Sports
Plaschke: The unbearable guilt of losing nothing — and everything — in the Altadena wildfire
I lost nothing. I lost everything.
I am lucky beyond all imagination. I am haunted beyond all reason.
I am spared. Nobody is spared.
I am rounding the sharp turn that enters my leafy Altadena cul-de-sac, my home for the last dozen years, and I am loudly pleading.
“Hail Mary, full of grace …”
It is a Wednesday morning, several hours after the Eaton fire began tearing apart thousands of lives, there are still flames shooting up from burning destruction. On every block, the air is still dark with smoke and the streets are still clogged with trees, but my fiancée, Roxana, and I had just endured a night of sleepless terror. We had to come here. We had to see.
The burned carcass of a Volkswagen rests in the rubble of a home destroyed in the Eaton fire in Altadena on Wednesday.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Did we lose this most evil of lotteries? Did we take a direct hit from the hand of hell?
I’m shouting and shaking as the bravely determined Roxana spins the car through flames and foliage onto a scarred and sooted street where we see a bit of fence, and a bit of white, and, then, there it is, standing strong amid the ruins of my beloved neighborhood.
Our house. It survived. It survived?
“The Lord is with thee …”
I begin crying, awash in gratitude and relief, until I look around at the barren smoldering landscape and my heart almost instantly drops into a much deeper emotion.
Guilt.
I was here, but where was everybody else? Where were my neighbors? Where were my friends? Why was I still standing and they were not?
My next-door neighbor lived in a sprawling old house that was always full of life. It was gone, burned to nothing, a portrait of death. How did those flames miss me?
Directly across the street was the tidy home of the kindly elderly professor who lived behind a bevy of beautiful trees. No more. No more beauty. No more privacy. No more house. The bones of her refuge lay crushed and stacked and still flickering with flames. Why was she so cursed when I was so blessed?
Next to her lived a wonderful attorney who never complained when cars from my house were parked in front of her beautifully remodeled home. All gone. Total carnage. Her proud accomplishment had been reduced to rubble. Why did I not lose everything instead?
Times columnist Bill Plaschke stands outside his Altadena home on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025. It was one of the few homes in his neighborhood that did not burn down during the wildfires.
(Mark Potts / Los Angeles Times)
Of eight houses in my cul-de-sac, four remained standing, three of those absorbed some damage, and mine was the only one that appeared untouched. There was no reason for it. There was no logic behind it. My neighbor Phil Barela said he stayed late the previous night and doused a small fire at the back of our property line, and I’ll credit him forever for saving the structure, but this was surely much more than that.
The fire that surrounded our house on all sides did not consume it. There had to be a reason. What was that reason?
During that frantic Wednesday morning visit, we made a quick dash through the house as flames flickered on the streets below. We were enveloped by the smell of smoke, but everything else felt normal. Everything was just as we left it. Surrounding a brown prickly Christmas tree were old magazines, throw blankets, hurriedly discarded socks, all the trappings of an ordinary life.
A life that, like that of thousands of grateful Angelenos whose houses had survived, had nonetheless changed forever.
Our house will have to be stripped and scrubbed and basically gutted down to the drywall and insulation because of smoke damage, and we were the lucky ones.
We could lose all of our furniture, and we were the lucky ones.
Once we’re allowed to live in the house again, which could be months considering all the water and power issues, we will spend the next two years living in the middle of a construction zone, and we were the lucky ones.
If you hear guilt in those statements, you hear right, a guilt as oppressive as a flame. Why did so many others lose priceless photo albums while we get to keep ours? Why must so many others rebuild their daily steps from scratch while our basic floor plan remains the same?
A couple of years ago I wrote a book about the resilient Paradise High football team, which played a nearly undefeated season months after their town was leveled by the 2018 Camp fire. It was called “Paradise Found,” and its central character was a tough head coach, Rick Prinz, whose house amazingly did not burn down.
I contacted Prinz this week to ask about survivor’s guilt. He said it is real. He said he felt it immediately.
Firefighters try to keep a fire from engulfing an adjacent home during the Eaton fire in Altadena on Jan. 8.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
“When we found out our home did not burn it was very emotional, we were so thankful and amazed,” he said. “We also felt guilt at the loss of so many others. We did not share our joy with others and kept it to ourselves. I would try not to mention that our house survived to those who had lost so much.”
