Utterly, positively Magic

BY THE time Earvin `Magic' Johnson throws the last of his oversize running shoes into his oversize purple kitbag, it is well past 10.0 in the evening and the Great Western Forum in LA is metamorphosing from basketball arena to ice hockey rink.

In circumstances which Magic Johnson describes as "weird, very weird", the Los Angeles Lakers have just lost a key game to their visitors, Orlando Magic. Orlando have built a lively team around the young upstarts of the US NBA, Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee Hardaway. Tonight has been Magic Johnson's first evening in such company.

"Yeah," he says, "it sure was everything it was cracked up to be."

And more. With the last play of the game and a point separating the teams, the Lakers broke away. Nick Van Exel found himself one on one underneath the basket, as the clock ticked away five seconds, four seconds, three seconds.

"When Nick goes one on one, says Magic Johnson, "that's money in the bank. He had me behind him and I was thinking dump it to me, man, and I'll dump it in the hole, but Nick kept going and I don't know what happened. It was just so weird. You can't blame Nick. Nick's won more games than anyone in this ball club. Oh, except me. I forgot, I'm back!"

He's back.

The house lights are out now. Magic Johnson, the king of this place, lopes contentedly towards the players' car park. In the corridor to the outside world, he passes an over stacked trolley containing the playing equipment of the St Louis blues ice hockey team. The St Louis Blues have just hit town. Somewhere amidst the paraphernalia is a bag with the name of Wayne Gretzky on it.

Just as Earvin Johnson was christened Magic in a school hall in Lansing, Michigan, long, long ago, when he was just 16, Wayne. Gretzky's powers on the ice are such that he has spent most of his adult life being referred to as the `The Great One'. In February, The Great One exercised his powers of free agency and, after seven years, left the Los Angeles Kings for the St Louis Blues.

His departure stung Los Angeles. Just last summer, the LA Rams gridiron team moved their operation lock, stock and barrel to St Louis. Weeks later, the even more storied LA Raiders moved back to their old home in Oakland. American cities partly define themselves through the prism of their major league teams. LA needed therapy.

Gretzky is gone, the Rams have gone, the Raiders have gone and OJ Simpson is yesterday's bad news. Tonight, Magic Johnson, a 37 year old, HIV positive hero for the 1990s, is the only show in town. The town feels pretty good about itself again.

MAGIC JOHNSON passes Wayne Gretzky's kitbag. Outside maybe 200 kids are still waiting, hoping for a glimpse of him before his turns his car around and heads for the freeway. They've had a long wait. It's been a long night, many hours since game time.

Tonight, life is good, but not perfect. Midway through a bruising game Johnson, damaged his right calf for the third time since his comeback six weeks ago. The physical limitation the injury imposed ate into his game. Yet, the Lakers still looked a better team with Johnson on the court than off it. Something about the way he guns the ball around with such flair and authority. He is the grease for this particular wheel.

It was once said of Johnson, in his prime, that he was "the only player who can take only three shots and still dominate the game".

He still has the knack, still drives the Forum crazy.

Since the last buzzer sounded he has spent half an hour on the treatment table and then passed another hour or more sitting on a stool, with just a small towel preserving his modesty, chatting first with the local media and then taking his time with three foreign journalists who have travelled to hear his word. The Great Western Forum is all but empty when he leaves, but every living moment in this crumbling old hash of an arena brings him pleasure.

"It's important for me to be accessible," he says, "not just for other people, but for me, too. I've missed the contact. This is all such a pleasure. It gives me such energy."

The pleasure is shared. Bountifully. Since Magic came back this place has been full every night. Jack Nicholson, faithfully fastened to his courtside seat, is no long the biggest star here on game nights. Magic J. 32 as he signs himself, has illuminated a town, enlivened a sport, built bridges of understanding everywhere he has gone.

He loves the attention and he loves the inter action. He loves talking and communicating, just letting his mouth run. It is a privilege to be given so much of his time, but not an exceptional privilege. As he makes his way to his car he stops and yarns with almost everybody he meets, scattering his good spirit about the place like seed.

He retired four and half years ago having shocked America with his announcement that a life of playing hard on and off the court had left him with AIDS. On November 7th, 1991, he stood at a podium in the Great. Western Forum and told the world what was wrong with him, why it was so, and what he would do. For many Americans it was the sports equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. They know just where they were and what they were doing when they heard about Magic.

