Judo Gene LeBell

Gene LeBell, regarded as America’s first martial arts sensation before parlaying his athleticism into a career as a professional wrestler, actor and stuntman, has died at the age of 89, his family confirmed.

LeBell, who had been in declining health for the past eight months, died in his sleep at home in Sherman Oaks, with his loving wife of years, Midge, by his side on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022.

“He was larger than life, and he was so kind. If you said you liked his shirt, he would take it off and give it to you,” Midge LeBell said. “I am devastated. It’s very difficult. I have been with him for so many years. I don’t know how you go on without him. I am so used to him being there. He’s not hurting anymore. He was a wonderful man and was so good to so many. There is nothing bad you can really say about him. He was a good person, so I am sure he is doing well where he is at now. I am sure he is happy now. I want to thank everybody in the world who has said such wonderful things about him and all the prayers that were said for him. I am thanking them for both he and I.”

Midge and Gene were married twice. The second time, they said their vows on a motorcycle as Gene performed a wheelie with Midge holding on, followed close behind by the minister on a four-wheeler. The couple wore matching red, white, and blue wedding attire and Midge wore flowers in her helmet.

“Judo Gene” LeBell was revered for his strength and tenacity and often referred to as “the toughest man alive.” Beneath the rugged demeanor, the “Godfather of Grappling” was also known for his warmth and generosity. For years, he taught martial arts in Southern California.

Born Ivan Gene LeBell on Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles, LeBell grew up at the famed Olympic Auditorium, where his mother, Aileen Eaton, was a boxing and wrestling promoter from 1942 to 1980. Eaton was the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

“Fighters practically raised the young LeBell at the Main Street Gym where he started going at 7 years old,” Midge LeBell said. He once sparred with legendary boxer Sugar Ray Robinson as a teenager. He also trained with wrestlers Lou Thesz, and Karl Gotch while growing up.

It’s no wonder LeBell flocked to combat sports and martial arts.

In 1954 and ’55, LeBell won the AAU National Judo Championships heavyweight and overall divisions. He then embarked on his professional wrestling career, implementing his years of judo and catch wrestling and helping popularize the holds and submission attempts that remain in the sports entertainment industry to this day.

LeBell famously wore a pink gi and would invite anybody to take a turn on the mat with him if they had anything to say about it. The pink uniform originated from a trip to Japan where a pair of red socks, or shorts, made their way into the laundry, turning his white uniform to pink. With only one uniform, he wore it and beat the competition. The newspaper the following day had a story saying the American radish wins. LeBell thought it was because he had red hair before someone told him it was because of his pink attire. He wore the pink gi from then on.

LeBell was a pioneer in the sport of MMA before there was MMA. One of the first martial artists to train in wrestling, judo, boxing, karate, and other combat arts, he blended the techniques into an efficient fighting style. In 1963, in Salt Lake City, LeBell took on boxer Milo Savage the fifth-ranked light heavyweight boxer in the world. Kenpo Master Ed Parker asked LeBell to take on the fighter after a challenge was issued stating that a boxer could easily beat any martial artist. LeBell wore a gi for the fight, and Savage had his body greased to make it difficult for LeBell to grab him. LeBell was victorious, choking out the boxer in the fourth round, sparking a riot in the auditorium.

Highly decorated in judo and jiu-jitsu, LeBell also began teaching grappling to notable names: Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Benny “the Jet” Urquidez, Roddy Piper, Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, Gokor Chivichyan, Steve McQueen, George Reeves, Robert Duvall, John Saxon and many more.

LeBell’s top student, Gokor Chivichyan, started training with him at the age of 16 and now runs the Hayastan MMA Academy in North Hollywood. “I look at Gene as my second father. He had a big heart. He was a good man. We are going to miss him a lot,” Chivichyan said of his teacher.

In 2006, LeBell even welcomed an unsuspecting Daily News reporter to the Hayastan Academy for a lesson that went about as you would think when LeBell started it with his common non-serious threat: “Alright, you bums! Let’s get working, or I’ll burn your houses down.”

In the 1960s, LeBell began acting and doing stunts, including in three movies with Elvis Presley. On the set of “The Green Hornet,” LeBell struck up a friendship with martial arts icon Bruce Lee, and they began cross-training, with LeBell showing Lee his pain-inflicting holds, locks and throws, and Lee demonstrating his lightning-quick kicks and strikes. Lee and LeBell had a rocky start to their friendship after LeBell hoisted Lee on his back in a fireman’s carry without Lee’s cooperation. Eventually, LeBell put Lee down, and the pair became friends.

LeBell’s students included AnnMaria De Mars, the first American to ever win a gold medal at the World Judo Championships in 1984, and De Mars’ daughter, Ronda Rousey, who became the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo by winning bronze at the 2008 Beijing Olympics before embarking on her illustrious MMA career.