Prinz admitted the darkest thoughts wrought by survivors’ guilt — “Yes, there were times when we thought it may have been better if our home had burned,” he said.
But he acknowledged that it was so difficult to get his house working again, his focus turned to that. — “Living in a burn scar, rising insurance costs, constant construction, terrible road conditions … the survivor’s guilt begins to wane,” he said.
That guilt is still going strong here. I will not complain. I cannot complain. I don’t deserve to complain.
Even one minute spent in that house is better than the horrible fate that awaited so many who were never given that time.
From this moment forward, every day in that house will be a monument to pure luck and good wind and Phil Barela and, certainly, I had nothing to do with any of it, and how do I live up to that?
There are many of us in Los Angeles in similar situations, houses intact but lives uprooted, forced nomads who may never get home until spring, folks facing a road so long and complicated surely some of them, like Prinz, may already wish their homes were instead destroyed so they could have just started the rebuild from scratch.
You know who you are, those of you whose homes were saved as their guilt threatens to destroy them. You know who you are, and so seemingly does everybody else.
At one of the recent hotels that we’ve been surfing while waiting to be allowed back home, I was approached by someone walking a big dog down a narrow hotel hallway, a common sight these days.
“Good morning, are you an evacuee?” she asked brightly.
“I am,” I said.
“I lost everything,” she said.
“I did not,” I said.
End of conversation. She abruptly spun and headed in the other direction. I was a pariah. I was not worthy of discussing a loss that could not be quantified. I wasn’t a true survivor.
Gusts send burning embers into the air, fueling the Eaton fire on Jan. 8 in Altadena.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
It was then that I realized, no, we’re all survivors, we’ve all been touched even if we still live in pristine neighborhoods with power and water and life. We were all burned. We will all be scarred.
Just because your house is standing doesn’t mean you are standing with it.
At the moment, I’m trying to stand, but I’m not quite there yet. I am blessed but hobbled. I have learned in the past few days that intangible losses, while no match for the tangible ones, can nonetheless stick deeply in the throat. Those of us with intact houses in burned areas can’t publicly admit it, nor should we, but it’s true.
I’m a creature of habit, a slave to routine, I begged for the same press box seat during the Dodgers postseason run, I drive the same weird route to USC football games, I wear the same basic black uniform to every game of every sport.
And now, even though my house is there, everything else is gone, my traditions, my habits, my normalcy.
I used to drive down a pretty Altadena street toward work. That street is now one long junkyard. I used to stop at a corner Chevron Station every day to buy snacks and talk Lakers with the owner. That place has become a blackened shell.
My favorite hamburger joint, gone. One of my favorite breakfast places, gone. A dive bar that helped keep the neighborhood together, gone. Pizza joint, gone. The hardware store that just sold me air filters last week, gone.
From Altadena to Pacific Palisades, you all have stories like this. You lost your favorite watering hole, your favorite grocery store, a part of your city that had become your anchor, your strength, your best friend. All of Los Angeles has stories like this. Our daily lives have been mangled beyond recognition. There have been deaths, there has been destruction, everybody, everywhere, nobody is keeping score, it’s all bad and it all requires a resilience that was on full powerful display everywhere last week, including in my little burned-out block.
During the brief visit to our house the day after the fire, my neighbor Brian Pires was standing in the middle of the street waxing in amazement that his house had also survived when flames shot up from his corner lot. It was his garage. It was suddenly on fire. He had no water, no hose, no chance, yet he refused to give up. He jumped in his car and raced back to the main road and returned moments later with two firetrucks in tow. He had somehow found the firemen himself and led them to the flames which they quickly doused.
At that moment, he wasn’t just a chiropractor protecting his home, he was all of Los Angeles fighting to breathe again with an unreal courage that transcends all tragedy.
Many of us may never get over the guilt of having a house that is still standing. But, damn it, we owe it to those who lost everything to keep them standing.
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The face of baseball will not be at Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
Shohei Ohtani was scratched from his start on Friday as the Los Angeles Dodgers said he will also miss the Midsummer Classic with what the team called left knee irritation.
Ohtani, for obvious reasons, has become an All-Star Game fixture. He has earned the honor in each of the past five seasons and made his first start in 2021.
Starting pitcher Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers warms up before the MLB game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field on June 03, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
The two-way phenom is on his way to winning his fifth MVP award in his last six seasons as he is hitting .290 with a .939 OPS and pitching to a minuscule 1.79 ERA, the second-lowest in the sport among pitchers with 80-plus innings. His OPS is also the seventh-best mark in the league.
