Jerry Hoffman didn’t just talk sports during his Sportstalk radio broadcast. He researched topics, lined up guests, carted equipment in and out of the recording booth, edited and produced and promoted his segments and even sold the air time.
Always, even when local teams didn’t win and listeners wouldn’t call, he did it with a smile on his face and promise in his voice. He wore just as many hats and just as big a grin when he started promoting boxing events, like the Shakedown in Quaketown in Santa Cruz and the Riot at the Hyatt in Monterey.
“A lot of that radio stuff, he would be the engineer, the talent and the sales guy — that always impressed me. All games he would do it. He would sell it and go do it,” said longtime friend and media cohort Rusty Reed of Santa Cruz. “He was a one-man band.”
So, it should come as no surprise that Hoffman ultimately also orchestrated his own death. Three years after being diagnosed with the brain cancer glioblastoma and, later, lymphoma of the brain, Hoffman opted against further treatments. He died Oct. 18 at his home in La Selva Beach. He was 65.
“Nothing ever made him unhappy, even his illness,” Hoffman’s niece, Robin Findl, said. “He was like, ‘I got dealt a hand and I’m just going to deal with it. I’m not going to give up.’ And he didn’t. He fought to the very end.”
A memorial will be held on what would have been Hoffman’s 66th birthday, Dec. 12, beginning at 11:45 a.m. at Seascape Beach, below Seascape Resort. A special sendoff is planned for 12:12 p.m. Findl said the number 12 held great significance for Hoffman, whose sports company was called 12 Sports Productions.
SPORTING LIFE
Hoffman credited his parents for his work ethic and perseverance. He spent his childhood in Pittsburgh, the youngest of two children in a blue-collar family. His father worked at a cleaners and his mother as a shoe salesperson at Gimbels. Hoffman excelled in Little League as a child and, in memoirs posted on Facebook earlier this month, recalled playing catch with his father, Harry.
“I had a glove. My father did not, and from time to time, my strong throwing arm damaged his hands,” Hoffman recalled in a memoir he posted on Facebook.
Hoffman’s father was often ill and that was only exacerbated by the Pittsburgh cold. So, when Hoffman was 12, his family moved to Los Angeles.
Four years later, when Hoffman was 16, his father died of bone cancer. His mother died 20 years later, and his sister, Barbara, passed shortly after. He is survived by his wife, Susan, two nephews, Rick and Mark Findl and his niece, Sue Findl, as well as their families.
Hoffman spent much of his childhood working or visiting his father in the hospital and didn’t get a chance to explore the extent of his own athletic abilities. Still, his passion for sports never waned. Later in life, he played pick-up basketball, organized recreational baseball and softball teams, swam, biked, golfed and skied, even serving as president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. He also devoutly followed the professional teams in the Bay Area.
“He had a special affinity for all the Bay Area teams, rejoicing and suffering with each one of them,” Geoff Gilbert, one of Hoffman’s closest friends, wrote in an email. “He could talk Giants, A’s, Raiders, Niners, Sharks and Warriors all day. We both especially enjoyed the Warriors’ success the past three years and after he became sick, watching the games together reminded us of how much joy a team can bring to its fans.”
As much as he enjoyed watching them, Hoffman loved talking sports even more. He graduated with a degree in radio-TV-film from CSU Northridge in 1973. While there, he did play-by-play and announcing and also hosted his first radio show, wherein he gave boxer Bobby Chaco the nickname “Schoolboy.” Immediately after graduating, Hoffman escaped to Carmel, where he secured his first job as a sportscaster for KRML and later worked for KIDD in Monterey. That spring, he covered his first of 44 Bing Crosby Clambake golf tournaments, now known as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am.