“Very, very few people believed in me at the very beginning of my MMA career, you could literally count them on one hand. He was one of the people trying to convince my mom to let me do it, but he was also privately trying to convince me not to do it. He totally supported me, he was telling my mom to let me do it, and he was telling me, ‘I’ve won every R-E-A-L fight and never made a penny and lost every R-E-E-L fight and I am comfortably retired, think about that kid.’ He said he would help me out with this MMA stuff, but he was always trying to get me stunt jobs and to meet the right people in the stunt works so I would have somewhere to go after fighting. He not only tried to help me get into fighting, but he also helped me think about life afterward before anybody would even entertain the thought. He was already trying to get me out and convince me that I am more than just a fighter and capable of so much more,” Rousey said of her longtime friend and mentor, LeBell.

Rousey’s husband, Travis Browne, a former top-ranked UFC heavyweight fighter, met LeBell before meeting his future wife. LeBell gave Browne one of the coveted patches that he always had on hand to make a fan smile. Browne put a patch featuring Rousey and Lebell in his gym bag, and there it remained for five years before he met, fell in love with and married Rousey. “Uncle Gene let him (Browne) know all about me before we met. He put me over to my future husband before we ever met,” Rousey said.

LeBell also helped Rousey secure her nickname “Rowdy” from his former black belt student Rowdy Roddy Piper. “He told Rowdy Piper that he would stretch him if he didn’t let me use it,” Rousey said with a chuckle as she recounted the story.

As Rousey rose to prominence in the UFC as the first woman on its roster and its first female champion, LeBell was always in her corner, often seen with a stopwatch to record her first-round finishes. She has a tattoo of her winning fight times on her right wrist down her forearm. “I got a tattoo of how many seconds it took me to win all my (MMA) matches. My first match, the official time, and his time differed by two seconds, and I was like (expletive) the official time, Gene’s time is what matters, so I tattooed his time.” Rousey and mother De Mars gifted LeBell a new stopwatch for his 80th birthday in 2012.

In a story in the L.A. Daily News in 2011 on Rousey’s breakout potential in the sport, nearly a year and a half before she made her UFC debut, LeBell offered his assessment of his pupil.

“She gets in that ring, and she owns it mentally,” said LeBell, then 78, who couldn’t resist touching upon his pro wrestling background and growling to describe Rousey colorfully. “She says, ‘This is my house. This is my bedroom, my kitchen, my garage and my front room,’ LeBell continued.

“She’s gonna annihilate you. She’s gonna mutilate you. She’s gonna assassinate you.”

In the end, LeBell had appeared in more than 1,000 films, shows and commercials. His roles went from such television series as “Mission: Impossible,” “I Spy,” “The Wild Wild West,” “Baretta,” “Married … with Children,” and “Baywatch” to feature films “Raging Bull,” “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” and “Ed Wood.” One of his last appearances was in “Men In Black II” in 2002. LeBell was presented with the Taurus Lifetime Achievement Award on May 13, 2017 for his outstanding contribution to the world of action feature films. The Taurus World Stunt Awards are held yearly to honor stunt performers in movies.

It has been said that Brad Pitt’s character of stuntman Cliff Booth in the 2019 Quentin Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood,” which included a memorable sequence with Lee, was an homage to LeBell.

LeBell was also at the center of one of the most highly anticipated fights of the 1970s. The “War of the Worlds” pitted heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, against Japanese professional wrestling star Antonio Inoki on June 26, 1976, in Tokyo, with LeBell working as the referee. Watched by more than a billion people worldwide, the fight ended in a draw, with LeBell’s score (71-71) determining the outcome after one judge scored it for Ali and the other for Inoki.

Into his 80s, LeBell was still working as a Nevada and California Athletic Commission MMA judge, scoring fights ringside with his ever-present bag of candy, which he always shared, tucked inside a larger bag resting at his feet.

Tributes came from around the world following the announcement of his passing, including on Twitter from Chuck Norris, Triple H, Titus Welliver and others.

LeBell is survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

***

One day in 1966, stuntman Gene LeBell was called to the set of the television series “The Green Hornet” to deal with Bruce Lee, the future martial arts superstar, who played Kato, the crime-fighting Hornet’s sidekick. Lee, it seems, was hurting the other stuntmen.

The stunt coordinator asked LeBell — a former national judo champion and professional wrestler — to teach Lee a lesson, perhaps with a headlock.

LeBell would later recall in many interviews that he went further: He picked Lee up, slung him over his back and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you!” When LeBell relented, he was surprised that Lee didn’t attack him. Instead they came to appreciate their different skill sets, and LeBell became one of Lee’s favorite stuntmen.

