It was the last story I wrote before everything changed.
It was Jan. 5, 2025, and I was marveling at the Rams gumption in their short-handed loss to the Seattle Seahawks.
“It was weird,” I wrote. “It was wild.”
I was so witty. I was so wrong.
Two days later, I was fleeing for my life, steering my car down narrow Altadena streets with a fireball at my back and a nightmarish future sprawled across the smoke-filled streets ahead.
Now that was weird and wild.
The year 2025 was more tumultuous than any silly football game and its accompanying overwrought metaphors. It was a year that knocked me flat, tearing me apart from so many things that once anchored me, setting me afloat in a sea of guilt and despair and ultimate uncertainty.
Today, I have a home but no home. My days are filled with the beeps and growls of bulldozers. My nights are draped in the silence of emptiness. What was once one of the coolest secrets in Los Angeles has become a veritable ghost town, the vast empty spaces populated by howling coyotes and scrounging bears.
And I’m one of the lucky ones.
A lot has changed in the 12 months since the Eaton Fire spared my house but destroyed my Altadena neighborhood. I say a daily prayer of thanks that I did not endure the horror of the 19 people who lost their lives and thousands more who lost their homes. I am beyond fortunate to live in what was left behind.
But virtually nothing was left behind. Venerable manicured homes have been replaced by weed-choked vacant lots. Familiar local businesses are now empty parking lots. There is the occasional sighting of new construction, but far more prevalent is “For Sale” signs that have seemingly been there for months.
After living in the limbo of hotels and Airbnbs for two months while my home was remediated, I was blessed to return to four walls and running water, but beset with the guilt of having a front-row seat to the pain of so many who lost everything. I was spared, but nobody in Los Angeles was spared, and it wasn’t until halfway through the year that I noticed a consistent light from the strangest source.
Every night, I would watch the Dodgers. At least once every couple of weeks, I would attend a Sparks game with my daughter, MC. Soon, there would be Saturdays with one of our college football teams, then Sundays with the NFL then, the baseball playoffs, leading to the insane Game 7 and morphing into the annual Lakers winter drama.
By the final weeks of December, I realized that one thing has consistently kept my spirits strong, perhaps the same thing that has helped keep our city upright through trials much tougher than mine.
Sports.
The highs, the lows, the dramatics, the desperation, it was all there when nothing was there, it was the feeling that even with everything gone, you still belonged to something.
From Dodgers exhilaration to Laker despair, from USC football frustration to UCLA women’s basketball greatness, sports has been the bright wallpaper on a year of Southland darkness.
It is sports that kept me grounded, kept me steady and somehow kept me believing.
In the worst year of my life, it was sports that saved me.
The path back to normalcy began two weeks after the Eaton fire, when I left my temporary hotel room to attend a press conference for the Dodgers’ latest Japanese import, Roki Sasaki.
“Invincible,” I wrote about the team’s rebuilt roster, a word that was so comforting during such a time when everything in life felt tenuous.
I came back to the hotel after the press conference, wrote my story then, like thousands of others in my situation, packed up and moved to another hotel.
Soon thereafter I was awakened late one night with the news of the Lakers stunning acquisition of Luka Doncic. I wrote this column from a rental house while preparing to move to yet another new place. My clothes were in a plastic grocery bag. My house was still in shambles. In Doncic, as least, there was hope.
Several days later I attended the Doncic press conference, asked a question, and Doncic asked me to repeat it. Turns out, it wasn’t a language barrier, it was a sound barrier. I was speaking too softly. It was then I noticed that the trauma from the fire had exacerbated my Parkinson’s Disease, which affected my voice, one of the many symptoms which later led me to acknowledging my condition in a difficult mid-summer column.
Yeah, it was a helluva year.
Good news returned in early March when it was announced that the Dodgers had made Dave Roberts the richest manager in baseball, giving him a new four-year, $32.4 million contract. In a bit of dumb luck that hasn’t stopped me from bragging about it since, 10 years ago I was the first one to publicly push for Roberts’ hiring. In such unstable times in our city, Roberts had become the new Tommy Lasorda, and his presence became a needed jolt of smile.
In early April, I wrote a column I never thought I’d write — that Bronny James had been transformed from circus to contributor. I also wrote a column that I maybe wish I hadn’t written so soon, that JJ Redick was a Laker success.
By then, writing stories about Laker conflicts was a refreshing respite from dealing with fire hassles. We were back in the house, but were we safe? Did we test enough for toxins? And how can we look our next-door neighbor in the eye when she comes to examine the giant empty scar where her house once stood?
In late May I sadly said goodbye to my second family when I wrote about the end of my 22-year run on ESPN’s popular “Around the Horn” game show. It wasn’t the first time in 2025 that a column brought me to tears, witness the video immediately after the fire. Agreed, I spent the year showing so much emotion for someone who had gotten so lucky. But I’m guessing I wasn’t alone.
Two weeks later I wrote about my new family, the group of boxers I have joined in my fight against Parkinson’s. That was the toughest column I have ever written, as I was acknowledging something I refused to admit for five years. But the fire had seemingly set the disease ablaze, and I could hide it no longer.
The year continued with columns about the soon-to-be-retiring Clayton Kershaw, the greatest Dodger pitcher with the greatest entrance song. Hearing “We Are Young” when he took the mound consistently gave me hope that, through the treacheries of a summer that marked the escalation of those insane ICE raids, we can continue to strive for rebirth.
That’s what sports consistently provided in 2025, the hope that from beneath the rubble, we could all fly again.
I voiced this hope in a Rams preview column that predicted they would go to the Super Bowl. I later wrote a Rams column predicting they would actually win the Super Bowl. I stand by my stories.
All of which led to a series of Dodger playoff columns that hopefully reflected the building energy of a town enthralled. After their Game 7 victory against the Toronto Blue Jays, I was so spent that I hyperventilated for what felt like an hour.
“In the end, they not only ran it back, they sprinted it back, they slugged it back, and then, finally, they literally Will-ed it back,” I wrote.
In hindsight those words could have been written not only about a team, but a city, fighting back, staying strong, the results of its struggle mirroring the Dodgers’ consecutive championships, punching through desperation, from struggle to strength.
In 2025, sports showed me that life can get better, life will be better, that if we hang in there long enough we can all hit that Miggy Ro homer, make that Andy Pages catch, stay forever young.
And thus I offer a heartiest and hopeful welcome to 2026.
Bring it on.
The post Thank you, L.A. sports teams, for saving me during the worst year appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
