The Lakers’ Legendary Voice

Chick Hearn, the legendary broadcaster who provided the lively soundtrack to more than four decades of Los Angeles Laker basketball, inventing a new vocabulary along the way, died Monday. He was 85.

Hearn died about 6:30 p.m. at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where he was admitted Friday night after falling at his home in Encino. He underwent two craniotomies to control brain hemorrhaging Saturday but never regained consciousness. He declined seriously Sunday and by Monday morning his condition was downgraded to grave.

Talking to reporters at the hospital Monday night, Dr. Asher Taban, Hearn’s neurosurgeon, said, “The injury to the brain stem was the main cause of death.”

Hearn, who was instrumental in introducing professional basketball to Southern California sports fans after the Lakers moved west from Minneapolis in 1960, broadcast 3,338 consecutive games in a streak that began in 1965 and ended when he suffered a series of medical setbacks that began late last year.

Hearn missed his first Laker broadcast in 36 years last Dec. 20 after undergoing heart valve replacement surgery the previous day. Two months later, he slipped and fell getting out of his car, breaking his hip. The injury required Hearn to undergo hip-replacement surgery, extending his absence from the Lakers to 113 days and 56 games.

On April 9, Hearn returned to his familiar seat at Staples Center, calling the play-by-play during a 30-point Laker victory over the Utah Jazz. Though his voice sounded weak at the beginning of the broadcast, Hearn sounded more robust as the game progressed, clearly enjoying the appreciative applause from the fans and the opportunity to entertain local radio and television listeners with his unique wordplay once again.

“This is the happiest I’ve been since I married Marge!” he exclaimed on the air, referring to his wife of nearly 64 years. Half a beat later, he was quickly back to business: “Shaq down the middle

Hearn remained with the Lakers through the clinching of their third consecutive National Basketball Assn. championship in June. It was the Lakers’ ninth league title since arriving in Los Angeles, and from Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain to Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, Hearn had provided the colorful narration.

“It is impossible to express the depth of our sorrow.... This is one very sad day for everyone associated with the Lakers, the NBA and with the sports industry,” said Laker owner Jerry Buss in a statement from London where he was traveling. “What Chick has meant to the Lakers and the popularity of NBA basketball in Los Angeles can never be overestimated. His ‘word’s-eye view’ is as responsible for this success as any of the great players who have worn a Laker uniform. We will be forever grateful to him.”

Former Laker star Magic Johnson expressed his sadness in a statement Monday night to Associated Press.

“I’ll never forget all those times when I needed a hug, when I needed a high five, he told me, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ He always uplifted me and uplifted other people, and I’ll tell you something, basketball and the Lakers, without him calling the games, it would have never been the same.”

Outside the Northridge hospital Monday evening, Laker general manager and former player Mitch Kupchak said:

“If you are a Lakers fan, if you are a basketball fan, if you are a sports fan in general, you know this is truly not a good day.... Chick, we will miss you. Quite simply, you are the best.”

Hearn was the effervescent common link to every chapter in the team’s Los Angeles history and nearly as valuable to the franchise as any of its storied players. His distinctive high-speed delivery--so fast that Hearn often announced a player had scored while the shot was still in the air--was perfectly suited to the Lakers’ fast-breaking “Showtime” playing style.

Hearn invented a lexicon that has become as much a part of the game of modern basketball as the three-point field goal--”Chickisms,” they were called. He concocted such phrases as “airball” for a shot that misses the rim, “slam dunk” for a shot that is thrust down into the basket, “yo-yoing up and down” to describe a player dribbling a basketball, and “dribble drive” for a player driving hard to the basket.

With Hearn behind the microphone, the Lakers didn’t just pull away from a beaten opponent, they “put the game in the refrigerator.” A defender badly fooled by a player with the ball was “faked into the popcorn machine.” When a player mishandled the ball while trying a needlessly flashy move, Hearn determined that “the mustard’s off the hot dog.”

