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sight.) From Philly to St. Louis, the flight had stops in Pittsburgh, then Columbus, then Louisville. Three stops to go eight hundred miles. It was the Greyhound bus in the skies. Finally, the trip ended in New York. Overall, five flights with eight total stops, five nights, four games. And my sole on-air function was still to read the halftime statistics. Sure, my friends thought it was cool. But I was now getting very nervous about the immediate future. If Chick didn’t want me, what was the endgame?
    After four games back in Los Angeles, the fourth of which was against the Knicks on a Wednesday night, another road trip was on the docket. We were leaving the next day for a Friday night game in Boston, and then would go on to Cincinnati for a game against the Royals the next night. I got to the airport, checked in and checked my bag, and then went to the curb to hand out the tickets to the players as they got out of their cars and cabs. I gave Jerry West his, I handed Elgin Baylor his—and then the team’s rookie head coach, Butch Van Breda Kolff, pulled in, got out of a cab, and told me to hand him the rest of the tickets. Don’t get on the flight, he said. And I should immediately call Alan Rothenberg at the CSI office.
    Rothenberg would go on to help launch professional soccer in the United States. But in 1967, he was a young lawyer/hatchet man running Jack Kent Cooke’s day-to-day operations. Getting an order to call him under these circumstances couldn’t be a good thing. When I reached him from an airport pay phone, he told me to come immediately to the team offices, which were in a wing of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.
    At that point, even if I wasn’t sure what was going on, the embarrassment was beginning to envelop me. But first I had to go to the United Airlines counter and ask if they could get my bag off the plane before it took off. Try doing that at LAX today. After a long, lonely wait at baggage claim, it came down an empty carousel. I then got in a cab to see Rothenberg, a guy I hadn’t trusted from the beginning.
    Rothenberg was direct. “Look, this isn’t really working out. We’ve hired Hot Rod Hundley to be the new color announcer. And we’re letting you go.”
    And I wasn’t even offered a job to stay with the company.
    Right then, it became clear. I’d been set up. Hot Rod Hundley had retired from the Lakers four years earlier. But before hiring him, the Lakers had used me as a wedge to get Chick to work with somebody . Hearn had always worked alone. Instead of moving Hundley in immediately—which Chick would have resisted—I became the sacrificial lamb. With Hundley, Chick could take solace that at least his new partner had played in the NBA, and wasn’t twenty-two years old. I was angry and upset, and most of all, embarrassed. And I had to turn on the television the next night and watch Chick introduce Hot Rod Hundley, standing right next to him on camera at Boston Garden in a way that I never did.
    Dejected and upset, but still naïve, I called Cooke’s secretary and asked if I could see him. A few days, I’m there. He started in, “Oh, Alan”—that was his “nickname” for me, Alan, my given name, something that no one other than my mother ever called me—“this will be the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll have a good career.”
    I muttered something to the effect of “No thanks to you.” And I walked out.
    Hundley, of course, would go on to become a longtime NBA announcer. He also had one of the great sports quotes of all time. “My biggest thrill came the night Elgin Baylor and I combined for seventy-three points at Madison Square Garden. Elgin had seventy-one of them.”
    Meanwhile, years later, Chick Hearn and I would eventually reconnect in Los Angeles, become friends, and often share laughs about the whole episode. For my money, Chick and Marv Albert are the greatest basketball announcers of all time. And