Chick Hearn Just Keeps Going, Going and Going

The city of Chicago has been in mourning since the death last week of Harry Caray, the beloved baseball announcer who spent the last 16 seasons of his 53-year career doing play-by-play for the Cubs. Caray was one of a dwindling breed of larger-than-life broadcasters more celebrated than most of the athletes they covered.

Washington Wizards patrons seated within listening distance of the visiting broadcasters’ perch at MCI Center on Monday night can overhear another brilliant octogenarian sports voice still going strong. That would be Chick Hearn, who’s called Los Angeles Lakers games for 38 years and is working on an unparalleled streak that will reach 3,017 straight games in Washington on Monday night.

Hearn hasn’t missed a Lakers’ contest since November 21, 1965, when snow grounded him after a football game in Fayetteville, Ark., forcing him to miss a game that same night. Through illness, laryngitis and the tragic deaths of both of his children, he’s been on the job ever since.

“There were probably two, three, four times I’d wake up in a hotel room in a strange city sick and vomiting,” he said this week from Indianapolis. “At home, at least you have your own doctor. On the road, the hotel’s got to find you someone. I got to the game and I worked with a sack under the chair, just in case.

“I didn’t know anything about a streak until a Lakers PR man told me when I was getting close to 1,000. Ever since, they’ve given me a basketball for every 500. Hell, I got more basketballs than Spalding.”

Hearn has been the team’s only play-by-play man. He was originally hired by Robert Short, the grinch who stole baseball from Washington when he moved the Senators to Texas in 1971. Late in the Lakers’ first season in L.A. in 1960, Hearn got a call from Short. The franchise was averaging about 2,200 a game despite having future Hall of Famers Jerry West and Elgin Baylor on the team, and Short thought he could drum up interest if games could be heard on the radio.

Then working for CBS, Hearn went to St. Louis to announce the fifth game of the Western Conference finals between the Lakers and Hawks. L.A. won, and when the team came home for Game 6, it drew 15,000 fans and a then NBA-record gate of $55,000.

Hearn has gone through seven analysts, including, Al Michaels, who lasted all of six games. Michaels could barely get a word in edgewise before then-Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke realized a one-man booth made economic sense and was far more preferable to Hearn’s growing legion of fans.

Cooke and Hearn also became best friends, a relationship that lasted until Cooke’s death last year. According to Hearn, Cooke, a Canadian, initially had little interest in the Lakers because he didn’t know much about basketball. He bought the Lakers and hockey’s Kings, and Hearn became one of his most trusted basketball advisers.

“He desperately wanted to win championships,” Hearn said. “One day, he said to me, ‘Who do you think can help us win the title?’ I told him Wilt Chamberlain, and he went out and got him. When Wilt left, he asked me again. I told him Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He’d been a UCLA kid and obviously a great player. Jack did everything he could to win, in anything he ever tried. His record proves it.”

Hearn also has had a significant impact on the game. He uttered many of the expressions in the lexicon of hoops, almost always off the top of his head.

He first used “slam dunk . . . yo-yoing the dribble . . . dribble-drive . . . no harm, no foul . . . or no blood, no ambulance.” Games are placed “in the refrigerator” or the offshoot “The jello is jiggling” when the Lakers have clinched a victory. Players are “caught with their hands in the cookie jar” when they’re called for a reach-in foul or “faked into the popcorn machine” when they go airborne after an opponent’s fake.

To his credit, he’s also never been a screamer like so many voices of the ‘90s, who jack up the decibel level at the drop of a pass, the better to get noticed for possible inclusion on radio and TV highlight shows around the country.

Hearn said he always admired the work of colleagues Mel Allen, Jack Drees and Marty Glickman, and took something of his own staccato style from each. He also was a great friend and admirer of Caray and once, in the early 1950s, interviewed for a job as Caray’s color man on St. Louis Cardinals broadcasts.

“But Harry was a nine-inning guy,” Hearn said. “They just wanted someone to fill in during the breaks between innings, and I decided that wasn’t enough work for me. He was one of a kind, no question about that.”

My own memory of Caray goes back to the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri. One summer, the Cardinals were making a run-from-behind in the pennant race, and after every St. Louis victory, Caray would warble into the radio microphone “the Cardinals are coming tra-la-tra-la, the Cardinals are coming, tra-la-tra-la.”

A few years ago, I interviewed Caray during spring training, and ended a memorable session by asking him how long he wanted to go on. “I’d like to go out with my boots on right up there,” he said, sitting in the stands at the Cubs’ Arizona spring training headquarters and pointing to the broadcast booth up above.

Chick Hearn also has no intention of ending his remarkable streak any time soon. Like Caray (believed to be 83 when he died), he doesn’t like to tell anyone his age, but is said to be in his early eighties and plans to keep working for as long as he can.

When will he stop?

“When I don’t look forward to the next game,” he said. “I love the game, the associations I’ve had. As long as the voice holds up and my enthusiasm is still what it is, I’ll give it a few more years. I’m having too much fun to quit now.”