Between the Bylines Read online

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC 29403

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2013 by Doug Krikorian

  All rights reserved

  First published 2013

  e-book edition 2013

  Manufactured in the United States

  978.1.62584.074.5

  Library of Congress CIP data applied for.

  print edition 978.1.62619.004.7

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  Gillian Mary Howgego Krikorian.

  Contents

  Foreword, by Jerry West

  Special Acknowledgement

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  April 1998 (A Dark Omen)

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  September 1999 (The Revelation)

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  April 2000 (The Diagnosis)

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  May 2000 (The Metastasis)

  Chapter 23

  June 2000 (The Treatment)

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  July 2000 (The Sexual Attempt)

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  December 2000 (Family Illnesses)

  Chapter 34

  March 2001 (Brain Surgery)

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  July 2001 (The Spiritual Supporter)

  August 2001 (The City of Hope)

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  September 2001 (Hospice Care)

  The Final Day

  The Aftermath

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  The Los Angeles Lakers’ legendary former player and general manager Jerry West shares a laugh with Doug.

  Foreword

  I have known Doug since 1968 as a sportswriter and, more importantly, as a friend. Our friendship was built out of a mutual respect for each other’s craft. My many years with the Lakers were filled with frustrations and disappointments. Doug was such a Lakers fan and always seemed to take the disappointments as personally as our team. He could be a tough critic but always was a fair one.

  Doug has lived a life in the media business as a traveling reporter, a columnist and a radio announcer. During the traveling years, Doug led a rather carefree and somewhat wild life, especially after he and his first wife split up. He gambled, drank heavily and chased around, and although that might sound exciting, at the end of the day he had no one to bring stability to his life.

  Then Gillian unexpectedly entered his life, and the spark was back. She was everything that Doug needed, and although he was guarded at first, perhaps because of the carefree bachelor life he had been leading, he eventually fell in love. They soon married, but not long after that another unexpected event took place: Gillian was diagnosed with cancer. Though Gillian fought hard and courageously, she lost the battle, and Doug’s heart was broken. The love of his life was taken so quickly, and Doug spiraled into deep despair for a few years.

  Perhaps therapeutically, Doug began writing this book—a book filled with candor and honesty about his turbulent life and the love of his life. Although this book was a difficult task, Doug has written with courage and honesty and has shared his demons and secrets with us all.

  Congratulations to you, my friend.

  Jerry West

  Special Acknowledgement

  Unlike writing a newspaper column, which can be done in a few hours, the creation of a book is a totally different challenge. I equate it to what major-league players go through in their professions. Their toil is like a grueling marathon rather than a brief sprint, as they compete day after day with joyful moments and despairing ones from April until October, with only a few off days. I found writing a book to be comparable, as the editing, the research, the composition, the endless fact-checking and the attempt to set down the prose in an orderly fashion turned out to be a daily, weekly, monthly grind for almost a year. A lot of dormant memories were revived, many glad ones, many sad ones and many that, frankly, I now find astonishing since some of those memories brought back a person—me—I described who doesn’t faintly resemble the person I am today.

  I doubt I could have written this book without the stellar support and constant encouragement of my fiancée, Kathy Heddy-Drum, who selflessly goaded me to write on a sensitive subject—the tragic saga of my late wife, Gillian—that I had kept hidden in the attic of my senses for a decade. Like Gillian, Kathy is also a kind, giving, sweet person. She also is a doting mother, and her daughter, Lolo Silver, is a member of the USA Water Polo team; her son, Matt Drum, is a star water polo player and swimmer at Los Alamitos High. It’s not surprising that Kathy’s children have excelled in aquatics, since Kathy herself was a swimmer extraordinaire who won four gold medals in the 1975 Pan-American Games and also was a participant in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

  Prologue

  It is 4:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, and my wife, in a desperate, pleading voice of sadness, awakens me from a fitful sleep and says, “Please call the hospice nurse. I can’t take the pain any longer.”

  I turn to her in the darkness of the bedroom and know at that instant the end is near, that her horrific year-and-a-half struggle soon will be over, that all the surgeries and treatments and consolations and prayers won’t contain her deadly disease.

  I never had heard her during this agonizing period complain about her plight and the terrible physical and mental torment she had been enduring.

  Within an hour, the hospice nurse makes an appearance at our home, injects her with a shot that instantly brings her relief from the harrowing pain and induces sleep.

  We are awakened a couple hours later by the loud ringing of a phone perched on a nightstand near me, and I drowsily answer it.

  I hear the voice of a friend named Mark Emerzian and chide him before he even starts speaking.

