Matt Parlow’s a nice guy.
He’s a lawyer—stay with us—a cancer survivor, adult convert to Catholicism, and dean of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law.
“I really enjoy working and interacting with people,” he says. “So much of a dean’s job” is collaboration, which he’s done at Chapman since 2016.
Cancer came in 2003, and he’s well past the five-year threshold to be declared cancer-free.
His faith isn’t so much on his sleeve as in his office—a picture of St. Thomas More and a Vatican-minted medal from 1622 “to commemorate the canonization of St. Ignatius of Loyola that year.”
For his entry in the Business Journal’s OC 500, he cited More, an English Catholic martyr under Henry VIII, as a hero.
Dodger
Spanish Basque Loyola founded the Jesuits, famed for their reasoning, and codified a rule of life in his “Spiritual Exercises.”
Reasons and rules.
Which brings us to baseball. Kin cricket is called a “gentleman’s game,” and Parlow pursues it passionately.
His first strong childhood memory is of the Dodgers’ 1981 World Series win when he was 6. He was at Game 1 of last year’s World Series win with buddies—and the Game 7 loss with his wife, Janie.
Daughter Maya, 9, joined the gaggle of kids who swarmed the field during warm-ups on Father’s Day 2016, just after the Parlows returned to Southern California for the Chapman job. Maya’s sister, Hannah, 7, is on deck for a future ball signing.
Matt and Maya gave the “It’s Time for Dodger Baseball!” cry in August.
Parlow owns “about a hundred thousand” baseball cards.
Desert
His second hero is Brooklyn Dodger great Jackie Robinson. He wore Robinson’s No. 42 at Dodgers fantasy camp in January at Camelback Ranch in Phoenix. Parlow hesitated out of respect, but “they said you could have any number you want.”
Some 70 fanatics paid $5,000, forming six teams to play nine seven-inning games over five days.
“We went 6-1 [then] lost both playoff contests,” he said. “We ran out of gas.”
Parlow played third base and pitched one scoreless inning. He ended in the top 10 in hits and runs scored and was fifth in batting average at .607.
Pitches came in at a respectable 60 miles per hour.
He “didn’t realize how physically grueling it would be,” and spent a lot of time in the ice tub after games, but in true “let’s play two” fashion, he plans to return.
Dodgers on hand included Steve Garvey, Steve Sax, Jerry Hairston Jr., minor leaguers and current staffers.
Players used team lockers and came away with a commemorative baseball card, photos and plenty of memories.
“I knew nobody when I got there, and we bonded as a group.”
Devil
Not-so-gentlemanly firebrand Leo Durocher managed Brooklyn in the 1940s but became its Mephistopheles midseason in 1948 when he was fired and agreed to helm crosstown rivals the New York Giants. He’d missed da Bums’ 1947 pennant in Robinson’s rookie year, suspended by Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler for, as the Baseball Hall of Fame website notes, an “accumulation of unpleasant incidents.”
Brooklyn publicity director Harrold Parrot said Durocher “claim(ed) he was sacked forty times [as Dodgers skipper] but I was there and can only verify twenty-seven.”
Durocher is best-known for maybe saying, “Nice guys finish last”—of the Giants while leading the Dodgers in 1946.
The Dodgers moved west in 1958, 75 years after the team’s launch. Thirty years later, the L.A. squad won its fifth World Series. It’s been another 30 years since then.
Parlow was born in 1974, midway between the move and its last World Series win.
His 1980s childhood “coincided with two world championships and several winning teams.”
Here’s where his niceties come again, acknowledging a link to OC’s Angels.
He was at Game 7 of their 2002—and only—World Series win, “one of my favorite and most memorable sporting events.”