It was a pivotal moment. A sporting life crammed with fast glory and good living doesn't tell too much about a man. They know that in this city. Magic Johnson would have been forgiven if he went back to being plain old Earvin. They know in this city that the role you play isn't always the life you live.

He retired and the world waited for the great ineluctable sorrow that was to come. They made him a vice president of the Lakers. They gave him coaching jobs. They retired his number 32 jersey and hung it high in the Great Western Forum, never thinking that he would walk out of his own past and reclaim it from the rafters.

While he was away, he did what he'd said he would do. He educated.

He wrote a book for schoolkids called What You Can Do To Avoid Aids. He created an educational half hour TV show on the same topic. All profits from his enterprises went to the Magic Johnson Foundation for fighting AIDS. He was co opted by George Bush on to the National Commission on AIDS, but resigned soon after, criticising Bush's lack of vigour.

He never took the martyr stuff. Never bought into the deathwatch routine. He developed other interests, had a healthy son and coached a little. Found new aspects of himself.

"I enjoyed being a businessman. That was one thing I discovered. I have a movie theatre now, one of the top 15 grossing theatres in the whole nation. We have been number one four times, four different weeks. We are building in Atlanta. Going to start in Houston in a month. Have sites in Chicago and other places. I enjoyed that and it's an aspect I am developing."

His movie theatre, in Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, having been an instant success. Johnson has entered into partnership with Sony for future developments. He is also dabbling in the retail trade.

"We are going to buy some shopping centres and malls in California. We are spending $50 million on that at the moment. These projects are all in the cities where we can put people to work. It's an opportunity to put people to work. Lots of labour. I want to be a businessman. I've always wanted to own companies. I have a shopping centre in Las Vegas already that is doing very well. We are looking at other things which we will announce in a couple of weeks. Basketball is my love, nothing can replace that, but business gives me something. I wear my people out with phonecalls about how we are doing, where we are going. I practice, then I shower and put another hat on.

He's sitting here showered and hat less, at his locker now, chatting and bantering. When he came back, suddenly and out of the blue early in February, he claimed a locker space between Eddie Jones and Anthony Peeler, two young men in their early twenties who came to the Lakers in the years when Magic Johnson's absence had left a huge hole in the franchise.

Jones and Peeler are comfortable in the company of the legend they call "old man". They twig him about his clothes sense and his 30 pounds of extra weight and his lost pace. They tease him because, even with all the baggage he carries, Magic Johnson still has more genius in him than 99.9 per cent of the sports playing world. They tease him and pull his tail because it would never occur to them to pity him.

Take the moment, two thirds of the way through the first quarter of tonight's game. Johnson, not long on the court, takes the ball from under his own post, his trademark loping, high knee stride eating up half the court in an instant.

Times have changed, though. His opponents, fleet and young, have funnelled back ahead of him and present him with a wall of blue shirts and flailing arms. Without breaking stride, Johnson lakes to go out to the right, but dispatches the ball some place behind him, sending it bouncing with a furious and wicked spin off the floor and up into the hands of one Cedric Ceballos, who seems surprised - but not quite as surprised as the Orlando Magic players. The Lakers lead for the first time in the evening. The Forum erupts.

Goes wild. Showtime baby!

The beauty is that it is not the sickly, charitable applause, larded with sympathy and pity, which Magic Johnson might otherwise have been hearing were he an ordinary man with ordinary failings.

This thunderous sound is adulation and love and respect. It is the appreciation of sporting genius. Even if he were nothing more than a basketball player, in Los Angeles, Magic Johnson will always be an emblem of the showtime era in Lakers' history, that golden stretch through the 1980s when they took five NBA titles and shot the lights out every time they played.

He is enmeshed in the history of this place and this sport. An icon since late adolescence, he grew to greatness on the west coast in parallel with his east coast friend and rival Larry Bird. The epic rivalry between Bird and Johnson, the Lakers and the Boston Celtics, set the foundation of the modern NBA. Bird and Johnson wept back further than that even. Their college rivalry culminated in the highest viewership ever for a college championship game when Johnson's Michigan State beat Bird's Indiana State side in the 1979 finals.

One year later, as a rookie professional, Magic Johnson secured the NBA title for Los Angeles with one landmark performance. In game six of the finals, he scored 42 points made seven assists, got his hands to 15 rebounds and took three steals.

