Jim Michaelian loved a sunny day.
He loved them so much, in fact, that it became a running joke between myself, JJ Fiddler, Tyler Hendrickson, and anyone else who ever covered the Grand Prix of Long Beach for us over the last two decades. There are many fun and revered traditions associated with the race, which is one of the city’s best-known events in the sports landscape or any other landscape.
One of our favorite traditions has been a friendly bet placed on the way to the annual media luncheon that kicks off the week’s festivities. The luncheon is held downtown each year in a rotating series of gorgeous locations, usually outside under a crisp, blue sky. On the way to the luncheon, we’d place our bets—not on who would win the race, but on how many sentences it would take during his open remarks for Jim to mention the beautiful weather.
Typically the winner was whoever guessed closest to the number “one.” Sure enough, you’d sit down for a nice meal with the luminaries of the racing world all around you, fresh from the airport or their hotel room, and Jim would take the podium to welcome all the guests from around the world that he’d brought to our fair city.
“Welcome to Long Beach—the weather really is like this all year round,” he’d say. Or he’d give a forecast for the upcoming weekend, an unmistakable note of pride in his voice as he read out that it would be, once again, 77 degrees and sunny for the weekend’s festivities. I don’t think he ever made it more than five sentences into his speech without giving some mention to the forecast.
Jim Michaelian understood that a warm sun sitting in a clear sky with a cool ocean breeze is and has always been Long Beach’s greatest natural resource. He passed away over the weekend at the age of 83–thanks to his leadership over the 51 years that he was the CEO and president of the city’s biggest sporting event, millions of people around the globe got a postcard advertisement for Long Beach. They’d tune in on a Sunday morning and get a couple of hours worth of shots of roaring crowds along Shoreline Drive with a picturesque ocean background, and broadcasters raving about how much nicer it was than Florida or Minnesota or wherever they’d parachuted in from.
It’s a view that the organizers of the Olympics have since fallen in love with, as that same gorgeous stretch of Long Beach coast is now set to play host to several events in the world’s largest sporting event in two years and a few months.
As nice as it is to have people elsewhere get a good eye-full of the beautiful weather and coastal living in Long Beach, I confess I’ve never cared too much about people who aren’t from here or who don’t live here. What I appreciate Jim Michaelian for—perhaps not quite as much as he appreciated a perfect day of weather—is all the sunny days he brought to my family and me, and the other residents of the city. He worked hard to make sure that the Grand Prix was not just a television product, as so many sporting events are these days.
He wanted its Expo and community events like Thunder Thursday to reach the Grand Prix of Long Beach into Long Beach, and I think as long as the event is running those efforts will be his greatest legacy to me. He didn’t just want it to be a one-off race, even though running one of the world’s greatest street-course races would certainly have been accomplishment enough. Jim wanted to showcase the city for a full four days, and he programmed it that way intentionally.
I greatly enjoyed getting to know him over the years, and often joked that he had the best life story of anyone at the race. He was a driver himself, racing for more than 25 years in endurance racing tracks like Le Mans. He was a great guy who never hesitated to share a positive word, or offer counsel when called upon.
We were lucky to have him helping to put Long Beach (and its weather) on the map for more than a half-century. I hope that wherever in the great beyond Jim is today, the sky is blue and the sun is shining.
