Nahan’s story has silver lining

Stu Nahan is 80 and says he feels like 50. OK, maybe 60.

Some people get their energy from pasta. These days, Nahan gets his from life, from sunshine and trees, from people around him. All the people.

Nahan hasn’t been gone long from the public eye. His most recent job in local sports broadcasting was on the Dodgers’ pregame show. He retired from that after the last game in 2004. For decades, he has been “Silver Tip Stu,” nicknamed by the late Jim Healy and seemingly ever-present on Los Angeles Channel 7 (1968-77), Channel 4 (1977-86) and Channel 5 (1988-99).

Nahan spent more time in your living room than you did.

When he retired from the Dodgers job, he said he just hadn’t felt well for a while. “I’d go on the road and Rick Monday would end up carrying my bags,” Nahan says. “I couldn’t figure it out.”

He had some tests in December that were inconclusive. Then he fell at home Jan. 14 and was taken into the hospital. Three days later, after more tests, he looked up from his hospital bed to see his wife, daughter and a doctor about to tell him that he had a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma called Burkitt’s. He was told it was something senior citizens didn’t often conquer.

“I remember hearing that I had to have treatment immediately, chemotherapy, and if I didn’t, I could be dead in six weeks,” Nahan says. “I must have nodded OK, although I don’t remember. The next day, it started.”

On Feb. 28, six weeks later, Dr. Maurice Berkowitz of the East Valley Hematology and Oncology Medical Group of Burbank told Nahan he appeared to be cancer-free. An original test had shown dozens of black spots, each indicating cancer. The same test now showed no black spots.

He recently had his last chemo treatment. He went to the doctor’s office, sat for six hours while the drugs were dripped into his body, then went home. The chemo didn’t make him nauseated, weak, or tired. It just saved his life.

His hair, that striking silver-gray that became a trademark, has started to grow back and his seat at Kings hockey games, vacant for a couple of months, was filled again at season’s end. The only problem, he says, is some short-term memory loss. But then, most people know that has nothing to do with the cancer. The memory loss is the result of being hit in the head so often by hockey pucks.

After “Silver Tip Stu,” Nahan’s other identifier is “the Old Goalie.” He played years of minor league hockey, some with the L.A. Monarchs of the Pacific Coast League, a farm team of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was, by his own admission, not a very good goalie.

But he parlayed his misadventures on the ice into a 50-year comedy routine. Nahan was Bob Uecker before Uecker was Uecker. He loves to say he is so old, he was born before the Dead Sea got sick. That sense of humor served him well during his recent treatment.

He says part of what got him through it was a tape of “Slap Shot,” the 1977 hockey movie starring Paul Newman.

“He played goalie without a mask, and he says people ask his wife, Sandy, why his face isn’t more marked up.

“Apparently, all the shots went in,” she says.

He signed a contract with the Maple Leafs in the early 1950s.

“I was backup goalie,” Nahan says. “Never got into a game. The starter, Turk Broda, played something like 571 consecutive games. I used to tie his skates together and when he took his teeth out, I switched them with somebody else’s so he’d get sick. He never missed a game.”

He says he eventually quit the game “because I got such a bad sunburn on the back of my neck from the red goal light being on so much.”

Asked how many shutouts he had in his long minor league career, he ponders for a long time.

“Two, maybe three,” he says, with a huge grin.

That grin is ever-present these days. Always gregarious, Nahan is a walking, talking ray of sunshine now.

“I have a different attitude,” he says. “My personality has changed. I don’t yell. I’m at peace with things. God has given me another chance. I’m not a religious zealot, but I know when I’ve been blessed.”

He calls his biggest blessing his wife of 20 years.

“You can’t go through something like this alone,” Nahan says. “Sandy is a psychologist and she called all her patients, said her husband was ill and needed her, and that she would do as much as she could by phone, but was going to be with him 24/7. And she was.”

Nahan will get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 25. For a while, that was touch and go. Now, it will be a celebration of a man who was one of the best-known sports broadcasters in Los Angeles for much of the last four decades.

That day, there will be lots of hockey jokes, some about bad goalies and some delivered by one. The honoree will be greeting family and friends, spending a little more time with each, hugging them a little longer. He will be talking about how fortunate he is. And really meaning it.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.