The Defender is Never Late for the Game

     By Bill Tarrant

     Having a monster game at the plate can send an amateur softball player on a high for days; it’s truly extraordinary if it also launches a professional career in their day job. That’s what happened to Stu Glovin, right-fielder for the Black and Gold team in the Culver City Senior Softball League.

     Glovin was playing for a white shoe Philadelphia law firm as a newly minted lawyer in 1975 when he mashed in the first game of a doubleheader against the Philadelphia city public defender's office.

     Armed with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from Rutgers, he had interviewed for a job with that office but had heard crickets since. That changed after his bravura performance in the first game, and his opponents learned he’d applied for a job with them. This guy wanted to be a poorly paid public defender, and he could star for their softball team? You’re hired! they said.

     “I like to say I hit my way into the job," Glovin said.           

     He had long dreamed of being a public defender.

     “The Defenders,” starring E.G Marshall and Robert Reed as a father and son defense attorney team, was an immensely popular TV series in the 1960s, when he was growing up.

     “When I was a kid, I identified with hot-shot lawyers on TV. I thought they were cool. I always identified with guys charged with crimes. I felt sorry for them, even when they were guilty.”

     He’s often asked about that – how he feels about representing guilty defendants. 

     “It’s that I may also be representing someone innocent. They’re the ones that keep you up at night,” given the unpredictability of a jury trial, Glovin noted.

     He moved across the country in 1984 – unwilling anymore to defend the misery of a Philadelphia winter – and joined the LA County public defenders' office. He worked in various offices around the city, including Compton, where he handled a number of gang shootings. In one case, his client was warned that if he was acquitted, he’d never leave the courthouse alive. He was acquitted.

     “I walked out with the guy and was thinking, ‘are we going to get capped?’ Fortunately, it was an empty threat,” Glovin recalled.

     One of his more lurid trials was the case of a young woman who killed her apartment mate by bashing in the older woman's skull with a coffee jar and clothing iron, repeatedly burning her with the appliance and, finally, drowning her in a bathtub -- all in self-defense. She said the victim was trying to choke her.

     The body was never found, and the only evidence was the videotaped confession the young woman gave to police, which Glovin called “the ultimate Candid Camera.”

     "If you're going to make up a story, that's not the story you tell the police if you're trying to help yourself out," Glovin pointed out.

     The woman was convicted of murder, but acquitted of the aggravating charge of torture, which would have merited a death sentence.

     Glovin played mostly in lawyer leagues during his working life. 

     “You think some managers in our leagues are picayune, you should see what happens in the lawyer leagues,” he quipped.

     After retiring in 2014, Glovin, now 77, rekindled his baseball passions, joining senior softball leagues in the Valley and Culver City.

     Glovin sports a .581 on-base percentage, anchoring the bottom four and its seasonal OBP of over .500 for Black and Gold, which finished second in the regular season in Culver City. It’s axiomatic that a productive bottom four is often the margin of victory in parity leagues.

     Glovin has to be one of senior softball’s most eligible bachelors, with a fondness for travel that has taken him to 80 countries, Greece being the most recent. He also teaches seminars and assists the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles in jury trials.

     His busy life tends to make him tardy for many things.

     “But I’ve never been late for a softball game.”