfully halted when the family stopped through.

“I just had to come down and look at it once more,” Marge said.

One day, another member of the family might occupy it. On her way to the booth, 7-year-old Kayla passed a picture of Hearn peering through a refrigerator and observed, “The Jell-O isn’t jiggling.”

At the booth, she picked up a microphone and started to interview Marge, then Chick’s color commentator, Stu Lantz.

Then she handled herself quite well as the subject of a live TV interview.

“I like being on TV,” she said afterward.

It must run in the family. So does strength, because they all held up well Friday.

We were at Staples Center, some 13 miles from the church, but Marge had one more religion-tinged message, a reflection on all the happy times with Chick that outweigh the sadness of this week:

“Count your blessings.”

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.