The Dodgers said Ohtani will be the team’s designated hitter up until the break, but he will “have some interventions on his knee to put him in the best position for the second half of the season.”
Ohtani dealt with knee issues earlier in the season.
It is certainly a big hit for the game as the other face of the sport, Aaron Judge, will miss the game due to a fractured rib that has kept him out since late May.
Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers gets ready in the on deck circle against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field on June 01, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images) (Norm Hall/Getty Images)
DODGERS WILL AGAIN VISIT WHITE HOUSE TO CELEBRATE WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONSHIP, OFFICIAL SAYS
Ohtani hit 99 home runs combined in 2024 and 2025, leading the National League with a 1.025 OPS in that span. Ohtani did not pitch in 2024 after elbow surgery but returned to the bump last year and owned a 2.87 ERA and 11.9 K/9, a figure he also put up in 2022 that led the American League.
The “Japanese Babe Ruth” is the only player in MLB history to have 300-plus plate appearances and 40-plus innings in six separate seasons (Ruth only did it twice and never stole 50 bases), and he has more than excelled at both.
Shohei Ohtani pitches for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California, on May 13, 2026. (Gary A. Vasquez/Imagn Images)
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Ohtani is not hitting like he has in the past, but certainly the best pitching performance of his career will make up for it. He “only” has 20 homers and 56 RBI this season.
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If Mikel Merino is sleeping, please don’t wake him. If the last week has been a dream, he’d just as soon keep dreaming.
Because on Friday, for the second time in five days, Merino came off the bench for the final five minutes of a World Cup knockout game and scored the winning goal, the latest lifting Spain to a 2-1 victory over Belgium and into next week’s semifinal against France in Arlington, Texas.
“Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what’s happening right now, right?” Merino said in Spanish. “Honestly, it’s crazy.”
How crazy? Merino has played less than 10 minutes in the last two games and has two goals. He’s taken four shots in the World Cup and put two of them in the back of the net, the first in stoppage time to beat Portugal in the Round of 16 and in the 88th minute Friday to beat Belgium in a quarterfinal and extend Spain’s unbeaten to streak to 36 games.
“I don’t really even know what to say. I still can’t quite believe it,” Merino said.
Yet Spain’s final substitution, which brought on Merino in the 86th minute, wasn’t the only one that figured heavily in the result. Fifteen minutes earlier Belgian coach Rudi Garcia sent backup goalkeeper Senne Lammens on for Thibaut Courtois — not by choice, by necessity.
The dropoff in talent wasn’t great — Lammens started 32 times for Manchester United this season — but the difference in experience was. Courtois was playing in his 21st World Cup game, second-most all-time, and he had been brilliant up to then.
But he tweaked a muscle making a save minutes earlier and dropped to the turf just before the second-half hydration break. After being attended to by the team’s trainers, he tried to continue but couldn’t, eventually hobbling to the sideline and collapsing on the bench in tears.
“We didn’t want his injury to get worse. That’s why I subbed him off,” Garcia said.
“It’s part and parcel of high-level sport. You need to be concentrated, 100% focused, and need to be able to perform. I did not want to put players on the pitch who were not 100%.”
The margin between Belgium and Spain, after all, is a small one, even if the teams took completely different routes to the quarterfinal.
Spain, which hadn’t gone past the Round of 16 in a World Cup since 2010 when it won its only title, had gone a record six games and 609 minutes without allowing a World Cup goal, dating to the group stage of the last tournament four years ago.
Spain midfielder Mikel Merino scores off a rebound in front of Belgium goalkeeper Senne Lammens during the second half of Spain’s 2-1 quarterfinal win in the World Cup quarterfinals Friday at SoFi Stadium.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
You could binge watch two seasons of “Abbott Elementary” in that time.
But if Spain, the reigning European champion, and goalkeeper Unai Simón were the immovable objects, Belgium, playing in the quarterfinals for the third time in four World Cups, was an unstoppable force. With 12 goals in the last three games, it entered the quarterfinals with the third-most goals in the tournament. And no team had taken more shots.
Spain struck first, with Fabián Ruiz giving La Roja a 1-0 lead with his first goal of the tournament in the 30th minute. The sequence started with Pedro Porro sending a cross into the box for Dani Olmo, whose shot was parried away by Courtois. But Ruiz pounced on the rebound and deflected a shot off defender Timothy Castagne and into the back of the net.