They also trained together, with LeBell’s expertise as a grappler meeting Lee’s fist-flashing kung fu brilliance.

LeBell never became as famous as Lee, who died in 1973, but into his early 80s — when he played, among other roles, a corpse falling from a coffin in an episode of the TV series “Castle” — he remained busy as one of Hollywood’s most soughtafter stuntmen. At 20, he was walloped by John Wayne in “Big Jim McLain.”

Nine years later, he was kicked by Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii.”

And he was knocked around a few times by James Caan.

“Every star in Hollywood has beaten me up,” LeBell told AARP magazine in 2015. “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are. The man who enjoys his work never goes to work. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing stunts.”

LeBell died Aug. 9 at his home in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 89. His death was announced by Kellie Cunningham, his trustee and business manager, who did not specify the cause.

Ivan Gene LeBell was born Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles. His mother, Aileen (Goldstein) LeBell, promoted boxing and wrestling matches at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles; his father, Maurice, was an osteopath and diet doctor who died after being paralyzed in a swimming accident in 1941. His mother later married Cal Eaton, with whom she promoted fights.

LeBell started to learn to fight at 7, when his mother sent him to the Los Angeles Athletic Club.

“I went up to Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis and said, ‘I want to be a wrestler,’” LeBell was quoted as saying by the Slam Wrestling website in 2005. Lewis, he recalled, asked him: “Do you want to roll? Do you want to do Greco-Roman? Do you want to do freestyle? Or do you want to grapple?”

“What’s grappling?” Le-Bell asked.

“That’s a combination of everything,” Lewis said. “You can hit ‘em, eye-gouge ‘em.”

He was sold. He started learning judo at 12 (although his mother told The Los Angeles Times in 1955 that he had been inspired a little later, in high school, when he was beaten up by a smaller teenager who knew judo), and by 1954 his proficiency had grown to an elite level: He won both the heavyweight class and the overall title in that year’s national American Amateur Union championships. He successfully defended his title the next year at the Olympic Auditorium, in front of his mother.

Realizing that judo was no way to make a living, he shifted to professional wrestling later in 1955.

LeBell never became a big name in the ring or even a great wrestler, either under his own name or in a mask as “the Hangman.” But he gained notice in his role as an enforcer, in which he compelled other wrestlers to stick to the script, even when they didn’t want to.

His work as a stuntman began in earnest in the 1960s and continued on TV series such as “Route 66,” “I Spy,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “The Fall Guy,” in which Lee Majors starred as a film stuntman. He also appeared in movies such as “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the Steven Seagal crime drama “Out for Justice” (1991).

LeBell had a long list of acting credits as well, mostly in bit parts. He often played referees and sometimes a thug, a henchman, a bartender or, as in “Raging Bull” (1990), a ring announcer.

LeBell also worked over the years with many wrestlers, including Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ronda Rousey, and trained with Chuck Norris, the martial artist and actor.

More recently director Quentin Tarantino used Le-Bell’s initial encounter with Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” as the basis for a scene in his 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Brad Pitt, as a stuntman, threw the Lee character into a car.

LeBell is survived by his wife, Eleanor (Martindale) LeBell, who is known as Midge and whom he married twice and divorced once; his son, David; his daughter, Monica Pandis; his stepson, Danny Martindale; his stepdaughter, Stacey Martindale; and four grandchildren. His brother, Mike, a wrestling promoter, died in 2009. His first marriage ended with his wife’s death; he also married and divorced two other women.

[New York Times]

***

Gene LeBell, the colorful judo champion, wrestler and stuntman who trained Bruce Lee, fought Elvis Presley and John Wayne in the movies and was an inspiration for Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has died. He was 89.

LeBell died in his sleep early Tuesday morning at his home in Sherman Oaks, his trustee and business manager, Kellie Cunningham, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Affectionately known as the “Godfather of Grappling” and “Judo” Gene LeBell, he was a two-time AAU national judo champion early in his career. Later, he taught his masterful submission techniques to Lee, Chuck Norris, pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, MMA fighter Ronda Rousey and many, many others.

With his legendary strong handshake, red hair, weathered face and battered nose, LeBell was universally admired by fighters and wrestlers around the world.

By his own admission, “every star in Hollywood beat me up” when he was a stuntman and actor. Wayne punched him square in the face in Big Jim McLain (1952), Presley karate-kicked him between the eyes in Blue Hawaii (1961), Gene Hackman went toe-to-toe with him in Loose Cannon (1990), and Burt Reynolds kicked him where it hurts in Hard Time (1998).

Even Steve Martin roughed him up and threw him into a swimming pool in The Jerk (1979).

