At the time, Hundley served as a broadcasting caddy for the Lakers’ inimitable announcer, Chick Hearn, managing to dispense a few innocuous opinions during one of Hearn’s rare silent periods.
Hundley enjoyed liquor and women, and as it turned out, he also enjoyed fleecing me of my per diem allowance by continually beating me in gin rummy games on flights and in hotel rooms that season.
And even on the infrequent occasions when I did beat Hundley, he always would force me to continue playing until he’d recoup his losses, even if it meant our having to stay up until the early morning hours. I don’t think I ever came away with money from Hot Rod, who possessed every sly trick of the cad he was.
Anyway, on that afternoon when Hundley and I were making our rounds, one of the saloons we visited was Mr. Laffs, which was co-owned by the former New York Yankee infielder Phil Linz.
We were sitting at the bar when two brawny, uniformed New York cops walked into the place and sidled up next to us. I didn’t know what was going on—were they going to bust the joint?—but to my surprise the bartender brought over two shot glasses and a bottle of J&B.
I couldn’t help but notice that the officers proceeded to pour themselves three drinks in less than ten minutes, and they then walked coolly out the door without paying. I turned to Hundley and said, “I can’t believe what I just witnessed. Never seen cops in uniforms down drinks in a bar before.” Hundley shrugged and said, “Kid, this is New York. Welcome to the big show. They do things differently here.”
Another unforgettable time in New York would come a year later—the exact date was February 16, 1970—when once again I was there with the Lakers during an off day.
The sports editor of the Herald Examiner, Bud Furillo, and another writer on the paper, Allan Malamud, my pal, also were in town for the heavyweight title match between champion Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis. The bout was taking place that evening at Madison Square Garden.
Bud decided to have me write a supplementary story on the fight—Frazier stopped Ellis in five rounds—and on the day of it he took Malamud and me to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant on Broadway, where he introduced us to the legendary Dempsey. We stayed only a few minutes—I was impressed with Dempsey’s immense hand size when I shook it—and then Bud took us to Toots Shor’s joint at 33 West Fifty-first Street.
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling (center) poses with Doug and fellow sportswriter Allan Malamud.
We had lunch at Shor’s, and the celebrated saloonkeeper actually came over to our booth and sat down to have a drink with Bud, who got to know Shor from his days as an Angel beat writer for the defunct Los Angeles Herald Express when Furillo would bring the womanizing pitcher Bo Belinsky into Shor’s place.
The golfer Arnold Palmer came by to say hello to Shor and Bud. Bud knew everybody, and later that day we went to the Manhattan office of Ernie Braca, a well-known fight guy with mob connections who once co-managed Sugar Ray Robinson.
Although I had a press pass for the Frazier-Ellis fight and could have sat ringside, I chose to watch the proceedings in the stands next to Jerry West, a rabid boxing fan.
It was all like a fantasy to me—meeting Jack Dempsey, Arnold Palmer and Toots Shor earlier in the day and then covering the Frazier-Ellis fight that evening with Jerry West, one of America’s most renowned athletes at the time, seated next to me.
But it became even more so in the press room afterward as I was composing my story for the Herald Examiner. I was seated next to one of my sportswriting idols, Jimmy Cannon, who astonished me when he handed me the first take of his column, which he had typed out on his old Remington.
“What do you think of it, kid?” he asked. I perused it quickly and gulped, “Great. Great.” The great Jimmy Cannon, whose lyrical prose was admired by such distinguished authors as Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming, seeking my approval? As I have noticed so often, some of the most insecure people are those endowed with greatness.
Later that year, on the evening of May 8, I was once again at Madison Square Garden for a different kind of athletic event—the Game Seven NBA championship final between the Lakers and New York Knicks—and I’m sure my later coming down with tinnitus in my left ear could be linked to the deafening noise that erupted from the crowd when a limping Willis Reed came out of the tunnel for pregame warm-ups.
