From High Above The Western Sideline

Hearn's affinity for things Oriental isn't limited to tasteless remarks. He and Marge both collect Oriental antiques; their home in Encino, a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, is full of them. Marge and Samantha co-own, and Samantha runs, an antique store in Westchester.

When Hearn isn't on a road trip, he takes special care of his and Marge's dogs, Bichon Frises named Lord Ashley and Sir Oliver Twist. Chick claims the dogs are Marge's and she says they belong to him. "I never thought he'd like them because they're like women's dogs," Marge says. "But he loves them. I think he'd get rid of me before he would those dogs."

Hearn could always make people laugh, but if his humor began to seem more trenchant in the early '70s, his one-liners more stinging than funny, it was no mere coincidence. His 27-year-old son, Gary, who had often helped him keep score during his broadcasts, was found dead of a heroin overdose on May 31, 1972. After six months free of drugs, Gary had spent Memorial Day swimming in the pool at his parents' home. "All of a sudden he said he had to go to the store to get a pack of cigarettes," Hearn recalls. "And we never saw him again. Whoever was with him when he overdosed put him in the backseat of a car, turned on the lights and left him on a quiet street in the Valley."

Hearn didn't burden anyone with his grief, but he and Marge went to the cemetery almost every day for months. And for a long time, when she would pick him up at the airport after he returned from a road trip, they would stop at their son's grave before driving home. "It's difficult to get close to him," says West, who may be Hearn's closest friend, "because he doesn't share a lot of personal things. He bore the brunt of that himself, and I think it changed him."

Before his son died, Hearn had been a popular off-season banquet speaker, but he dropped out of sight almost immediately and spent the summer of 1972 just trying to survive. "After something like that happens, you feel like you're about to explode, like you can't live," he says. "But I knew if I could make it to the next basketball season, I'd be all right." Basketball renewed Hearn, but in the beginning even that was a trial. "I knew I had to be strong," Marge says, "because Chick had to go back to work. And he had to work with all those young boys."

In the end, it was all the young boys who pulled Hearn through, and they're the ones who keep him looking 10 years younger than whatever age he may choose to be. "It's so silly to say, but I really love what I do, really love it," he says.

The reading lamps in the Forum broadcast booth have been turned on, and they light his face from below in such a way that he looks as if he's suspended there in the dark, high above the western sideline, connected to the rest of the world only by voice.