“The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are,” LeBell liked to say.

On ABC’s The Green Hornet, he met Lee for the first time and forged a friendship with the Hong Kong martial arts star despite a rocky introduction.

During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”

In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”

He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”

To LeBell, the altercation revealed that Lee’s repertoire was without submission maneuvers, armbars and takedowns. “He came to my school and worked out for over a year, privately,” LeBell said, “and I went and worked out with him at his school.

“I taught him judo and wrestling and … finishing holds that he later worked into some movies. And he showed me a lot of his kicks and striking.”

In The Way of the Dragon (1972), Lee polished off Norris with a chokehold, and in Enter the Dragon (1973), he employed an armbar finish to submit Sammo Hung.

When Quentin Tarantino made Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he used LeBell as an influence for the character of stunt double Cliff Booth (Oscar winner Pitt) and adapted the LeBell/Lee confrontation into a much-debated fight scene between Booth and Lee (Mike Moh in the movie).

Booth also had an accusation of murder hovering over his head, which might have been a veiled reference to LeBell being charged in the murder of private investigator Robert Duke Hall in 1976. LeBell was acquitted of that charge, and his conviction as an accessory to the crime was later overturned.

Ivan Gene LeBell was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 9, 1932. His mother, Aileen Eaton, promoted fights at the Olympic Auditorium and was the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

LeBell moved to Japan to study judo and won U.S. titles in the 1950s before segueing to pro wrestling, learning the art of catch wrestling (a grappling style) from Ed “Strangler” Lewis, Lou Thesz and Karl Gotch.

From 1962-82, he ran the Los Angeles territory of the National Wrestling Alliance with his brother Mike.

The combat sport pioneer participated in what some credit as the first televised sanctioned mixed martial arts match on Dec. 2, 1963, in Salt Lake City when he took on light heavyweight boxer Milo Savage.

The impetus for the bout came from an article written in Rogue magazine by Jim Beck.

Under the headline “The Judo Bums,” Beck wrote that “judo … is a complete fraud … Every judo man I’ve ever met was a braggart and a show-off … Any boxer can beat a judo man.” Beck put up $1,000 to prove it.

LeBell said he was chosen by his peers because “you’re the most sadistic bastard we know,” and was put up against Beck’s choice of opponent — Savage.At a TV interview the day before the bout, LeBell choked out the interviewer, then screamed into the camera, “Come to the arena tomorrow night and watch me annihilate, mutilate and assassinate your local hero because one martial artist can beat any 10 boxers.”

The bout lasted four rounds and ended when LeBell submitted Savage to a rear naked chokehold. The crowd threw debris and chairs into the ring, and Savage had to be revived by LeBell’s cornermen.

“It sounds like I’m blowing my own horn, and I don’t mean to — I represented all the martial arts. I never said I was doing only judo or karate or kenpo,” he said. “I never said one art is better than the others. They’re all good. You should learn everything. You’re not a complete martial artist unless you do everything.”

He was rewarded when he fought Elvis in Blue Hawaii. The King was so happy with his work, he gave him a $100 bill. “I didn’t have any money then,” he said. “I used to eat every other day. So, I went out and I had the biggest fillet mignon and even tipped the waiter.”

He also did stunts for Presley’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style five years later.

While serving as the stunt coordinator on The Munsters, he appeared on a 1964 episode as grappler Tarzan McGirk in a bout against “The Masked Marvel” (Fred Gwynne’s Herman Munster in disguise).

As a stuntman across five decades on the small screen, LeBell popped up in everything from Gomer Pyle: USMC, Mission: Impossible, Ironside, Batman and The Beverly Hillbillies in the 1960s to The Six Million Dollar Man and Starsky & Hutch in the 1970s, Taxi, The Fall Guy and Married … With Children in the 1980s and even Reno 911! in the 2000s.

On the big screen, he did stunts, often uncredited, for the original Planet of the Apes movies, the 1974 disaster films Earthquake and The Towering Inferno and the Naked Gun flicks, plus King Kong (1976), Airplane! (1980), Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), Independence Day (1996), Bruce Almighty (2003) and Smoking Aces (2006).

In  Raging Bull (1980), he had a speaking role as the ring announcer for one of Jake LaMotta’s (Robert De Niro) fights. Four years earlier, he was in another ring, as the referee in the wacky Muhammad Ali vs. wrestler Antonio Inoki match in Tokyo.

Legend has it that as stunt coordinator on Steven Seagal’s Out of Justice (1991), LeBell was involved in an on-set altercation with the actor and allegedly choked him out.

LeBell never denied the incident, though Seagal did.

In Bloodfist IV: Die Trying (1992), he attempted to stop legendary kickboxer Don Wilson from hot-wiring his car and, naturally, finished up battered and bruised in a pile of garbage cans.

