The Steamer ― Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.a. Sports

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 theLos 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. 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!

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.

In The Steamer: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.A. Sports, Furillo’s son, Andy, himself a long-time 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.

Andy Furillo has been in the newspaper business since 1972 when he began as a copy boy at theLos Angeles Herald Examiner. He went on to work as a sportswriter in 1974 for theDowney Southeast News and spent the following six years with the Goleta Valley Today and theSanta Barbara News-Press. In 1980, he shifted to news reporting and for the next 35 years focused on criminal justice issues with theSanta Maria Times, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, theSan 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, theSacramento Bee made him a sports columnist. He lives in Sacramento, 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.