Talk of Fame Earns a Star

Column by the late Jim Murray on Chick Hearn, originally published Sept. 25, 1986.

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"Top of the key to Baylor.... Baylor yo-yo-ing in the frontcourt.... Give and go to Goodrich!.... Bounce pass to West.... Dribble-drive to the basket.... He turns.... He's fouled!.... Oh, no, Mendy didn't call it! No harm, no foul.... High post by Wilt.... Turnaround fake by Jerry.... He puts Cazzie in the popcorn machine. . . . He shoots!.... He scores!.... Fall back, baby!"

A lot of my friends have their own pieces of sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard. Spencer Tracy. Claudette Colbert. Mary Pickford. Gable. Doug Fairbanks. Bogie. Errol Flynn.

'Course, I didn't know all of them personally. But Tracy has been a friend of mine ever since "Captains Courageous." And Gable and Colbert crept into my heart in "It Happened One Night."

But now, guess who's joining Tracy and Gable and Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne? Guess who's joining legends like Tom Mix and Iron Eyes Cody and Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett?

Francis Dayle Hearn is who. Chick Hearn. The world's greatest basketball announcer. The machine gun that talks like a man. The guy who did more than any other to take pro basketball out of the drafty gyms in Peoria and Altoona and put it on prime time.

Every basketball player signing a million-dollar contract should take off his hat stepping across that slice of sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard they dedicated to Chick Hearn Wednesday. It's a shrine of their biz if not show biz.

Basketball was a tough sell when Francis Hearn came along. I remember in the late winter of '61 going down to the Sports Arena where they were staging a playoff game between the then-St. Louis Hawks and the newly arrived--from Minneapolis--Los Angeles Lakers.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and they used to click off the attendance on a screen high above the arena floor. It read 2,800 that day as the teams took the floor.

Now, mind you, this was a playoff game. The division final. But not only were there few customers, there were hardly any other journalists covering games in those days.

But the Lakers had made a very important acquisition just before that series. In later years, they were to acquire Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, even Magic Johnson.

None, however, was ever so important as the free agent they picked up that winter of '61. Chick Hearn and pro basketball made Romeo and Juliet, ham and eggs, gin and tonic look like unmatched opposites. It was like a river joining a sea. Caruso finding a song, Van Gogh a brush.