In any other game of this tournament, that would have been enough for Simón. But not against Belgium, which ended Spain’s shutout streak in the 41st minute on a brilliant header from Charles De Keterlaere, who shielded Pau Cubarsí with his body and one-hopped a Castagne cross past a flat-footed Simón for his third goal in two games.
“The record and the milestones are there,” Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente said of his goalkeeper’s record streak. “It’s been decades since the last record was set. And perhaps somebody will break the clean-sheet record.
“But it’s going to be many, many years before that happens.”
Belgium opened the game up a bit when Garcia brought Romelu Lukaku, the country’s all-time leading scorer, on at the hour mark. But Courtois was called to make two saves in the next three minutes and came up lame after the second.
Shorty after he came off, De la Fuente summoned Merino over.
“He didn’t say much to me,” Merino said. “He told me I was coming in as the No. 10. And then, as the game was coming to an end, he told me I was incredible.
“Those are the only two things he said to me.”
The first shot Lammens faced came moments later, when Cubarsí put a one-hop shot on goal from distance. The keeper dove to his right to stop it with both hands, but the ball skipped just before it reached he and Lammens had trouble with the rebound, pushing it toward the edge of the six-yard box for Merino, who tapped it in.
“Unfortunately, to beat a team of this caliber, you need luck on your side,” Garcia, the Belgian coach, said. And the stars didn’t align for us.”
So while Belgium goes home, Spain goes to Texas for Tuesday’s semifinal with France, the only team in the world ranked ahead of it.
“Ever since the World Cup started, everyone has been waiting for this match,” Spanish wunderkind Lamine Yamal said. “I’ve been really looking forward to it. To me, they’re the two best teams in the World Cup.
“If anyone can take on France with confidence, it’s us.”
Especially if Merino keeps dreaming.
Sports editor Iliana Limón Romero contributed to this story.
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Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar’s feud will come to a head at SummerSlam in August, and the showdown has the potential to be WWE’s match of the year.
Femi beat Lesnar at WrestleMania 42 and led to “The Beast Incarnate” deciding to retire – at least for a moment – at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Lesnar made a dramatic return a few weeks later, challenging and beating Femi at Clash in Italy.
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Oba Femi looks on during Monday Night RAW at Allstate Arena on July 6, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois. (Melina Pizano/WWE via Getty Images)
At SummerSlam, Femi and Lesnar will do battle inside a Hell in a Cell.
WWE Hall of Famer John Bradshaw Layfield called the next meeting between Femi and Lesnar a “generational matchup.”
“I’ve never seen anything like Oba – well, I have. I’ve seen Brock,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s very much the carbon copy of Brock coming in. Brock coming in was like, oh my God, who is this guy? The guy can even talk, and he’s gonna be one of the biggest stars in wrestling. Not only could he talk, he’s a really smart guy. Brock became one of the biggest draws in professional wrestling. He came one of the biggest draws in UFC. It’s an unbelievable story, and now you got somebody who can rival that character.
Brock Lesnar in action against Oba Femi during “Monday Night Raw” at TD Garden on March 23, 2026, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Owens/WWE via Getty Images)
“This Oba Femi comes out with the silly little walk he does. Everyone kinda does it, it’s like The Bushwackers. But the whole arena does it. I was in Vegas and I didn’t want to go to the matches and deal with the traffic and deal with the backstage area, and so I kinda just watched it in a sports bar. I stood in the back where nobody could recognize me, and as soon as Oba came out, the entire sports bar was sitting there doing that Oba Femi dance. The guy is just unbelievably over.
“I really think that somewhere in the NFL this year, you’re going to see an entire NFL arena doing this dance. You’re gonna have somebody like Saquon Barkley or ‘King’ (Derrick Henry) or some of these guys do this dance, and it’s infectious. Once one of them does, one of these great running backs or wide receivers, or somebody scores a touchdown, that’s when I think you’re gonna see entire arenas doing it. I just think Oba Femi is lightning in a bottle and Brock has always been that way. This is, to me, a generational matchup.”
Brock Lesnar and Oba Femi face off during WrestleMania 42: Night 2 at Allegiant Stadium on April 19, 2026, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Georgiana Dallas/WWE via Getty Images)
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SummerSlam will take place on Aug. 1 and 2 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
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