  “You know better than to call this early in the morning,” I say as I blearily gaze at a digital clock that informs me it’s 6:45 a.m.

  “I’m so sorry, but, well, America is being attacked,” says Emerzian somberly. “They’ve struck the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.”

  “What?” I reply, quickly forgetting my irritation.

  “Turn on the TV. We’re under attack. It’s Pearl Harbor all over again,” says Emerzian.

  I quietly get up and go to the front room, where I click on the TV and begin watching in horror the images coming out of New York and Washington, D.C.

  I walk back into the bedroom after awhile and inform my wife of the chilling events.

  Her eyes remain shut, and
she doesn’t respond.

  The strong dosage of morphine the hospice nurse has injected has her in a comatose state in which she will remain for the rest of her life, which will come to a blessed end four days later.

  But as far as I’m concerned, my wife, my Gillian, my dear Brit, ceases living on September 11, 2001, as nearly 10,000 others do around the country on that infamous day, a total inflated by the 2,996 who perished from the terrorist attacks.

  I am stunned by the tragedy unfolding on the other side of the country, as well as numbed by the one unfolding in my midst.

  My thoughts are a tangle of despairing emotions.

  The international romance Gillian and I had that was so implausible, so defiant of convention, so joyful, so plagued, ultimately, by misfortune is drawing to a dark finish.

  The chances of our hooking up in the first place, much less even meeting each other on that rain-soaked afternoon in a railway station in the south London district of Crystal Palace in the spring of 1992, were roughly tantamount to a person being struck by a meteorite in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

  “A 50 trillion to 1 proposition our ever coming across each other,” I often said to Gillian, who always nodded in agreement. “And a 100 trillion to 1 proposition our ever marrying each other.”

  It was a quirk of incomprehensible fate that I was even in England when I met Gillian. It was a country I had not previously visited and hadn’t planned to visit until I suffered what I felt was an injustice that inspired my making an intemperately impromptu decision: boarding a Virgin Atlantic flight to Heathrow a mere three hours after I decided to make such a trip.

  Our lives, our backgrounds, our professions, our beliefs, our ages were such a disparate mixture that I often wonder how we were able to create the magical alchemy that resulted in a fiercely devoted and loving relationship.

  Still, in retrospect, there were forebodings in our brief marriage, going back to the first year of it when her impending, passionately desired motherhood was cruelly denied on the same day we were set to buy a crib for the child that was expected in less than four and a half months.

  The trajectory of life is rife with gladness and sadness, triumph and failure. The random fickleness of it conspires against certainties, and one never knows what lurks around the corner except the taxman always waits at the gate to collect his due.

  “You too often take life for granted and don’t realize how special it is until you know it’s nearing an end,” Gillian once said during her sickness. “You come to realize the beauty of it all—the chirping birds, the barking dogs, the beautiful flowers and trees, the mountains, the lakes, the cathedrals, the art museums, the great cities, the tender relationships you make with people, the different cultures you’re able to experience in different countries. I’m just glad I was able to experience what I did. I’m glad we were able to experience together what we did.”

  We experienced a lot during the time we were together, the aging sportswriter from America who finally settled down after years of hedonistic wanderings and the young woman from Great Britain who was responsible for such a dramatic transformation.

  We watched the new millennium arrive in the Middle East on the seventh-story balcony of our Le Meridian Hotel room in downtown Damascus. We had celebrated the previous New Year amid loud, garish fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. We were among the shrieking multitudes a couple years earlier watching the ball drop at Times Square in New York. We saw the grisly, sordid rematch between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, the one in which Tyson was disqualified for chewing off a portion of Holyfield’s ear.

  And we jogged everywhere—Circus Maximus in Rome, Englischer Garten in Munich, Tiergarten in Berlin, Alster Lake in Hamburg, Grosser Garten in Dresden, Promenade de la Crosiette in Cannes, Tuileries in Paris, Regent Park and Hyde Park in London, Phoenix Park in Dublin, Prater in Vienna, Central Park in New York, Grand Tetons in Wyoming, Sun Valley in Idaho and El Dorado Park in Long Beach, as well as Banff, Vancouver and Victoria Island in Canada.

  We never had a serious argument and never retired for the evening angered at each other, but the romantic idyll was too fleeting.

  Why, I kept asking myself that horrifying September morning of apocalyptic happenings, is this woman who assisted so many ailing elderly folk in her duties as a physical therapist with the National Health Service in London, who had a tenderness and kindness that bordered on the divine, having her life cut so prematurely short?

  Why is there no sense of proportion, of justice, of equity in this world that can be so enchantingly pleasant and yet so wickedly mean?