He trained mixed martial artist and WWE wrestler Rousey and her mother, judo champion AnnMaria De Mars.

“Ronda is the best woman I have ever been associated with, as far as fighting goes,” he said in 2018. “So, when you see Ronda, tell her Gene sent you, that Uncle Gene sent you. But don’t get her mad. Don’t get her mad.”

He authored more than 12 books, including Gene LeBell’s Grappling World — The Encyclopaedia of Finishing Holds, Gene LeBell’s Handbook of Judo, Pro-Wrestling Finishing Holds and The Grappling Club Master, and filmed his techniques for instructional videos.

Survivors include his wife, Eleanor (he called her “Midge”); children Monica and David; stepchildren Danny and Stacey; and grandchildren Daniel, Tyler and Nicholas.

As for his work as a stunt double, LeBell revealed he loved that work because “they don’t even look at you, talk to you, but then you go and turn a car over, set yourself on fire and all of a sudden, the star comes up and says, ‘Hey, that’s great,’ and then you’re buds.”

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a chat with Les Murakami

If you have a story to tell, I’m all ears.

That’s what I enjoy, listening to stories — even if they’re exaggerated.

Long-time fellow staffer Stephen Tsai tells good stories, especially about former colleagues. Legendary journalist Jim Becker experienced unbelievable exploits and he wrote a book about it.

So in my search for a good conversation, I figured that since it’s nearing father’s day I’d chat with Les Murakami, whom I consider the father and godfather of University of Hawaii baseball.

The younger generation only knows that the Manoa campus stadium is named after him. But little do they know that he built a program from ground zero, maybe below that. When he took the job in 1971, he had no field to practice or play (UH played games at Ala Wai), tattered uniforms (the reason he used jerseys from his Sheridan baseball franchise) and was only given $500 to start up the program. If not for the work of Les, his family, friends and host of volunteers, there wouldn’t be a program, a College World Series berth, 11 NCAA appearances and two iterations of stadiums (an aluminum-seated facility and the current one now).

Friday’s casual interview at the Murakami home morphed into an oftentimes amusing round table exchange among Les, his wife Dot, and gregarious Brian Kitaoka, Les’ health aide for the past four years.

Les, 86, is doing well, maintains a sharp mind and a vivid memory and is as blunt as ever.

Three years ago, Les was diagnosed with cancer of the rectum. It’s something not widely known but the Murakamis are OK talking about.

“The doctor’s telling me this place here is cancer(ous) and she tells me, ‘Hey, you better listen.’ I tell her, ‘Why should I listen, I know what I got.’ ” Les said. “Not gonna change.”

“I look at it this way, if the Lord wants to take me, ‘Go ahead.’ ” Les added.

“He went through three cycles of chemo and he never lost a hair,” Brian said.

“He’s amazing because he had this major stroke (in 2000),” Dot said. “He’s really a survivor.”

Les is still ambulatory and walks short distances with a cane.

“Thank goodness for Brian because Brian takes him out all over,” Dot said. “Brian stretches him, and he does take walks. He goes to PT (once a week). … Before that he was doing water therapy but he stopped when he got his cancer.

“He’s good, you know, but hey, with somebody who has half a brain (portion of it was removed because of the stroke) and had cancer and still can talk, talk, talk and his memory is still good.”

And the banter between Les and Brian usually starts with an insult and ends with a laugh.

One day they were driving past Queen Ka’ahumanu Elementary along Pensacola Street and Les tells Brian, “I went there … I’m not high-class, you know.” Said Brian: “I realized that the first day I worked for you.”

That was just the beginning of a lively session and Les was very obliging to tell his stories:

Kolohe from the start

“I used to go to Koloa Elementary School (on Kauai) but I was too young they said, so I couldn’t go first grade and I used to get really mad. Hell, I was one of the smartest guys, how come I cannot go first grade when the other guys going first grade?” Les said.

“My mother checked Lawai (School and) I could go first grade … so I’m in the classroom, I got the boys and we’re all playing in the room, the teacher said if you don’t want to listen, get out there and play, go in the yard. So I told all the guys, OK, let’s go, and went and we played softball.”

Added Dot: “When I went to a funeral the first grade teacher was still there, and she told my son Rob, I hope you’re not like your father, because your father gave me such a bad time.”

The franchise and the chatterbox

Les credited Derek Tatsuno as being the most important player in the program’s history. “Before I had Derek, I used to draw 100 to 200 people, and then when Derek came, it was standing room only.”

But Les acknowledged, his favorite player was someone else.

“Gotta be Ron Nomura. Because the guy is just like another coach of the field.