HE STILL has the moves. He reckons it'll take another week to get fully re acclimatised, but other week or two to get already he has exceeded the world's expectations of him, bringing the Lakers' winning average from 52 to 75 per cent.

"It has gone a million times better than I thought it would," he says, as he sticks his autograph on a pair of his own trademark shoes and hands them to a friend who plans to nail them up in his new sports bar.

"Standing ovations on the road. Everybody has treated me well. People welcomed me back, especially the guys in the game. You run around with these guys and you know them well, but for them to welcome you back with love . . . Sincerely. It's good.

"It's with the team, too. They can look to me as a guy who has been there. I'm the old guy who has done it before. Hopefully, I can teach them how to get to the next level. I think I'll do a job for them. I am the guy they can go to with the ball when it is tight. That's good. Everything has been good."

Everything is indeed good. In 1992, "Johnson, having competed at the Olympics in Barcelona as a sort of sentimental swansong, intimated that he might play the following NBA season for the Lakers. There were squawks of alarm from some professionals, most audibly from Karl Malone of Utah Jazz. Johnson gave up the idea.

He hated having to quit.

"I should have come back a long, long time ago," he says now. "When I was away I played with doctors and I played with lawyers and I played with little kids. I'd play with anybody. People would ask why I wouldn't go back. I'd play down in UCLA in the summer and the guys would be on me to go back. I had to wait, had to wait `til the time was right. Now, the fans are educated and the players are educated and the media are educated. That means a lot. I play out there and the players know nothing can happen to them.

"They've been all over me these past few weeks. Giving me a hard time trying to get my ass in shape."

The tone of this second coming was set as early as his second game back. Johnson was still gathering the bouquets after his comeback game against Golden State when he faced the Chicago Bulls in his second game. Dennis Rodman, the game's bete noir with day glo hair, jumped all over Magic that night, pulling him, thumping him, elbowing him.

"A hard, hard time," said Magic, afterwards, "but what Dennis did was right. He played me like a man."

He has different versions of what motivated him to hit the road again. He has said he and his wife prayed about the matter and decided it was the right thing to do. Tonight, though, the great showman is trying out another line.

"I wanted my son (Earvin III) to see me play. I didn't want people to say to him `EJ, your Daddy could play some ball'. I wanted him to be there and see it for himself. Anyway, I was wearing my wife out about it til she finally said `get out of there and go back and quit moaning'. I'm so happy that I did. The way to live life is to strive after the things that you love. I'm a lucky man. People like what I do and how I play. They react with affection. That makes me a lucky man."

Since his return, he seldom refers to AIDS, dismissing his HIV positive condition, as "my situation". That locution isn't motivated by a need to step back from the frontline of AIDS activism, rather it is born from the need to be an active and strong role model.

"I have done everything that was asked of me since I came back," he says. "I have played back to back games, I have gone on the road, I have practised hard. All those questions have been answered. I feel fine."

He feels so good, in fact, that team mates have been warned off asking him how he feels. He wants their attention, but not their sympathy.

"I've accepted the role," he says, "and I am happy to be in the role. I want people to see that I never ran away and said `why me?'. I have accepted my role and I am comfortable and happy doing what I do. I am doing things in my own way, doing what I love to do."

He is asked about the limelight and whether, after a lifetime in its shine, he has missed it these past four years. It's an outsider's question, missing the point as surely as a fresh air shot lobbed blind from the free throw line.

"The limelight?" he laughs. "I couldn't go anywhere these past four years. Nothing changed. I couldn't go into a movie theatre `til the lights were out, couldn't go anywhere without all that fuss. I went to Europe with my wife, we were on a little boat. I woke up and there were 3,000 people on the shore shouting Mageec! Mageeec! The limelight never went away. I'm just using it in a different way.

It's late in the evening and the Lakers have a big week ahead. Two games against Seattle before a road trip. The countdown to the NBA play offs has begun. The Lakers are hitting form, losing to better teams by a point or so each time, beating inferior teams clinically.

"I'm going to be in trouble," he says, "late home." He laughs. The line seems as familiar as the hookline in a long running sit com. Magic Johnson always dallies in this place, always says he'll be in trouble when he gets home.

He hits the warm LA air, turns his back to the Great Western Forum, puts his face to the breeze, smiles as the kids come towards him, calling his name. "Magic! Magic!"

Still Magic.