“He had this phenomenal ability to sound as fresh in the last game of last season as he did in the first game of his first season,” said “Monday Night Football” broadcaster Al Michaels, who worked briefly as Hearn’s partner in the late 1960s.

“His medical problems obviously affected his voice in recent years. But nothing could affect his enthusiasm and sense of humor....

“To do what he did as long as he did with fresh and unabashed enthusiasm is truly astonishing. Chick understood the essence of the game. He had such vast knowledge he could have been a coach.”

Bill Sharman, former Laker coach, general manager and president and now a special consultant to the team, said, “I’ve been in pro ball since 1950 and I’ve heard a lot of announcers, but no one was close to Chick. He was dramatic, humorous and informative, and he has a passion for the game.”

Along with his contributions to the sporting vocabulary, Hearn pioneered the “simulcast”--the nuanced art of calling a game simultaneously for radio and television. Hearn adroitly straddled the fine line between giving his television audience, with the action right in front of them, too much information and his radio listeners, relying on Hearn to create a vivid verbal picture, not enough.

It’s a subtle craft, and for more than 40 years with the Lakers, he was the master of the simulcast.

Hearn always said he couldn’t remember the first time he put a game in the refrigerator.

“It was at least 10 years ago, oh, maybe much longer ago than that,” he said in January 1998. “It just popped out, like a lot of things do. It just didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”

A reader once wrote that he remembered Hearn using the phrase when he was doing Bradley University basketball in 1950.

“I guess it’s possible,” Hearn said.

Later came the phrase “The door is closed, the light is out, the eggs are cooling, and the butter is getting hard.”

That came from the late Gladys Worthy, the mother of former Lakers star forward James Worthy.

“Chick and my mother struck up a friendship, and she used to write to him occasionally,” said Worthy, a member of the Lakers of the 1980s. “She suggested in a letter to Chick that he add ‘the door is closed, the light is out, the eggs are cooling, and the butter is getting hard’ whenever he put a game in the refrigerator. I don’t know where she got it, whether it’s a Southern saying or what.”

Hearn once said, “Mrs. Worthy definitely gets credit for that, bless her heart. The ‘Jell-O is jiggling’ came later. A fan wrote to suggest that.”

Francis Dayle Hearn was born on Nov. 27, 1916, in Buda, Ill., one of two sons of a railroad worker.

The family moved to Aurora, near Chicago, in 1925, and Fran Hearn played basketball at East Aurora High. He might have gone to college on an athletic scholarship, except that his father was seriously injured in an auto accident. Hearn was forced to get a job and forget college.

When Hearn was 19, he was involved in a car wreck and was put in a body cast to heal broken ribs. Then he had to have the cast removed for an emergency appendectomy and later developed pneumonia. The prognosis was so bleak at one point that he was given last rites.

Hearn became known as Chick when he was 22. Some teammates on an AAU basketball team in Aurora turned the tables on Hearn, a chronic practical joker, and played a practical joke on him. They handed Hearn a shoebox, but instead of new shoes, it contained a dead chicken, covered with bugs.

“I got it all over me--it was awful,” Hearn said.

After that, his teammates started calling him Chicken, which eventually was shortened to Chick. The name stuck throughout his long and busy broadcasting career.

It began with Armed Forces Radio when Hearn was stationed in the Philippines during World War II. When he was discharged in 1946, he decided to give broadcasting a shot in Aurora. He failed to get the first job he applied for and began selling pharmaceuticals. But the station manager who turned him down the first time came back and offered him $5 to announce the second game of a high school basketball doubleheader.

Hearn worked the game but told the station manager to keep his $5. He wanted a full-time job and got it--at $47 a week. He did a little bit of everything--disc jockey, religious programming, news, sports and weather.

Hearn recalled his father’s reaction when he told him he was giving up the lucrative pharmaceutical business to go into radio. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Do you think radio is really here to stay?’ ” Hearn recalled.

