Deep Inside, There Was Wisdom
From all the years of our very zag-zig relationship — today you are a saint, tomorrow you are a bum — I benefitted from several baubles of wisdom that Mr. Furillo would periodically proclaim. A professional Italian in every breath he drew, he polished his ethnic bona fides every morning before leaving for the office. Mr. Furillo was not so much a sports editor as he was the self-styled leader of the band, the godfather of a sportswriting team. You can’t be a leader without followers, and we young fellows followed him around as if he were flypaper in long pants. He loved the apparent adoration, and we didn’t seem to mind, either. He never mastered the combination to a 1-2-3 temper. He would blow up so fast he barely got to 1. If you ever have walked into a control room and noticed 300 apparently unconnected black wires lying athwart the floor, this was a caricature of Mr. Furillo’s somewhat messy personality.
His Best Line
Spending nearly a decade in the halls of the University of Furillo, I came away with a sound journalistic education, even if some days you did have to cling by one hand from the roof of the newspaper building at 11th and Broadway to gain it. The one Furillo bauble of wisdom I remember best was: “Sports is the Toy Department of life.” As green as I was when I came under his tutelage, this perhaps untintentionally shrewd insight was a sock to my exposed jaw. I don’t know whether the line originated with Mr. Furillo, who died two days ago at the age of 80. But the power of the message jolted my one-rail mind. I was in my 20s then, and, as my grandmother said, “crazy about ball.” I never aspired to do more than to chronicle athletics. Mr. Furillo helped me to grow up, spread out and flee athletics. The unmistakable epigrammatic message of the Toy Department quip was that sportswriting is where you may apprentice for the adult portion of your life.
Here’s How to Survive, Kid
Another valuable lesson Mr. Furillo taught, actually hammered at us, was how to survive — and star — in an underdog role. From the inception of the 1962 merger between the Herald-Express and the Examiner, the born-again Herald-Examiner was the underdog to the Times by a mile. By then, Los Angeles was down to two dailies, and the clunky Times set out every morning to prove that you can be dreary and prevail. Since we could not out-man the gigantic Times, we would outwrite them and tattoo them on single events. We were a peanut and the Times was an elephant. Then as now, the Times covered the news as if it were sleepwalking. Mr. Furillo would assign half of the staff to cover designated events, and by sheer force of multiplicity, we would claim conquest of the Times for one day. When Mr. Furillo uncovered a juicy angle, he would pound away every edition. He was merciless. He would uncover new angles, and then swing away at a topic until its mother would not have recognized its mutilated form.
Postscript
After leaving the Herald-Examiner for a fling in sports talk radio, he returned to print journalism and traveled to a few newspapers, as many of us have. As a wise-guy columnist with a winking eye on the wider world, Mr. Furillo would have made readers forget nearly everyone if only he had taken his own advice.