San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Spartans feeling absence of ‘Mr. San Jose State’
Colleagues trying to carry out Fan’s lifelong mission to promote SJSU sports
San Jose State media-relations director Amy Villa choked back tears as she heard Spartans football coach Brent Brennan field questions about her late colleague, Lawrence Fan.
It was a muggy afternoon midway through training camp, and SJSU had just finished a routine practice: drills, one-on-one instruction, some brief scrimmaging. However, something — or, more accurately, — was missing. For the first time since 1980, the Spartans are preparing for a football season without Fan on the sideline.
Over his 42 years as SJSU’s sports information director, Fan became far more than just an athletic-department spokesman. His affable personality and encyclopedic knowledge of Spartans history earned him the nickname, “Mr. San Jose State.” Whenever reporters, coaches and athletes needed to know something about SJSU, they called Fan and almost always found their answer.
In late February, Fan died from undisclosed natural causes. He was 67. In the six months since, Villa and other athletic-department staffers have assumed Fan’s duties, but they know that there is no replacing all he offered. The Spartans haven’t just lost a beloved coworker, confidant and mentor. Given that Fan had refused to write down much of what he knew about SJSU’s athletic history, the university also lost a vital piece of its past.
“We miss the knowledge every single day,” said Villa, who worked closely with Fan for 28 years. “There’s no words
Lawrence Fan, longtime sports information director at SJSU, was known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Spartans history and devotion to the job.
for what his knowledge — and the way he delivered it — meant to us all.”
By keeping detailed mental notes of almost everything that had happened at SJSU since long before he arrived on campus, Fan ensured that past coaches and athletes were not forgotten. Now, Villa and other athletic-department staffers consider it their duty to preserve their late friend’s legacy.
They have handed out ribbons honoring Fan, given him a full-page tribute in the football game notes, announced plans to induct him into SJSU’s Hall of Fame and reserved a seat for him in the press box. What many might not be aware of, though, are the numerous hours Villa’s staff has spent scouring Fan’s old desktop.
The tidbits in those thousands of Word documents provide a valuable link to the university’s past and offer a visible reminder of Fan’s attention to detail.
He was known nationally for his black-and-white football game notes loaded with more information than any play-by-play announcer could recite during a broadcast. While compiling this season’s game notes, Sky Kerstein, SJSU’s director of multimedia, handpicked the most relevant stats from Fan’s old files.
Villa has combed through those Word documents for a sort of blueprint to lead the media-relations department. When she came across a file detailing how staffers should assist each other on various sports’ game days, she was ecstatic: Just because Fan is gone doesn’t mean SJSU must change how it does things.
“It’s all about keeping his legacy alive,” Kerstein said. “Even if no one else ever knows those stats or guidelines came from Lawrence, at least we know we’re doing everything in our power to make sure the student-athletes here get the best coverage they can get.
“At the end of the day, that was all he cared about. That was his life’s mission.”
In a college athletics landscape filled with coaches, athletes and support staffers desperate to move onto bigger schools, Fan was an outlier — a man who preferred life at a mid-major university considered a distant afterthought among the Bay Area sports hierarchy.
When two local newspaper columnists, Dave Newhouse and Mark Purdy, encouraged Fan to apply for an opening as sports information director at his alma mater, Cal, in the late 1980s, Fan told them, “I appreciate that, but my work is not done here.” The response baffled Newhouse and Purdy. An SID’s work is never done; that’s the nature of the athletic calendar.
Fan, a lifelong bachelor, logged 70hour work weeks trying to bring SJSU athletics positive exposure. Though Fan understood that pro sports, Cal and Stanford dwarfed SJSU in interest, he pitched writers with persistence.
Such phone conversations are how
Lawrence Fan, who died in February, was sports information director for San Jose State for more than 40 years.
Purdy — a longtime sports columnist at the San Jose Mercury News — learned about the 1941 SJSU football team’s role in helping patrol Honolulu after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Without Fan’s dogged insistence, that and other key nuggets from Spartans history might have been forgotten long ago.
“He had phenomenal recall,” Purdy said. “If you asked him about a football game from the ’80s, he’d tell you the leading rusher’s name and how many yards he rushed for.”
It hardly seemed to bother Fan that SJSU sports were often mired in futility. The bigger the challenge, the more the fun.
In Fan’s four-plus decades at SJSU, he outlasted seven men’s basketball coaches, nine athletic directors and 10 football coaches. Football reached only eight bowl games in that span. Meanwhile, men’s basketball made just one NCAA Tournament — in 1996, after the Spartans authored a shocking Big West tournament run despite a sub-.500 record.
On a handful of occasions, Fan had to lead news conferences in the wake of high-profile scandals. Even in those tense times, reporters remember him being professional, courteous and responsive.
“He felt like the university was his identity,” said Jimmy Durkin, a former SJSU beat writer for the Mercury News. “He loved being connected there. If he had gone somewhere else, he might be put in charge of one thing and not be able to dip his toes into whatever other areas he wanted.
“With San Jose State, he knew that he
could do things in his vision. He really could touch as many people as he wanted to. I think it was always the perfect place for him.”
During each football training camp, Fan, wearing a beige floppy hat with a Spartans logo, memorized every freshman’s name so he could greet him after practice. At football games, Fan could be found overseeing postgame news conferences in one of his three-piece suits.
When Fan learned that an athleticdepartment photographer didn’t like the pizza and hot dogs at men’s basketball games, he started baking him a spice cake with raisins. Those so-called “Fan Cakes” would become a staple at men’s and women’s basketball regularseason games.
To make sure the raisins were of the highest quality, Fan asked Fresno State staffers to bring him ones from the San Joaquin Valley. Whenever men’s and women’s basketball hosted doubleheaders, Fan made one of his two specialties — a pot-roast stew or spaghetti and meat sauce — so employees could eat lunch together.
At times, his dedication confounded those around him. While serving as the media coordinator for the 1997 men’s basketball West regional, Fan lived at San Jose Arena for a weekend, sleeping a few hours a night in his old Cadillac. His house was less than 10 miles away, but he wanted to be nearby — just in case he was needed.
“He made everybody here feel welcome: media, visiting scouts, players,” Brennan said. “We miss him, man.
Everyone misses him. He was just such a part of your existence here. If you were at this school, he was there making your day-to-day just a little more enjoyable.”
Added senior defensive lineman Cade Hall: “Lawrence was the connection between every single person who’s come through here for the last however many years. Whenever we walk off the field after practice now, we definitely feel a piece missing.”
At Fan’s memorial service in April, more than 2,000 people arrived at CEFCU Stadium to hear stories about the man who many say embodied the best of SJSU: hard work, modesty, loyalty. Two months later, at the annual convention for college sports information directors, Villa accepted a lifetime achievement award on Fan’s behalf.
Those posthumous recognitions do little to ease the sting of his absence. On that muggy afternoon midway through training camp, tears welled in Villa’s eyes as she thought about football’s Sept. 1 season opener against Portland State.
It will be the first time in 502 games that Fan won’t be in the press box, rattling off obscure stats and asking media members if they need anything.
“He’s not going to be sitting in his chair that’s always been his chair,” Villa said, her voice catching. “Also, we have to figure out how to do our game days without him.
“It just doesn’t feel right.”