Shav Glick was a gentle giant of a sportswriter

Shav Glick died early Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86 years old, but in experience years, he was more like 286.

Glick was the motorsports writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1969 until his retirement in late 2006. He had been battling cancer for the past year or so, and if I know Shav, he fought the heck out of it.

There’s very little evidence that Glick ever wanted to be anything else besides a sportswriter. Maybe that’s the reason I respected him so much.

He had his first byline in the paper in his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., in 1935 when he was just 14 years old. So for 70 years, give or take, Glick covered sports.

When he retired, he wrote a column about some of the greatest moments in his unbelievable career. He told a story about a baseball game he covered at Brookside Park, near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, in March of 1938.

The Chicago White Sox faced a team of players from Pasadena, and that team included a young shortstop who had two hits, stole a base and played so brilliantly in the field that the White Sox manager said he’d sign the kid in a minute if he could. The thing was he couldn’t, because the shortstop was named Jackie Robinson and he was black.

Glick covered Ted Williams when Williams was still in high school in San Diego. In that retirement column, he wrote this: “You think about all the wonderful things you have seen and been privileged to write about - 35 Indianapolis 500s, Formula One races, Times Grand Prix sports car races, every Long Beach Grand Prix but one, world championship motorcycle events, midgets, spring cars and yes, even drifting. And that's only the motor sports. How about two Olympic Games, a dozen Masters and U.S. Opens, a British Open at St. Andrews, Wimbledon, the World Series, Santa Anita Handicaps and…more Rose Bowl Games than I can count.”

The remarkable thing is that Shav was quite likely was the nicest guy in the press room at just about every one of those events.