“He’s the only guy I know that can talk to the player, who can do all the talking and yet his mind is still (in the game).  He moves people around like a coach. He’s not a 100 percent great player but he’s a player that’s a coach. Amazing.

“We were playing — I’m not sure if it was New Mexcio or Santa Clara — all of a sudden the coach comes out and calls time, and he comes to talk to me. He tell me, ‘you gotta tell your catcher to shut up.’

“I tell him, ‘You show me in the rule book where it says catcher cannot talk?’ You know what he tells me? He tells me your catcher’s ‘different.’ ‘What do you mean different? You can do the same thing, get your catcher to talk.’ He tells me, nobody can talk like yours.”

1980, most talented team

“Oh yeah. That was the most talented team. That’s why we went far (College World Series). My teams usually we don’t have power. But that 1980 team, we had some power. I had probably the most powerful player I’ve ever had. Good hitter. He could hit the long ball. That was (5-foot-5 slugger from Waipahu) Greg Oniate.”

Les remember going to Austin, Texas, for the regionals.

“We’re playing Pan American the first game and we come off the bus. It’s about 90-something degrees. All those players from Pan American are in the swimming pool and they’re yelling at us, Oh, (Alan) Maria is waiting for you guys. He was their ace pitcher from Waipahu. We coming off the bus and Oniate is behind me. He says, ‘What you talking about, he’s waiting for us, I’m waiting for him.’ We hit that guy in batting practice every day. Coach, don’t worry, we going get him.”

UH beat Pan American 8-4 and the Rainbows tagged Maria for 15 hits over six innings.

The rival coach

The late San Diego State coach Jim Dietz. who passed away this past March at age 83, was a rival who always tried to get an advantage. He would ask opposing coaches if they were starting a right-hander or left-hander. Dietz then would return the favor and tell him what he was throwing.

“So the first inning, he brings in his left-hander. In the second inning he brings in a right-hander,” Les said.

But Les recalled when that tactic backfired when SDSU played USC, a day before the Aztecs were scheduled to play UH.

With Les, Nomura and Carl Furutani scouting in the stands, Dietz pulled the same pitching ploy.

“Right after that, USC started going after San Diego State, (you) hear the guys … arguing back and forth, yelling at each other. (When) the game (was) over, you think the guys are going to shake hands, they come over to shake hands, (then) Pow, pow, pow, the guys they fighting. The two sides, they get bust up.”

Afterward Deitz sees Les in the stands, approaches him and says, “I don’t think we can play tomorrow. So I said, ‘What do you mean you cannot play, the game is scheduled.’ He tell me, yeah, but they’re going to be big rain tonight, there’s going to get one storm tonight, I don’t think the field’s going to be ready.”

The next day around noon, Les goes to check the field and sees (radio broadcaster) Don Robbs and (UH sports information director) Eddie Inouye. “Nothing wrong with the field they tell me. Everything look OK,” Les said.

“So I was go home, come back about 3 o’clock thinking we going to play, right?

“And here’s frickin’ Deitz with hose pipe, shooting water at home plate. I watch him pretty soon the darn thing becomes flooded. Then Deitz disappears. When he comes back, he has two frickin’ ducks and he puts them in the pool. I’m not kidding you. He had the SID over there. He told the SID take the picture and send it to Advertiser and Star-Bulletin.”

Rich Hill and Jocelyn Alo

“I thought he did a fantastic job, I know he only got so much talent,” Les said of first-year UH coach Rich HillWhat do you think of Alo?

“Wow. Most amazing Wahine I’ve seen.”

Give some respect

“They only see what he is today, but they don’t see the effort and hard work and sacrifices that went in to making this program what it is today,” Brian said. “I don’t think the public really knows the sacrifice and the determination he had in developing this baseball program. They look at it, they got a stadium named after him but behind that, a lot of sacrifices and a lot of efforts were put on him and Dot to move this program forward.”

Dot: “Actually our friends, boy did they come through for us.”

“One person who should be recognized and should have a plaque is Charles Ushijima. He was the one that believed in him.”

”Charlie was a legislature,” Les said. “And he helped me and he became the booster group president. He helped us so much.”

“One thing I’m most proud of, is that I don’t know he does it, but he has so many people that’s willing to work, and he’s doing nothing,” said Dot, Les’ wife for 58 years. “He would ask people and they’d work hard. He had big dreams.”

Dick Vitale cancer free

Finally, Dick Vitale is officially cancer free.

The iconic college basketball announcer revealed on Twitter Wednesday afternoon that he has officially been given the all-clear after multiple lengthy battles with cancer.

Vitale, 83, has battled cancer twice in the past year — first with melanoma last August and then again after he was diagnosed with Lymphoma in October. He started treatments and chemotherapy, and ended up missing most of last season.

