Arash Markazi · @ArashMarkazi
15th Jan 2019 from TwitLonger
Dreams Do Come True
If you had asked me what my dream job was as a kid, I would have told you I wanted to be the starting point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers just like Magic Johnson. I fully expected to grow up to be a 6-foot-9, 215-pound wizard on the court. At some point during my childhood, however, someone pointed out to me that my mom is a shade under five feet and my dad is a shade over five feet and, well, maybe I should start thinking about alternate career aspirations.
We got the Los Angeles Times every morning and as much as I loved watching the Lakers and Dodgers, I looked forward to reading what Jim Murray and Allan Malamud had written about my teams just as much. So at 12 years old my dream job shifted to being a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times. While that may have been a physically more realistic dream, it didn’t seem like a very likely job for the son of two Iranian immigrants who moved to Los Angeles before my first birthday during the Iran hostage crisis. I didn’t see anyone who looked like me or had a name like mine in the sports section. But a kid needs to have a dream job when he’s invariably asked that question by adults and that was mine.
So I started a sports newsletter while at Laurel Hall grade school in North Hollywood before going to Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks where I became the sports editor of The Knight school paper. I would clip out my favorite Murray and Malamud columns in the Times and taped them to my closet door. At the beginning of my sophomore year in 1996, Malamud died. My heart broke. I would no longer get to read “Notes on a Scorecard” every morning. The next year as I was sitting in U.S. history class, Bill Plaschke walked in to get our opinions on Los Angeles not having an NFL team. The Raiders and Rams had left two years earlier and as future prospective ticket buyers, he wanted to know what we thought. Three weeks later I wrote a column for the school paper that got pulled because it was critical of the football team. Eric Sondheimer found out and wrote a story on it in the Los Angeles Times. I was in The Times twice in three weeks. It was probably the best three-week stretch of my life up until that point.
During the summer before my senior year of high school, Murray died and I was devastated. My dream wasn’t just to work at the Los Angeles Times, I wanted to work alongside Murray and “Mud” and now both were gone. I mustered up the courage during this time as a high school senior to ask Mike Hiserman, who was the sports editor of the Times’ San Fernando Valley and Orange County editions, if I could string high school football games for the paper. To this day I’m convinced Mike was nice enough to allow me to do it because he felt bad for this kid who got dropped off by his mom for the meeting.
When I went to USC, I knew Murray and Malamud both had scholarships in their names and my goal was to win both. I didn’t tell my parents this at the time but that was a bigger goal of mine when I first stepped on campus than getting a degree. I would go on to win the Allan Malamud Scholarship and the Jim Murray Memorial Foundation Scholarship by my junior year. Linda Murray, Jim’s wife, called to tell me I had won the scholarship while I was putting together the agate page as a summer intern at the Los Angeles Daily News. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Linda invited me to the home where she and Jim lived and showed me the room where Jim typed so many of his columns I loved so much and gave me a book of his last columns, which I still have to this day.
When I graduated, I took a job at Sports Illustrated, which meant so much to me partly because I knew Murray helped found the magazine in 1953 before moving on to be a Los Angeles Times sports columnist in 1959. I left Sports Illustrated in 2009 to take a job at ESPN for the launch ESPN Los Angeles where I was one of the columnists. Over the next nine-plus years my role changed but I was able to cover some of the most amazing events in the world from the Super Bowl and NBA Finals to Wimbledon and Tour de France. It was a dream job I’ll be forever grateful for but I’m now leaving for the job I dreamed of having for most of my life.
I’m going to be a Los Angeles Times sports columnist. It’s the job I’ve wanted since I was a kid growing up in this city. I will be writing multiple columns a week which will anchor a new and expanded Page 2 in the Los Angeles Times Sports section. I will also be leading the coverage of emerging trends in sports like esports, sports gambling and the rise of professional sports in Las Vegas. The first person I called when I accepted the offer was Linda Murray, who has become like a second mom to me over the past 15 years. The second was Bill Caplan, a dear friend and hall of fame boxing publicist, who was Malamud’s best friend. Murray and “Mud” were the reasons I dreamed of one day being a Los Angeles Times sports columnist and to know that dream has come true still doesn’t seem real to me. It might take me holding the paper in the morning and seeing my byline next to my picture a few times to know that I’m not still dreaming.
This is an exciting period for the Los Angeles Times, a paper that I loved so much that I took a course and read two books on the Chandlers and the history of The Times while at USC. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong returned The Times to local ownership after 18 turbulent years just seven months ago and moved the paper to a beautiful new campus in El Segundo, which happens to be a few miles from my home. After talking to Patrick, executive editor Norman Pearlstine, senior deputy managing editor Kimi Yoshino and assistant managing editor, sports Angel Rodriguez, I couldn’t more excited about the future of The Times.
It’s also an exciting period for Los Angeles sports with the region being home to 11 professional sports teams and some of the most storied college sports programs in the country. It’s a city that will also host the 2020 MLB All-Star Game, 2021 College Football Playoff Semifinal, 2022 Super Bowl, 2023 College Football Playoff National Championship Game, 2026 World Cup, 2028 Summer Olympics and so much more over the next decade. I’m getting my dream job during a dream time in my city and I can't wait to get started.