August
6, 2002 I want to say something about the life and death of the greatest
basketball (and sports) announcer ever, Chick Hearn. I don't talk about sports
much, but I really love basketball. It's a sport of both large and small scales
--- it's much more than statistics and much more than pure individual skill.
There is a magic to it, a flow, a rhythm that surpasses analysis into parts
--- the whole is greater.
Basketball transcends ordinary thinking --- often the best thing to do when something is going wrong is --- nothing. Sometimes when you're falling behind, the trick is to relax. It's like this, it's like life, and Chick was one announcer who really understood this. He implicitly understood the feel of the game --- the fact that there was a psychology to it, a flow. A team could be defeated even when they had a statistical chance --- that's when he rhetorically put games into "the refrigerator." He had immense experience and a feel for the intangible aspects of the game that really set him apart from almost every other announcer I have ever heard. He would call shots while in the air --- he had compassion for the opposing team, even though he was the voice of the Lakers and he loved his team. He was unabashed in his criticism of the home team when he felt it. It is a pity and a shame that people in other cities rarely got the chance to hear him --- I really believe Chick had a major impact on the city of Los Angeles, on the people in it, on the way that Angelenos think about life, competition, and sportsmanship.
As for his death, I have to say that tragic as it was, and perhaps this is a morbid thing to say, but I can't imagine a better moment for him to go out. Better this than to fade away, than to have to be let go, or even worse, to die halfway through a season, in the middle of the playoffs, or something like this. Retirement was not for Chick Hearn --- this was a man who deserved, if I could say that, to die while still employed, but after having called the Lakers' tremendous and even improbable rise to their third title in a row. It might not be what his loved ones would have wanted, but I myself couldn't begin to hope for a better death than this. This whole thing segues into thoughts about large and small scales of description, etc., etc. It's funny but Chick really understood something about basketball that many great philosophers fail to understand about ordinary life. Thinking about the effects of the whole is quite different from thinking about the parts, and this is really, really strangely difficult to grasp.