Vitale returned briefly on ESPN in what was an emotional moment during the Gonzaga-UCLA game in November, but he stepped away for good in January while dealing with vocal cord dysplasia.

He said in April that he was cleared to “ring the bell” after seven months of treatments, and then was finally given the all-clear on Wednesday.

Vitale has essentially been at ESPN since the beginning. He joined the network for the 1979-80 college basketball season, and called the first ever college game shown on ESPN. He’s been an iconic voice in the sport ever since, and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.

Fittingly enough, Vitale was honored with the Jimmy V Award at the ESPYs earlier this summer. Vitale actually presented Jim Valvano with the Arthur Ashe Courage award just months before the legendary coach died in 1993, and Vitale has been a big champion for the V Foundation for Cancer Research ever since.

Vin Scully

Vin Scully, the gentlemanly, yarn-spinning play-by-play man whose mellifluous voice provided the soundtrack to Dodger baseball from Brooklyn to Los Angeles for a jaw-dropping 67 seasons, has died. He was 94.

Scully, a member of the Dodgers organization from 1950 until his retirement following the 2016 regular season, died Tuesday at his home in Hidden Hills, the Dodgers announced.

When he bid farewell to the broadcast booth, he had called nearly half of the games for a franchise that was born in 1890.

Always even-tempered and an easy listen, Scully was credited with turning Los Angeles into a “transistor town” — his broadcasts were pumped throughout the L.A. Coliseum (the team’s first home out west) and then Dodger Stadium and wafted from traffic jams and street-side venues throughout the sprawling city.

“When a game is on the air, the physical presence of his voice is overwhelming,” wrote Robert Creamer for a 1964 Sports Illustrated profile of Scully titled, “The Transistor Kid.”

“His pleasantly nasal baritone comes out of radios on the back counters of orange juice stands, from transistors held by people sitting under trees, in barber shops and bars, and from cars everywhere — parked cars, cars waiting for red lights to turn green, cars passing you at 65 on the freeways, cars edging along next to you in rush-hour traffic jams.”

It was such a shame that because many distributors refused to carry Time Warner Cable’s Dodgers channel in a cost dispute, most TV viewers in L.A. were unable to hear the great Scully at work for several years.

Inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982, Scully also called MLB games for NBC starting in 1983. (He received a Peabody Award that year.) On the network’s Game of the Week, he was partnered with Joe Garagiola.

Earlier, Scully did The Masters and other golf tournaments as well as tennis and NFL contests for CBS. It was Scully who did the play-by-play on the NFC championship game in January 1982 in which the 49ers’ Joe Montana threw a last-minute touchdown pass to Dwight Clark to stun the Dallas Cowboys.

Through all that, Scully continued to serve as the voice of the Dodgers.

“His timing is impeccable,” Dodgers broadcaster Rick Monday told Sports Illustrated in May 2016. “He’s never in a rush. It’s like the game waits for him. We have a little joke among us. When Vin starts one of his stories, the batter is going to hit three foul balls in a row, and he’ll have plenty of time to get it in. When the rest of us starts one, the next is a ground-ball double play to end the inning.”

In 2010, the American Sportscasters Association named him the greatest sportscaster of the 20th century.

Scully was smooth and cool and made it sound easy. He didn’t talk too much or hyperventilate for the home team. When the Dodgers won the 1959 National League pennant, his line was vintage: “We go to Chicago.” That was one of the few times he ever referred to the Dodgers as “we.”

Scully’s honey-soaked voice was an instrument, his pace varied, from rat-a-tat to complete silence, allowing the crowd and background noise to fill things in. He left the microphone for two minutes during the roar that followed Hank Aaron’s record-setting 715th home run in 1974.

For Kirk Gibson’s dramatic ninth-inning blow in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series that would propel the Dodgers to the title, Scully said: “She is gone! In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

“Mine, I guess, is no style at all. I’m just myself, coming to chat with the audience,” he once said.

When Bill Buckner of the Red Sox allowed a grounder to slip between his legs in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, capping a crazy comeback by the New York Mets, Scully said:

“A little roller up along first … behind the bag … it gets through Buckner! Here comes [Ray] Knight, and the Mets win it!”

Another one of Scully’s more memorable calls came when he “time-stamped” Sandy Koufax’s fourth career no-hitter, this one a perfect game. “The time on the scoreboard is 9:44,” he told his radio listeners. “The date, September the 9th, 1965.”

He described the scene at Dodger Stadium: “There’s 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies.”

