You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (5 page)

I knew someone who knew someone at California Sports Inc., the company that had purchased the Los Angeles Lakers. The company was building a state-of-the-art arena in suburban Inglewood, which would be called the Forum, and the Lakers would move there from the Los Angeles Sports Arena by the end of 1967. In addition, the National Hockey League was expanding from six teams to twelve, with one of the new franchises awarded to Los Angeles. CSI owned that team as well, and named them the Los Angeles Kings. I interviewed for a job in the public relations department, which would at least give me a small toehold inside the company, and who knows what could happen from there.

Well, I got the job, and let people inside the company know that I was dying to get into broadcasting. The Kings had hired a play-by-play announcer but were still looking for a color man. Back then, a color announcer was a number-two voice doing minimal analysis, bearing very little semblance to the role that today’s analysts typically fill. They had hired a young announcer, Ken McDonald, as their number-one announcer—but the president of CSI, one Jack Kent Cooke, who took the term
bombastic megalomaniac
to new levels, decided that Ken McDonald wasn’t a distinct enough name. Cooke wanted everyone to have a nickname, and he asked McDonald if he had one. McDonald told his new boss they used to call him Jiggs when he was younger. And that was the start of Jiggs McDonald’s forty-year Hall of Fame career calling games for the Kings, Flames, Islanders, Olympics, and more.

In mid-September, with the Kings already in training camp, and no partner for McDonald yet hired, I got a call at home from Cooke on a Saturday morning. He wanted me to meet him at the airport around five that afternoon. He was flying up to San Francisco, where the Lakers were playing a preseason game against the Warriors at the Cow Palace, and wanted me to join him. Hours later, I was on the plane with him and confused about exactly what was happening. The mysteriousness, though, was exciting. We flew back to Los Angeles after the game, and I was still confused. Then, at the end of the following week, my boss in the PR department told me I was going to be the new radio color announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers.

What?
A few months earlier, I’d been trying to convince people to try out for
The Dating Game
. Now I was going to be the color man for the Los Angeles Lakers! Jerry West!! Elgin Baylor!! I was twenty-two years old.

Now it was October. The Lakers’ preseason schedule was winding down, and Cooke wanted me to join the team immediately. So I flew to Salt Lake City, where the team that night was playing the Baltimore Bullets. It was the first stop of a three-game, three-night trip, and right off the bat, I was going to be on the air alongside Chick Hearn, the team’s extremely popular, eventually iconic announcer. This was too good to be true.

And you know what? It was. Chick didn’t want to work with
anybody
, least of all a twenty-two-year-old.

So when I arrived in Salt Lake City, I didn’t exactly get the warmest greeting from my new partner. Chick put up a virtual wall. And when the radio broadcast started, my role as “color announcer” for the Lakers turned out to be something that was neither color, nor announcing. I was consigned to reading the halftime stats. That’s it. And during the actual game, I did nothing but keep statistics for Chick.

So that was my debut. And then we flew to Boise, Idaho, and drove to the small town of Rupert for another game the next night against the Bullets. Then on Sunday, we flew to Seattle for a game with the Warriors that was a part of a doubleheader, with the Sonics, who were in their inaugural season, meeting the St. Louis Hawks in the other game. On each broadcast, all I did was read the halftime stats. No color, no analysis, nothing else.

We flew back to Los Angeles after the Seattle game, and Monday was an off day. Tuesday we flew to Fresno for a game with the San Francisco Warriors. That game was on television as a simulcast—the same broadcasting crew, with one call for both radio and TV. But that night, Chick didn’t even mention my name on the air except when he impassively turned it over to me for the halftime numbers—which by the way, didn’t include an on-camera appearance. He didn’t talk to me much anywhere else, either—before or after the games, on the bus, at the hotel. Instead I wound up becoming a little friendly with some of the players who were closer to my age, and much more welcoming. Mel Counts, the seven-foot center, and I had two or three meals together on those first couple of road trips. I quickly developed a nice vibe with Archie Clark, a second-year guard. West and Baylor were the big stars and I was in awe of them, but they were friendly enough.

