Lost voices in the City of Angels: Remembering Jim Murray, Chick Hearn and Kobe Bryant
Jim Murray saw Babe Ruth hit a home run when he was a boy. As an older man in the last days of his life, Murray knew he had encountered greatness again when a young Kobe Bryant emerged on the Los Angeles sports landscape like the light of a new day.
Murray was a legendary Los Angeles Times sports columnist who watched the Showtime Lakers, witnessed Fernandomania, foretold Magic Johnson’s triumph over HIV and won a Pulitzer Prize while touring continents to chronicle the biggest sports stories in the world. When Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes in the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany, Murray was there, asking: “How do you put a funeral service on the sports page?”
Murray saw it all. In February 1998, six months before his heart stopped beating, he went to see Kobe.
“The last time anyone this good appeared there was a star in the East,” Murray wrote.
Old tales and tributes will pour in Tuesday as the world mourns the first anniversary of the fiery helicopter crash that killed Bryant, 41, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others on a Calabasas hillside. There was light rain, dense fog, and then there was a flash that took another voice from the City of Angels.
Bryant was an 18-time All-Star who led the Lakers to five NBA championships. He was named MVP in 2008, 10 years after Murray urged Bryant’s legions of fans to “get his autograph before he ascends into hoops heaven.”
In the days after Bryant’s death, a massive memorial overtook L.A. Live, the food and entertainment complex across the street from Staples Center. An estimated 250,000 mourners converged on the site, leaving behind cards, candles, flowers, balloons, memorabilia and a trail of tears that circled the globe. Kings coach Luke Walton took a late-night walk through the memorial site when his team visited the Los Angeles Clippers four days after Bryant died, still in shock over the loss of his friend and former teammate.
There were many thousands of people there when I visited the site the next evening. After interviewing mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who couldn’t believe Bryant was gone, I purchased a commemorative Kobe and Gianna T-shirt from one of the street vendors. During the flight back to Sacramento, while staring down at the hills below, I realized the shirt should go to one of my best friends, a lifelong Lakers fan whose eyes welled with tears when I passed along the memento.
Not everyone who grew up in Sacramento shared my friend’s fondness for Kobe while he was feasting on the hearts of Kings at the turn of the century. Bryant was viewed as the villain in a heated playoff rivalry that divided a state, but the outpouring of love and respect — here and around the world — revealed the real nature of his legacy.
“He was the guy that a lot of this generation looked up to,” Walton said. “I think, just like great players before him, you see the impact Michael Jordan had on him and the way he played the game. I think you see guys, whether it’s his moves or you hear guys talk about the ‘Mamba Mentality,’ and just the absolute work ethic and confidence and ability to hit huge shots. I think (those) are things that a lot of the young players are constantly striving to become, so he has left a huge impact on the game and he has influenced an entire generation of players.”
Bryant left something for Walton, too. In his 2018 book, “The Mamba Mentality: How I play,” Bryant mentioned Walton, who was coaching the Lakers at the time, in the same breath as the great Phil Jackson.
“Luke was a very smart player,” Bryant wrote. “He also had certain coaching traits: a bad back, like Phil used to have, and hippie lineage. I used to tell him that all the time. He didn’t find it as funny as I did.
“For real though, Luke had a great feel for the game. He understood how to look at it in sequences, versus looking at it one play at a time, and he was able to communicate very clearly. When I looked at the amalgamation of those things, I could see he was going to be a really good coach.”
Murray didn’t live long enough to see one of Bill Walton’s boys play for and later coach the Lakers, but he got to see Kobe’s first two seasons. Bryant was 19 when Murray died Aug. 16, 1998, eight weeks after the Utah Jazz knocked the Lakers out of the playoffs for the second year in a row, this time in the Western Conference finals.
In his February 15, 1998, column entitled “A Star is born; His name is Kobe,” Murray wrote: “He missed the most crucial shot of the year last year, the one that would have beaten Utah and kept the Lakers in the playoffs had it gone in. … He just shrugged and told himself that, the next time this happened, he wouldn’t miss.”
“My time will come,” Bryant said.
Chick Hearn, the legendary Lakers broadcaster, would live four more years to see Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal win three consecutive NBA championships together from 2000-02. Hearn called the memorable 2002 Western Conference finals series against the Kings and the Lakers’ subsequent sweep of the New Jersey Nets in the NBA Finals. He emceed the championship parade in Los Angeles and then he was gone, too, joining Murray in eternity on Aug. 5, 2002, after hitting his head in a fall at his home in Encino.
Tommy Lasorda, who managed the Los Angeles Dodgers for 20 years, outlived them all, but he finally succumbed to cardiac arrest earlier this month at the age of 93.
They’ve lost some fabled voices in the City of Angels, but sometimes we still hear them sing.
“The things he does with no college experience is beyond belief,” Hearn told Murray, describing the young Bryant. “He has total confidence. He’d walk up to Michael Jordan or a backup guard with the same degree of skill and enthusiasm and expectations of success. He’s a star on and off the court. I’ve seen lots of them come and go but none with the potential of Kobe Bryant. Someday, we’ll be able to brag, ‘We knew him when.’”
This story was originally published January 25, 2021 at 4:16 PM.
