The Steamer: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.A. Sports - Paperback

by Andy Furillo (Author), Tommy Lasorda (Foreword by)

For nearly sixty years, Bud Furillo wrote and talked about sports in Southern California. For fifteen of those years, he authored a popular column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called The Steam Room, which gave him the nickname that lasted him for the rest of his life: "the Steamer."

As a reporter, columnist, editor, and pioneer of sports talk radio, the Steamer dished out insight and understanding to Southern California sports fans while Los Angeles grew into a sports empire. On his watch, L.A. acquired the Rams from Cleveland, the Dodgers from Brooklyn, and the Lakers from Minneapolis. He covered them all while they won championships for the city.

In The Steamer: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.A. Sports, Furillo's son, Andy, himself a longtime newspaperman, uses his father's lens to give focus to the city's rise as a sports empire. The Steamer is a history of a great sports town at its most dynamic, told from the point of view of a legendary reporter who used his phenomenal access to reveal the inside story of the greatest athletes and teams to ever play in Los Angeles.

Back Jacket

For nearly sixty years, Bud Furillo wrote and talked about sports in Southern California. For fifteen of those years, he authored a popular column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called The Steam Room, which gave him the nickname that lasted him for the rest of his life: "the Steamer."

As a reporter, columnist, editor, and pioneer of sports talk radio, the Steamer dished out insight and understanding to Southern California sports fans while Los Angeles grew into a sports empire. On his watch, L.A. acquired the Rams from Cleveland, the Dodgers from Brooklyn, and the Lakers from Minneapolis. He covered them all while they won championships for the city.

The Steamer reported on the golden age of L.A. sports, writing about events and athletes that have long since seared themselves into the memories of Southern California sports fans, from the greatest generation to its baby-booming offspring. They were the years of Sandy Koufax no-hitters, Elgin Baylor yo-yoing on the dribble, and Sam Cunningham going over the top four times for touchdowns against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.

It was the roar of the Olympic Auditorium on Thursday nights, Bill Walton dropping a high lob pass into the hoop for UCLA against Memphis State, and Native Diver winning another stakes race at Hollywood Park. Vin Scully's voice wafted from foul pole to foul pole on cool and comfortable summer nights, when transistor radios lifted his words into the Chavez Ravine sky --"Russell to Lopes to Garvey: Double play!" On winter evenings, the transistor carried the more rapid-fire style of Chick Hearn as he described Jerry West driving left to right across the radio dial, stopping on a dime, losing his defender, and rising up and swishing a jump shot to win yet another game at the buzzer.

It was the same with USC football, UCLA basketball, the horse races, and boxing matches--champions flourished, and the Steamer chronicled it all. He helped shape the Los Angeles sports scene as it achieved world-class status. Furillo brokered trades, saved coaches' jobs, helped show others to the door, tweaked the owners, encouraged and promoted franchise moves, and even worked as a cut man for an L.A. fighter who defended his title in Madrid!

In The Steamer: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.A. Sports, Furillo's son, Andy, himself a longtime newspaperman, uses his father's lens to give focus to the city's rise as a sports empire. The Steamer is a history of a great sports town at its most dynamic, told from the point of view of a legendary reporter who used his phenomenal access to reveal the inside story of the greatest athletes and teams to ever play in Los Angeles.

Author Biography

Andy Furillo has been in the newspaper business since 1972 when he began working as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He went on to work as a sportswriter in 1974 for the Downey Southeast News and spent the following six years with the Goleta Valley Today and the Santa Barbara News-Press. In 1980, he shifted to news reporting and for the next thirty-five years focused on criminal justice issues with the Santa Maria Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner and, since 1991, the Sacramento Bee. Furillo won the 2002 Broun Award for his reporting on a Sacramento neighborhood's descent into one of the most crime-ridden areas of town. He won other national journalism awards for his coverage of L.A. street gangs, California's prison crisis, and the implementation of the state's "three-strikes" sentencing law. In 2015, the Sacramento Bee made him a sports columnist. He lives in Davis, CA.

Tommy Lasorda was the legendary manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1976 to 1996. A two-time World Series champion (1981, 1988) and a two-time NL Manager of the Year (1983, 1988), Lasorda was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997. He lives in Los Angeles.