  Why, oh why?

  It’s a question posed by everyone who has lost a loved one in tragic circumstances, and there’s no logical explanation except the ones tendered by those with sanctioned affiliations with the Almighty.

  Chapter 1

  I don’t believe in serendipity and view as mountebanks those who claim to have powers of clairvoyancy. But what occurred that long-ago day that brought Gillian into my life does make one idly wonder about unexplainable phenomena.

  It was the middle of a Friday afternoon, and I had walked to the Crystal Palace railway station from a nearby athletic facility where I had just finished interviewing an American football player. There were two benches on the station’s platform, and I noticed one was crowded with young students, while another had only one person on it, a woman engrossed in a newspaper. I decided to sit by her.

  My hair, clothes and shoes were damp from the rain that had been relentlessly persistent during the three days I had been in London.

  I sat quietly, looked straight ahead and waited for the train that would take me back to Victoria Station. It was due in fifteen minutes, and one did arrive at the designated time but zoomed past without stopping.

  In frustration, I turned to the woman next to me and asked, “What happened?”

  “The train that was supposed to stop was canceled, and the next one won’t come for another forty-five minutes,” she said in a thick English accent as she peered up at the overhead board that displayed the train schedules.

  The woman was adorned in an overcoat, and she had long, thick brown hair that hung to her shoulders and framed a youthful face that I immediately noticed was without makeup.

  She returned to reading the paper—I believe it was The Guardian—and I cast a sidelong glance in her direction, instinctively curious about the shape of the anatomy that was camouflaged by her overcoat.

  Then I noticed a revealing characteristic. Her fingers were long, thin and delicate, even elegant. Piano fingers. Angelic fingers. Fingers that indicated to me that perhaps I should engage her in a conversation.

  Not that I had any ulterior motives toward this stranger who still was seated beside me only because of a train foul-up. A long, deteriorating relationship I had been in had just ended, and the last thing on my mind that dreary day was pursuing a woman, which actually is quite ironic since pursuing women had been such a dominant part of my life since the breakup of my first marriage more than a decade earlier.

  “You from London?” I asked in commencing a dialogue.

  There was no hesitation in her answer, which indicated to me she was willing to be sociable.

  “Oh, I’ve lived here a few years, but originally I’m from Hartlepool,” she said.

  “Where in tarnation is Hartlepool?” I wondered.

  “It’s up in the northeast near Newcastle,” she replied.

  “I thought Newcastle was a beer, not a city,” I said, trying to be humorous.

  She smiled amiably.

  I asked her what she did for a living, and she told me she was a physical therapist with the National Health Service.

  “That’s why I’m here in Crystal Palace today because I worked with some senior citizens in the swimming pool,” she said. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a newspaperman from Los Angeles,” I replied.

  “That’s interesting.
What brought you to Crystal Palace?’”

  I paused momentarily in reflection and peered vacantly ahead, retracing the factors that had led to my coming to this faraway land, to my being at this spot at this moment in what was pure happenstance.

  It was inconceivable earlier in the week that I would have been present. It was a mere three days ago that I was having lunch at a popular restaurant, Phil Trani’s, in the California beach city of Long Beach with a couple of pals, Van Barbieri and Don Kramer, and hadn’t the faintest notion at the start of it that later that afternoon I would be on a flight to London.

  I was in a downcast mood that day because of my recent peripheral involvement in radio that had ended badly. At the time, I was naïve about the industry, was unaware of its maddening unpredictability, its ephemeral nature, its rampant personnel upheavals.

  Doug is flanked by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling (left) and UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden.

  I long had been in the newspaper business, which in those pre-Internet, pre-iPad, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, pre-iPhone days was a thriving entity and not in the moribund state it is today.

  I had been active in chronicling sports on the Southern California landscape for several decades, first for the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where I worked from May 1968 until it ceased publication on November 2, 1989, and then with the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

  I never even had actively sought employment in radio and savored my job as a sports columnist covering Olympic Games, Super Bowls, World Series, Rose Bowls, NBA Finals, world championship fights and all the high-profile athletic events in the Los Angeles area.

  I had become known for expressing strong, irreverent opinions in print—I had rows across the years with such American sports figures as Wilt Chamberlain, John Wooden, Joe Namath, Al Davis, Carroll Rosenbloom, Howard Cosell and countless others—and was a frequent guest on many of the Los Angeles radio and TV sports shows.

  Doug poses with two gridiron legends, Al Davis (center), late managing general partner of the Oakland and Los Angeles Raiders, and Tom Harmon (right), the 1940 Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Michigan who became a longtime sports broadcaster.