The Knicks’ center had a torn thigh muscle and didn’t play in his team’s one-sided loss in Game Six. And he played only briefly in this one—he scored the game’s first two baskets—but his presence inspired the Knicks to a 114–99 win. I’ve covered hundreds of loud sporting events over the years, but none matched the noise level that accompanied Willis Reed’s emotionally theatrical appearance on the floor that long-ago night at Madison Square Garden. My ears still were ringing when I woke up the next morning.
Incidentally, Bud Furillo sat next to me at that game—he wrote the main story for the Herald Examiner—and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the impact Bud had on my life. Without Bud, I’d have probably wound up selling real estate, or peddling cars or picking grapes and rolling trays in the vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley.
It was Bud who rescued me from oblivion. In the two years after getting out of college, I toiled in the newspaper minor leagues, serving as a sports editor at the Pacific Palisadian Post, Camarillo Daily News and Tulare Advance Register, as well as being a copy boy at the LA Times for a month.
A friend of mine from Fresno, Ron Delpit—we worked together as prep writers at the Fresno Bee—was working for the Herald Examiner and touted me to Furillo.
I sent Bud a collection of articles, which he liked, and he wound up hiring me despite an awful recommendation from the editor of the Advance Register who had fired me for disobedience (I refused his kindly request to become the paper’s society editor and pounded a typewriter and overturned a waste basket to show my displeasure).
“Any guy as young as you who already is pissing off editors is my kind of guy,” cracked Furillo, whom I looked up to at the time with awed reverence.
I came aboard the Herald Examiner when it was embroiled in a bitter dispute with its union—it was in its sixth month—and the newspaper’s editor, Don Goodenow, assured me that its publisher, George Hearst, wasn’t about to settle and that some employees who had gone out on strike already were returning. It turned out he was right on both accounts.
I worked alongside a lot of accomplished writers and editors at the Herald Examiner during my long tenure at the paper, including not only Bud Furillo, Melvin Durslag and Allan Malamud, but also James Bellows, Ben Stein, James Bacon, Joe Morgenstern, Bob Keisser, Larry Merchant, David Israel, Julia Cameron, Mitchell Fink, Elvis Mitchell, Jeff Silverman, Frank Lieberman, Larry Stewart, Steve Bisheff, Gordon Jones, Dave Kirby, Kevin Modesti, Mitch Chortkoff, Morton Moss, John Woolard, Arelo Sederberg, Al Stump, Robert Epstein, John Lindsay, Diane K. Shah, Mary Ann Dolan, Rick Arthur, Rich Levin, Ken Gurnick, Tom Singer, Chuck Culpepper, Tony Castro, Alex Ben Block, Lyle Spencer, Barbara Zuanich, Michael Sragow, Peter Rainer, Don Forst, Winfred Blevins, Dick Adler, Mikal Gilmore, Jim Perry, Denis Hamill (of the famous New York writing family) and countless others.
Bud knew all the sporting bigwigs around the country, and it always was a joy to tag along with him, which I often did in Los Angeles and on other occasions we were together in New York, where he took me to not only Toots Shor’s place but also to P.J. Clarke’s, Peter Luger’s, Mama Leone’s, Rao’s and Gallagher’s Steak House, where I wound up having dinner on that New Year’s Eve of 1996 on what was a historic trip for me.
Chapter 25
It was historic because it would be the first time I’d be in New York accompanied by a lady with whom I was in love.
Although we had discussed marriage, I still hadn’t given Gillian a ring, and I planned to do that in New York, where we stayed at the Hilton in Midtown.
I also brought along with me from Los Angeles my stepdaughter from my marriage to M, Leigh Anne Kelley, and her hus
band, Tom. I long had been close with Leigh Anne, a strong-willed lady with two young children who had patiently served as a valuable listening post for me, especially during times of romantic turbulence.
Leigh Anne was twenty years younger than me but three years older than Gillian, and she had voiced serious skepticism about our age disparity. I kiddingly told her that her feelings were inspired by nothing more than sibling rivalry.