“More than a half-century later, it still raises goosebumps,” Bob Costas recalled in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech in July 2018. “The building of the drama and anticipation, the meticulous attention to detail, the keen eye of a reporter blended with the graceful rose of a poet. A perfect performance on the mound matched, and enhanced, by a perfect performance in the booth.”

Scully’s skill was particularly evident in the tedious games that invariably came up. His forte was his storytelling. He mixed in vivid and thoughtful digressions that kept fans glued to his words, as likely to embark on an architectural review of a ballpark, literary or historical references or other engaging info. He brought out the color and life of the game beyond the lines.

Away from the field, Scully was heard on TV shows like Mister Ed, Highway to Heaven, Brooklyn Bridge and The X-Files (Gillian Anderson’s character is named for him) and in the 1962 Glenn Ford film Experiment in Terror. He even hosted a game show (It Takes Two) and his own afternoon TV talk show.

His wife of 47 years, Sandi, died in January 2021. Survivors include his children, Kevin, Todd, Erin, Kelly and Catherine; 21 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

“We have lost an icon,” Dodgers president & CEO Stan Kasten said in a statement. “The Dodgers’ Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever. I know he was looking forward to joining the love of his life, Sandi. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family during this very difficult time. Vin will be truly missed.”

Vincent Edward Scully was born in The Bronx on Nov. 29, 1927. His father, a traveling salesman, died when he was 4, and he grew up in an apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. His love for sportscasting was fueled when he crawled underneath the family’s wooden radio console to absorb the roar of the crowd during game broadcasts.

At Fordham University, he worked on the school’s paper, ran the radio station, wrote as a stringer for The New York Times and was a poor-hitting outfielder on the baseball team. He also sang in a quartet called The Shaving Mugs.

Scully served two years in the U.S. Navy before graduating from Fordham in 1949. He began his professional broadcasting career as a staff announcer at radio station WTOP in Washington, where a CBS executive noticed him and took him to see Red Barber, the network’s No. 1 sportscaster.

When CBS needed someone in an emergency to work the Boston University-Maryland football game at Fenway Park, Barber called Scully. Later, Barber suggested to Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, that Scully would make a good addition to the booth at Ebbets Field, and Scully was hired in 1950 at $5,000 a year.

Naive and good-natured, Scully failed to file travel expense reports, and the earnest announcer nearly went broke the first year.

He had replaced Ernie Harwell (who had left to join the New York Giants) on the Dodgers broadcasts, the No. 3 man behind Barber and Connie Desmond. Then Desmond departed and Scully moved up a notch. By the beginning of the 1954 season, Barber had jumped to the New York Yankees and the Dodgers had themselves a new golden throat, 26-year-old Scully.

With the Yankees in town on July 31, 2013, Scully reminisced on the air about the memorable home runs he had witnessed: Bobby Thomson’s shocking sudden-death game-winner that sent the Giants past Brooklyn and into the 1951 World Series; Aaron’s shot that moved him past Babe Ruth; and Gibson’s unthinkable blast.

Scully had another, less-known one — from Game 4 of the 1963 World Series, with the Dodgers one win away from sweeping their bitter rivals — that revealed the humility that marked the man and his career.

Scully talked about how the Yankees’ Mel Allen, another legendary play-by-play man, had been suffering from severe laryngitis. Doctors told him to stay subdued, and Allen remained in control through three games of the Series, broadcast by NBC (Scully also was working for the network).

But when Mickey Mantle of the Yankees homered off Koufax to tie the score 1-1 in the seventh, “Everything went for broke,” said Scully, who had worked the first half of the game before stepping aside. “Forget about the caution with his voice. Allen gave a great call, but it was too long and too hard for his throat, and he just came apart.

“Mel tried to speak, but nothing would really come out. I was supposed to go down to the clubhouse if the Yankees lost to do the Dodgers celebration. However, [NBC Sports head Tom] Gallery tapped Mel on the shoulder as if to say, ‘Give the microphone to Vin.’ And I felt horrible; my heart was broken for Mel.”

Scully called the end of the game, won by the Dodgers. Allen was fired the next season and never called another World Series.

“Here was Mel on the world stage, this great moment … that was a valuable lesson for me,” Scully said. “There but for the grace of God go I. It could happen to me anytime, anywhere.”

Nothing like that ever happened to Scully, and he bowed out on his own terms at San Francisco’s AT&T Park on Oct. 2, 2016. As Giants reliever Sergio Romo was retiring the Dodgers’ Rob Segedin for the final out, he said:

“It’s a good line, and it’s one certainly I’ve been holding on to for I think most of the year … The line is, don’t be sad that it’s over, smile because it happened. And that’s really the way I feel for the remarkable opportunity I was given and was allowed to keep for all these years.

“I have said enough for a lifetime. And for the last time, I wish you all a very pleasant good afternoon.”