The regular season was starting, and I was beginning to get a little nervous. On the one hand, I had this great job title: color announcer for the Los Angeles Lakers. But really, what was I other than a stat reader? Meanwhile, I’d been given another duty that had nothing to do with broadcasting. I was basically a quasi–traveling secretary, which meant getting to the airport early—these were the days when NBA teams flew commercial—and handing out the tickets to the players. Yes, I’d been looking for expanded duties, but on the air, not at the airport.

Now it was on to the regular season, which opened with a road trip. We started in Chicago, and then flew to Philadelphia, where the Spectrum had just opened. Next, St. Louis, then still the home of the Hawks. (The Gateway Arch was being built at the time, a thrilling sight.) From Philly to St. Louis, the flight had stops in Pittsburgh, then Columbus, then Louisville. Three stops to go eight hundred miles. It was the Greyhound bus in the skies. Finally, the trip ended in New York. Overall, five flights with eight total stops, five nights, four games. And my sole on-air function was still to read the halftime statistics. Sure, my friends thought it was cool. But I was now getting very nervous about the immediate future. If Chick didn’t want me, what was the endgame?

After four games back in Los Angeles, the fourth of which was against the Knicks on a Wednesday night, another road trip was on the docket. We were leaving the next day for a Friday night game in Boston, and then would go on to Cincinnati for a game against the Royals the next night. I got to the airport, checked in and checked my bag, and then went to the curb to hand out the tickets to the players as they got out of their cars and cabs. I gave Jerry West his, I handed Elgin Baylor his—and then the team’s rookie head coach, Butch Van Breda Kolff, pulled in, got out of a cab, and told me to hand him the rest of the tickets. Don’t get on the flight, he said. And I should immediately call Alan Rothenberg at the CSI office.

Rothenberg would go on to help launch professional soccer in the United States. But in 1967, he was a young lawyer/hatchet man running Jack Kent Cooke’s day-to-day operations. Getting an order to call him under these circumstances couldn’t be a good thing. When I reached him from an airport pay phone, he told me to come immediately to the team offices, which were in a wing of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

At that point, even if I wasn’t sure what was going on, the embarrassment was beginning to envelop me. But first I had to go to the United Airlines counter and ask if they could get my bag off the plane before it took off. Try doing that at LAX today. After a long, lonely wait at baggage claim, it came down an empty carousel. I then got in a cab to see Rothenberg, a guy I hadn’t trusted from the beginning.

Rothenberg was direct. “Look, this isn’t really working out. We’ve hired Hot Rod Hundley to be the new color announcer. And we’re letting you go.”

And I wasn’t even offered a job to stay with the company.

Right then, it became clear. I’d been set up. Hot Rod Hundley had retired from the Lakers four years earlier. But before hiring him, the Lakers had used me as a wedge to get Chick to work with
somebody
. Hearn had always worked alone. Instead of moving Hundley in immediately—which Chick would have resisted—I became the sacrificial lamb. With Hundley, Chick could take solace that at least his new partner had played in the NBA, and wasn’t twenty-two years old. I was angry and upset, and most of all, embarrassed. And I had to turn on the television the next night and watch Chick introduce Hot Rod Hundley, standing right next to him on camera at Boston Garden in a way that I never did.

Dejected and upset, but still naïve, I called Cooke’s secretary and asked if I could see him. A few days, I’m there. He started in, “Oh, Alan”—that was his “nickname” for me, Alan, my given name, something that no one other than my mother ever called me—“this will be the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll have a good career.”

I muttered something to the effect of “No thanks to you.” And I walked out.

Hundley, of course, would go on to become a longtime NBA announcer. He also had one of the great sports quotes of all time. “My biggest thrill came the night Elgin Baylor and I combined for seventy-three points at Madison Square Garden. Elgin had seventy-one of them.”

Meanwhile, years later, Chick Hearn and I would eventually reconnect in Los Angeles, become friends, and often share laughs about the whole episode. For my money, Chick and Marv Albert are the greatest basketball announcers of all time. And deservedly, there’s a statue of Chick outside the Staples Center. When he died in 2002, I was asked to write an appreciation piece for the
Los Angeles Times,
which I was honored to do. Suffice to say, when Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997, I wrote no such column. It would have been a beauty.

CHUCK BARRIS STILL HAD
a job for me. In fact, his empire was growing.
The Newlywed Game,
another Barris production, had become a hit. Chuck was now also overseeing a pilot for a series based on variety shows at military installations. I made a trip with the production crew to Eglin Air Force Base, near Pensacola, Florida, and a couple of weeks later we went to Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia.