I’m sure the motivating factor in my inviting Leigh Anne to New York was to seek her approval of Gillian, not that I would have broken up with Gillian had Leigh Anne voiced disapproval.
The Kelleys also were making their initial New York visit. They and Gillian reacted like I had when I first saw all the towering skyscrapers and heard all the blaring noises.
I knew Leigh Anne would like Gillian—and she did. How could anyone not like Gillian? She had that delightful English accent and that pleasant demeanor, and she was just so easy to be around—no nitpicking, no gratuitous putdowns, no complaints, no unnecessary verbiage—and those days of her getting uptight about a perceived feminist slight as she had one night with me almost four and a half years earlier in Las Vegas long had disappeared.
There was a genuineness about her that made a distinct impression on those with whom she came in contact. “Gillian’s an absolute sweetheart,” said Tom Kelley after spending a few days in her company. Who would have known then that a few years later Tom Kelley would provide valuable relief assistance for me in driving Gillian to the UCLA Medical Center?
On our first full day in New York, we visited a couple museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection—and Gillian and Leigh Anne skated around the ice rink in Central Park. We also walked a lot, and naturally, we stopped at a few saloons where Tom Kelley and I did most of the drinking.
On New Year’s Eve, Leigh Anne had a severe cold and remained in her hotel room.
Tom Kelley, Gillian and I had a late dinner at Gallagher’s and then joined the nearby assemblage on Seventh Avenue. We were too late to get close to Times Square, but we still were near enough to get caught up in the frantic commotion that ensued after the ball dropped signaling the commencement of the New Year.
There were hundreds of thousands of people packed closely together, and everyone was pushing, shoving, shouting and high-fiving in an unrestrained eruption of joy. Suddenly, I forgot about the numbingly cold weather—I think the temperature had dipped to eight degrees Fahrenheit—and kissed Gillian passionately.
“This will be our lucky year—1997 will be the year you become Gillian Krikorian,” I said. She nodded and smiled.
“That’ll be nice,” she said. We soon managed to return to the hotel, traversing a gauntlet of celebrants in varying degrees of sobriety.
The Kelleys returned to Los Angeles the next afternoon, but we stayed for another two days, during which we visited Ellis Island, where we saw the names of my Armenian and Italian grandparents on the outdoor walls that list all the people who arrived to the United States at that immigrant inspection station in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty.
Gillian was in awe at the sight of that storied monument.
“You wonder what all those millions of immigrants who came here thought when they saw the most famous statue in the world,” she said. “I feel quite emotional looking at it. You think of America, and the Statue of Liberty always comes to mind. I also feel a little like those immigrants did. Only I’ll soon be coming back to America on a plane and not be treated like a herd of cattle down in a ship’s steerage like so many of those poor people were when they came here.”
The following day we had lunch in the Windows on the World on the 107th floor in the North Tower of the ill-starred World Trade Center. The place was jammed, and the only reason we were even able to get seated was that my friend Rich Levin, a former Herald Examiner sportswriter who had become the top PR guy for the Major League Baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, was able to secure us a reservation.
As Gillian was gazing with fascination over the magnificent New York skyline, she said, “This is absolutely breathtaking. It’s like being in an airliner and getting an up-close view of New York City.”
It was a couple moments later that I presented Gillian with the wedding ring I had bought her, and her eyes became moist with emotion. “Douglas, this is the happiest day of my life,” she said.
We were now so much in love, and one never could envision at that beautiful moment that a few years later a hijacked 767 American Airliner would crash into the North Tower a few stories below where I had officially validated my marital intentions and that a hospice nurse on that tragic morning would be administering that first shot of morphine that would put Gillian in a comatose state in which she would remain until her death a few days later.
I vividly remember looking out at the New York skyline that day and thinking to myself how stunning the view was. There would be 168 people in the Windows on the World premises that ghastly September 11, 2001 morning—and all would perish, as did everyone above the 92nd floor of the 110-floor building.
