Celebrating Jim Hill’s 50 years covering Los Angeles sports

LOS ANGELES – Jim Hill wouldn’t want me to write this column, but this is one of the few times I must ignore the advice of a man I have looked up to for as long as I can remember watching sports in Los Angeles.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Lakers unveiled a statue of Pat Riley, the head coach of the Showtime Lakers, in a ceremony attended by Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Byron Scott, Michael Douglas and Michael McDonald, among others. Lionel Richie even took his courtside seat before the Lakers played the Boston Celtics, as John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock” blared through the arena. If the party had leaned any further into the 1980s, it might have been drenched in neon and simulcast on MTV.

The ceremony took me back to my childhood, watching Jim cover the Showtime Lakers for KCBS 2 and KABC 7. This month, Jim is celebrating his 50th year covering sports in Los Angeles. Next month, I’ll turn 46. Nearly every memory I have of sports in this city — from the Lakers’ 11 NBA championships to the Dodgers’ ifve World Series titles since 1980 — is connected to Jim talking to players in the locker room after the game.

The only thing more surreal than covering the teams I grew up watching today is doing it alongside Jim and calling him a friend.

I always dreamed of becoming a sportswriter in Los Angeles. At USC, I won the Allan Malamud Memorial Scholarship and the Jim Murray Memorial Scholarship, named after my two favorite Los Angeles Times columnists. Both Malamud and Murray died while I was a student at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. I never had the chance to meet them let alone cover a game alongside them.

Television never felt attainable to me. I grew up with a stutter so severe that I would invent excuses to skip class on days when I had to present a book report. On the first day of school, when students were asked to stand and say their name, I would sometimes pretend I needed to go to the nurse’s office.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Jim as a member of the media before a 2001 Lakers-Clippers game at Staples Center. I was a USC student freelancing for SLAM magazine. We were seated next to each other. He slapped me on the knee like we were old friends and introduced himself, as if I didn’t already know exactly who he was.

We stayed in touch as my career evolved as I became a staff writer at Sports Illustrated, senior writer at ESPN and a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. At every step, Jim would put me on the air, making me more comfortable with a microphone and a camera representing thousands of households. The kid who once struggled to say his own name was suddenly talking sports with Jim Hill on CBS in Los Angeles.

When I became an adjunct professor at USC, Jim was a regular guest speaker. I wanted my students to hear the same advice he once gave me: It’s all about relationships and hard work — and how inseparable the two are.

The contact list on Jim’s iPhone reads like a Hall of Fame program — legendary players and coaches, Academy Award-winning actors and directors, even a former United States president. But the relationships he nurtures daily are with beat writers and public relations directors across the city. While many anchors prefer the comforts of the studio, Jim has always preferred being in the thick of the action — at every game, every press conference, often seated in the front row, asking the first question.

One of the greatest honors of my career came during the 2020 World Series, when I was asked to fill in for Jim as the Dodgers faced the Tampa Bay Rays in Arlington, Texas. As thrilling as it was to watch the Dodgers win their first title since 1988, the celebration felt muted 1,500 miles from home during a global pandemic.

We made up for it in 2024 when the Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the World Series less than a month after my wedding. After finishing our postgame interviews in the clubhouse, Jim poured a bottle of champagne over my head while on the air and wrapped me in a hug.

Sunday was a celebration of Pat Riley and the Showtime Lakers. But as I watched Jim work the room after the ceremony as the only member of the media who covered every championship that team won it felt like something more.

It felt like a celebration of 50 years of Jim Hill telling the story of Los Angeles sports — and, in so many ways, shaping the dreams of a kid who grew up watching him do it.