Schwada runs into Leonard Shapiro

The newest author at LA Observed is John Schwada, the longtime reporter in Los Angeles who was recently let go by Fox 11. John had led the station into blogging a few years ago, and shows a nice touch with his first LA Observed post about spotting the legendary former Civic Center gadfly Leonard Shapiro on the golf course at Rancho Park. Sampler:

He was bent with age, a tan hat of the type favored by graybeards, on his head. His golf swing was wildly unconventional. He started with his club-head a foot behind the ball; at the top of his back-swing, he stepped forward and launched himself, almost like a pitcher stepping off the rubber, at his target.

You can see all kinds of eccentric golf swings at the Rancho Park 3-par course. It's a haven for senior citizen golfers, a verdant retreat for recession-and urban-weary Angelenos and a sometime-playground for noisy, punk kids with no etiquette and no game.

But it wasn't just the old man's golf swing that stood out. It was the tilt of his head, as if he were a punch-weary boxer looking up warily, through hooded eyes, at a world that had always given him a tough fight. A feather tickled my memory. Something about him looked familiar....

"You're the wild guy from City Hall. I remember you," I said.

"Leonard," he said, bringing his head up, a thin smile crossing his face. There was the red flush in his cheeks, the tough-guy voice. At the podium at Los Angeles City Council meetings, this guy, a miniature Mussolini of energy, with sweeping gestures and flaming rhetoric, had savaged City Hall as a Babylon of incompetence, self-dealing and waste.

Read the rest at Native Intelligence. John's bio and archive are here.