Gillian would return to London on January 4, and I returned to Los Angeles the same day. She was set to soon come to Long Beach permanently, and the marriage was set for late September. The script was unfolding perfectly. It was a happy time in both our lives.
Chapter 26
On February 28, 1997, Gillian Howgego, twenty-nine years old, arrived at LAX admittedly in a state of apprehension. She had uprooted herself from her native country, quit a secure job she liked and left behind many close friends and family members.
“It’s a little scary, but nothing compared to what all those immigrants who came through Ellis Island had to go through,” she had said on the phone to me a few days earlier. “Few had any money and had no idea how they’d make it or where they would live. And many didn’t even speak English.”
Gillian was coming to live with me in my modest tract home in east Long Beach.
I don’t know if it was a foreboding of what would occur in the upcoming years, but Gillian arrived on the day of the infamous North Hollywood shootout in which a couple heavily armed bank robbers named Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu had a violent confrontation with dozens of police officers from Los Angeles and nearby cities.
During the forty-four-minute battle that was televised live on two LA television stations by hovering helicopters, there were more than two thousand rounds of ammunition fired by the robbers and police as the area resembled a war zone. Eleven officers and seven civilians suffered gunshot wounds, but incredibly, no one died in the bloody incident except the two robbers.
Soon after Gillian had arrived and I had informed her of the wild gunfight, I remember her saying, “I’m a little superstitious on some things. I hope that’s not a bad omen for me in America.”
Looking southeast on Second Street in the Belmont Shores section of Long Beach, a billboard with Doug’s image and proclaiming, “Outspoken Sports” promotes the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
I sloughed it off, but now I have a slightly different perspective of that statement. After all, Gillian did enter this country on the day of its most notorious modern bank robbery and did pass away during the week of its most notorious terrorist attack.
I’m sure it’s only a strange coincidence, but such chilling bookends to her brief U.S. residency do inspire one to idly reflect on the chilling randomness of coincidence.
Those first few months were a huge adjustment period for Gillian, so accustomed to putting in long workdays and to driving on the left side of thoroughfares and to being around people she knew well. I knew it would take time for her to acclimate herself to her new life in a new country, but her biggest adjustment was her role as my de facto wife.
I was the first man she had lived with in such an arrangement, and at first it didn’t bother me that she didn’t involve herself in normal household chores. I still had a college coed over twice a month to tidy up the place. And while it would have been ni
ce had Gillian once in a while chosen to water the flowers, I wasn’t too bothered that she didn’t because I long had done that myself. And I had a gardener who came weekly to cut the lawn, prune the shrubbery and pull the weeds.
But after awhile, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by her inaction. I was brought up in a family where my mother did the cooking, the washing and the house cleaning and even occasional watering of plants in the yard.
I certainly didn’t expect Gillian to become my private servant—I long had grown accustomed to eating my dinners out and had no plans to change the routine—but I did expect her to do some menial duties around the home.
I think Gillian had been living with me for about six weeks when one afternoon we came home from exercising and I became agitated when I noticed the kitchen was in total disarray, with glasses, dishes and silverware strewn on a counter that needed cleaning. And our bed hadn’t been made, either.
I had written my column for the newspaper that morning, and I hadn’t paid any attention to the disarray when we hurriedly departed the premises for an hour-and-a-half run at El Dorado Park.
But now I did, and I called Gillian into the front room. We sat across from each other, and I knew the time had come for me to express my feelings on the subject.
I also knew I had to do it in a calm, restrained manner, making my point without offending her too deeply.
“You’ve been here now for almost two months, and I’ve never said one word to you about helping with the cleaning and the occasional watering of the roses,” I said. “And I know in the past in London, you did things for yourself in your flat and weren’t concerned about your roommate’s mess. Well, it’s different now. I’m more than a platonic roommate. I’m soon going to be your husband. Just look at the way your mother takes care of the family house. I’m not asking you to do that here. I’m asking you just to help out a little more. It’s no longer just you, Gillian. I’m part of your life now.”
Between the Bylines Page 15