So here I am in Georgia on that trip, and Linda calls. Two months earlier, I’d gone with her dad on a trip to Hawaii. He had a vending machine business in Honolulu, and had gotten to know an advertising executive named Frank Valenti, who knew a man named Jack Quinn. Quinn ran the local minor-league baseball team. So my father-in-law asked Valenti to try to set up a meeting for me. I met with Quinn in February and left a tape with him, though he didn’t have a job opening at that point. But he was friendly, and said that he would stay in touch if anything opened up. I flew back and went back to working for Barris.

Now, two months later, Linda was on the phone telling me that Jack Quinn had called our apartment in Los Angeles asking for me. I was in Georgia, almost five thousand miles away, and when I reached him, he asked if I could fly over ASAP and call a few games on the radio for the Hawaii Islanders.

“A few games?”

“I have some issues,” he said. “I’d like you to fill in.”

It turned out his “issues” were that the Islanders announcer, Marty Chase, was in a military reserve unit that had been called to active duty. It wasn’t entirely clear what Chase’s commitments would be, but Quinn was giving me an opportunity to announce some games.

I was so excited I could have flown home without a plane. I immediately called Chuck in the hotel—he had always known what my dream was, and he was very excited for me. Then I flew home on the first flight the next morning, Augusta to Atlanta to Los Angeles, packed my bags, went to sleep, and flew to Hawaii the next day. Linda would join me a week later. I would never work in an office again.

CHAPTER 5

Aloha

J
UST SOUND LIKE VIN SCULLY
. That’s what I told myself on the flight to Hawaii. I had heard Vin’s voice in my ears since I was six. The authority, warmth, knowledge, creativity, and maybe most important of all, the rhythm.

I think it’s the same in most artistic fields. When you’re young and starting out, there are people you idolize, and you are going to imitate their style until you more clearly develop your own. For me, that model was Vinny. Early on, I sounded like him. Similar cadence, similar delivery.

I was beyond excited for this chance, but there were a few challenges. At the top of the list: In 1968, you couldn’t exactly go on the Internet (which didn’t exist) and immerse yourself in all things Hawaii Islanders. Who are these guys? What’s the manager like? What are the team’s strengths and weaknesses? Jack Quinn, the general manager, understood this, and told me to take a couple of days to watch three or four games in the stands and familiarize myself with the team before I made my on-air debut.

And if I needed a reminder that this wasn’t quite the big time, all I had to do was look around Honolulu Stadium—which was separated from glamorous Waikiki by the fetid Ala Wai Canal. Termite Palace, as it was called, was a ramshackle stadium that seated about 22,000 and had been jerry-built through the years. They would add 2,500 seats in one section one year, then a thousand more seats down the right field line a few years later. Nothing fit. And it was an all-purpose stadium. Baseball in the summer. University of Hawaii football in the fall. Tons of high school football games, too. Occasional concerts. It was in constant use. There was one deck and the broadcast booth was a wooden cubbyhole up behind home plate.

But the conditions didn’t matter to me. It was thrilling—the golden opportunity. I was a lot like many of the players: hoping to get to the majors one day, but for the moment, happy just to be there, getting paid to do something I would have done for free. My Islanders salary was $15,000 a year, but shortly after I started, the Islanders gig led to me getting another job at local television station KHVH (the ABC affiliate), where I made another $15,000–$18,000.

Linda and I started out in a modest apartment. Then, when it became clear that we were going to be there awhile, we got a much nicer apartment at the foot of Diamond Head, owned by an undertaker in Spokane, Washington, who was renting it out for four hundred dollars a month. The undertaker hadn’t been there in years, and didn’t realize he could have rented it for three times as much. It was tiny, but it was on the eleventh floor and came with a wraparound lanai and a view of the Pacific Ocean and Waikiki. There was a swimming pool downstairs, and just beyond the pool you could climb down a ladder into the ocean. It was heaven. The air smelled like a flower garden. There were these perfect evening breezes. We were barely in our mid-twenties. I suggested to Linda that when we had children, we should give them Hawaiian middle names. We laughed when we thought that even if we would wind up in the majors, it might seem we’d be going downhill. Life was fabulous.