By 1950, Hearn was announcing Bradley basketball for a station in Peoria. A year later he came to Los Angeles to work for CBS radio and announce USC football, an assignment that lasted until 1963.

Hearn loved broadcasting. While steadily busy with the Lakers, he also did some USC play-by-play for Channel 5 in the mid-1970s and selected Nevada-Las Vegas basketball games from 1977-91.

Dick Manoogian, who owned the rights to the Las Vegas package, declined to say how much he paid Hearn but said, “Believe me, he didn’t do it for the money. He did it because he loved to work. And he took the job seriously. He always came over the night before a game to prepare for the telecasts.”

During most of the 1970s, Hearn was the host of the popular local game show “Bowling for Dollars.” Hearn won a lot of fans doing that show. One was Jeanie Buss, who, in addition to being the daughter of Laker owner Buss, is the team’s executive vice president of business.

She was 17 when her father bought the Lakers in 1979.

“I was a huge Chick Hearn fan, not because of the Lakers but because of ‘Bowling for Dollars,’ ” she said. “I remember meeting him was one of the thrills of my life at the time because I was such a fan.”

In his early L.A. days, Hearn also worked for the NBC network and the local NBC station. When Bob Short brought the Lakers to town, they had no television or radio contracts. But in March 1961, before the Lakers’ first playoff game in St. Louis, Short called Hearn at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and persuaded him to fly to St. Louis and broadcast the game on radio. “The broadcast went well,” Hearn remembered. “It was a great game [the Lakers won, 122-118, but lost the series]. I guess they liked my work.”

Years later, Pulitzer-prize winning Times sports columnist Jim Murray would write that Hearn was instrumental in making professional basketball a top draw in Los Angeles.

“Any sport needs a lively nomenclature, word pictures that go into the language,” Murray wrote in 1986 when Hearn was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Simple terms like bases loaded, circus catch, circuit clout, screwball and squeeze play all served to dramatize the grand old game of baseball that even became a national pastime, thanks to some chronicler of press row.”

”....Chick Hearn did the same thing for pro basketball, which had almost no language of its own when he came along. No more could division playoff games be played before 2,800 spectators after Chick hit the scene. They became the hardest tickets in town once Chick was out in front of the tent.”

At the dedication ceremony, former Lakers star Elgin Baylor, who is now the general manager of the Clippers, said to Hearn: “You made us stars. When you have a product, you need somebody to promote it. That was Chick.”

Hearn was proud of his long marriage to Marge, whom he met in a class when both were juniors at East Aurora High.

“I used to pass him the answers,” Marge once said, which prompted Hearn to say, “She’s still passing me the answers.”

They were married on Aug. 13, 1938, and would have celebrated their 64th anniversary on Tuesday.

Of Marge, Hearn once said, “I don’t know what I would have done without her. She is definitely the woman behind this man.”

Chick and Marge had to cope with the heartbreak of losing both of their children. Gary, their first born, died at 29 in 1972 from a drug overdose. Daughter Samantha died at 43 in 1990 of viral pneumonia brought on by years of battling anorexia.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that something doesn’t pop up to remind [us] of them, a song they liked, something they did,” Marge told The Times in May 2000. “I talk about them to keep them alive that way. [Chick] can hardly mention their names.”

Hearn turned down numerous requests to write his autobiography because, he said, it would be too painful to talk about his children.

He nearly ended his consecutive-games streak in 1990, with Samantha hospitalized because of pneumonia, her condition reaching the critical stage as the Lakers were about to be eliminated from the playoffs by the Phoenix Suns.

“I shouldn’t go tonight,” Chick told Marge as game time approached at the Forum. “You may as well,” Marge told him. “There’s nothing you can do at the hospital.”

So Hearn was in his customary perch at the Forum on May 15, 1990, as the Suns ended the Laker season with a 106-103 victory. Samantha died nine days later.

“You never expect your children to die before you. For us, it was a double loss,” Hearn said in 2000. “At the time, we thought we were doing everything we could for them. We never knew it would end in death for both of them. God knows, we tried everything.”