In 1979, Hoffman took a job with KKAP-Radio (later becoming KMFO and then KNZS) in Santa Cruz, where he beamed out much of his joy every day. Hired as a salesman, he negotiated that he would also be able to produce a sports show for the talk-only station. Sportstalk was born, a program that aired during the evening drive time and for which Hoffman was willing to literally go the extra mile. Reed, who shot video for local TV station KRUZ when he wasn’t shooting for ESPN, said he remembers Hoffman driving to Red Bluff to broadcast an Aptos High boys basketball playoff game in 1986.
“We weren’t about to take the truck all the way up there, but Jerry (went) because he’s the hardest working man in sports,” Reed said.
RING LEADER
Hoffman brought that same can-do attitude into the boxing ring. Inspired by an interview with a promoter and his boxers on Sportstalk in the early 1980s, Hoffman began working regularly as a ring announcer, eventually working on some ESPN broadcasts. He produced his first fight in 1992, the Shakedown in Quaketown at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, which drew such talent as Sugar Shane Mosley and James Page and Nonito Donaire.
Working as the ticket salesman, matchmaker, announcer, ring-renter, promoter and more, he produced two shows a year in Santa Cruz until 1996. He then moved the fights south to Monterey, where the Riot at the Hyatt was born. Those shows sold out for 10 straight years until Hoffman quit the business in 2007.
Some of the Central Coast’s best-known boxers got their starts at those shows, including Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero of Gilroy and Carina Moreno of Watsonville. Guerrero remembers how Hoffman put him and several other boys from a local boxing gym to work on fight night.
“Just to be able to run the spotlight all the way to the ring, it makes you like, ‘Wow, I can’t wait until that’s on me,’” Guerrero recalled. “Everybody is just watching that fighter. That’s the kind of thing that drives young kids and young fighters.”
Hoffman later gave Guerrero another highlight: a chance to walk in that spotlight as the headliner of his first fight, which also came at the Riot at the Hyatt. Guerrero later became a three-time world champion in both the IBF featherweight and lightweight divisions and is now a boxing analyst for FS1.
Guerrero and Hoffman stayed close even after both had left the ring. Hoffman checked in often when Guerrero’s wife, Casey, battled with leukemia. Later, he called the couple for advice when cancer began ravaging his own body.
Through it all, Guerrero said, Hoffman retained a sunny disposition.
“Being a fighter, being in the fight game, being around so many fighters, that’s all he knew — how to fight and stay positive,” Guerrero said. “No matter what adversity you were going through as a fighter, his interviews with you were always positive, and that’s the way he lived as a person.“
KNOCKOUT BLOW
Hoffman didn’t feel like himself on Oct. 10, 2014. He had spent most of the week engaged in radio coverage of the Frys.com Open golf tournament at the Silverado Resort in Napa, but on that day — one day before the final round of the event — he felt the need to return home. At 2 p.m. that afternoon, he began speaking gibberish to his wife and housemate. Shortly after, a series of seizures racked his body.
That is how Hoffman found out he had brain cancer. He underwent the first of several brain surgeries Oct. 24, 2014 and was given three to six months to live.
Early this October, three years after his initial diagnosis, Hoffman returned to Napa for what is now the Safeway Open golf tournament. He wrote in a Facebook post that he expected it to be a triumphant and cathartic moment. Yet, by then, he knew his end was near.
A year earlier, doctors had found the lymphoma growth. In the aftermath, he had been subjected to rashes, chicken pox, edema, pneumonia and a myriad of treatments and hospital stays. When doctors suggested he undergo another painful lumbar treatment, Hoffman made his decision to let nature take its course.
Unexpectedly, he found himself feeling better and better by the day. He even let his family throw him a remembrance of life, where several hundred friends and family roasted and toasted the man who — a la Dick Vitale — called everyone baby.
Two weeks later, after saying his goodbyes to his closest friends, he finally set down all his hats, all his responsibilities and all his passion and gave himself just one job to do. According to his Findl, his niece, he died quietly at home.
“Jerry was a kind and gentle soul and no one loved his job or appreciated people more,” Gilbert, his close friend, wrote in an email.
“He was more than just a sports fan, he was a fan of life.”
