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≡ LOS ANGELES SPORTS AWARDS ≡
After a year’s absence due to the devastating Southern California wildfires, the 20th edition of the Los Angeles Sports Council’s L.A. Sports Awards are back on 28 January, with a distinctly Olympic theme among the four Lifetime Achievement Award winners:
● Cheryl Miller, one of the greatest women’s basketball players of all time as the three-time Naismith Player of the Year in 1984-85-86 at the University of Southern California and gold medalist at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, as well as the 1986 Goodwill Games and the FIBA Women’s World Championship in 1986.
● John Naber, the individual star of the 1976 Olympic swimming competition in Montreal, winning golds in the 100-200 m Backstrokes, the 4×100 m Medley relay and the 4×200 m Freestyle relay, plus a silver in the 200 m Free. Also a USC star, his teams won NCAA titles in all four of his seasons there. He was so widely respected that at age 28, he was a member of the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the 1984 Games.
● Alan Rothenberg, one of two remaining original Board members of the Los Angeles Sports Council from 1988, was perhaps THE key player in the rise of soccer in the U.S., first as Commissioner of Football for the wildly successful 1984 Olympic tournament – men only in those days – and then as the Chair of the stunning 1994 FIFA World Cup, which set attendance records that will only be challenged 32 years later when the event returns to the U.S.
His memoir, The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped The Future of U.S. Soccer, will be published on 10 February.
● Andres Cantor, the Argentine-born sportscaster and eight-time Emmy winner whose famous “goooooal” call helped promote soccer in the U.S., and who has worked multiple Olympic Games for NBC and Telemundo, even including English-language calls beginning at the 2000 Sydney Games.
The 20th L.A. Sports Awards will be held – appropriately for Miller and Naber – at the Town & Gown Ballroom at USC at 6:30 p.m., and fans can vote through 26 January for the Sportsman, Sportswoman and Coach of the Year and the no. 1 sports moment of 2025 from 10 nominees from baseball, basketball, football and soccer.
The Sports Awards is a fund-raiser for the Sports Council and for its “Ready, Set, Gold!” education program that features Olympic athletes working with students in Southern California area schools to promote better attendance, attention and goal-setting. Ready Set, Gold! is one of the only legacy programs that sprang from a losing bid for the Olympic Games, created as a project of the Los Angeles effort to land the 2016 Olympic Games that eventually went to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Want to attend? The Sports Awards is primarily a corporate event, sold in tables of eight. If you’re interested in a table or a sponsorship, please contact Sports Council chief executive Matt Cacciato here.
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