Hearn’s consecutive-game streak began on Nov. 21, 1965, in his fifth season with the Lakers. He had missed the previous game because he was stranded by a snowstorm in Fayetteville, Ark., after calling an Arkansas-Texas Tech college football game. Hearn was on the plane, on the ground, when the pilot announced the weather was too bad to fly in.

“If you don’t think we should fly,” Hearn told the pilot, “that’s good enough for me.”

Hearn worked with six partners during the streak, beginning with Michaels, then fresh out of college, briefly in 1967. Previously, Hearn had worked solo, and he resented Michaels’ intrusion as a station-appointed color analyst. Michaels spent eight games at Hearn’s side, getting to talk in only four, before the experiment was called off.

Eventually, Hearn relented and agreed to a full-time sidekick. He worked with former Laker Hot Rod Hundley in 1968, followed by Lynn Shackleford, Keith Erickson, eventual Laker Coach Pat Riley and Stu Lantz.

Hearn had a gruff side, which he frequently exhibited when growing impatient with members of his broadcast staff or callers to his pregame Laker talk show.

“Chick was a perfectionist,” said Lantz. “He wanted to be perfect, and he wanted everyone around him to be perfect. I knew that when I took the job.”

But Hearn once described himself as crusty on the outside but made of mush in the middle.

Years ago, a fan, after working up his nerve, approached Hearn at the Forum and handed him a piece of paper with a name on it.

“Chick,” the fan said hesitantly, “my mother is in her 70s, and she loves basketball. She loves you. Could you mention her name on the air?”

Said Hearn: “Of course.”

The fan walked away and, for the benefit of a few reporters who were there, Hearn mumbled something like, “Yeah, fat chance,” and crumbled the piece of paper and threw it in a nearby trash container.

It got a good laugh.

But as soon as everyone went away, Hearn dug the crumbled paper out of a trash container and smoothed it out.

He read the name on the air.

“I thought, my God, what have I done?” Hearn once recalled. “I can’t read everyone’s name on the air, but in this case I was glad I did. I got several nice thank-you notes from those people.”

Michaels recalled a time this spring when he and his wife Linda were in their car listening to Hearn call a playoff game on Mother’s Day.

“Right in the middle of two crucial free throws near the end of the game, Chick wished all mothers a happy Mother’s Day,” Michaels said. “I just started laughing out loud.”

Hearn worked for three Laker owners--Short, Jack Kent Cooke and Buss.

Cooke, figuring that he could save money by giving Hearn two jobs, also made him assistant general manager. In that position, Hearn had one of five votes when the Lakers made their biggest trade ever--acquiring Abdul-Jabbar from the Milwaukee Bucks in 1975. The Lakers gave up four players for Abdul-Jabbar, who became the dominant center of his era.

When Buss bought the team from Cooke in 1979, Buss relieved Hearn of his administrative responsibilities. But not wanting to make it appear that Hearn was being demoted, he let him keep his title for a number of years.

Of Hearn, the great Dodger announcer Vin Scully said Monday night:

“Though we have lost a dear friend and a true broadcasting legend today, I would like to offer a prayer of thanksgiving for having been able to enjoy his work for all these years. Chick had immense talent that was driven by a tremendous work ethic and an insurmountable passion for the game and his trade. His personality, character and professionalism will be greatly missed, yet his spirit, importance and impact will live forever.”

Besides his wife Marge, Hearn is survived by his granddaughter, Gary’s daughter Shannon Newman; her husband Louis; and great-granddaughter Kayli, 2, who live in Placentia.

Years ago, Hearn was asked if he thought that he had left a legacy. After some thought, he said only, “I just hope I’ve made a contribution to the game.”

Asked what should be put on his tombstone, Hearn didn’t have to think about it.

“No harm, no foul,” he said.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

Times staff writer Steve Springer contributed to this report.