MAGIC JOHNSON : 1986-87: His Greatest Act Yet

Reggie Chastine should be here today, when a telephone rings in the Forum and it’s New York calling, and the voice on the other end says: “We are pleased to announce that Magic Johnson has been named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player . . . “

“Damn,” Reggie would say, “what did I tell you? Take it to ‘em, Earvin. Bring it on. C’mon. “

When Magic was still only Earvin and looked at the pictures in the newspaper and believed that nothing in the world could be better than being named All-City in Lansing, Mich., Reggie was always the one pushing Earvin to bigger dreams.

“You’ll be All-City your first year,” he would say. “Think about all-state, think about All-American. Think about being the best.”

Take it to ‘em, Earvin. Don’t take no stuff.

“On the playground, see, they want you,” Magic Johnson said. “If you’re the best player, they want you.

“So it takes not only being good, you have to have that drive. You Please have to say, I’m going to take all your best shots. I’m not looking to fight, but I’m looking to dominate you. Reggie taught me that.”

OK, bring it on. C’mon.

“He was the first one who really believed in me. I doubted myself, but he was looking to big things. To have that sense of the big dream and that strongness. . . . I needed that.”

The years have long since dried up the tears Magic shed when he lost Reggie Chastine, his 5-foot 3-inch Everett High School teammate and friend. Reggie was killed when someone ran a stop sign and struck his car the summer before he and Magic were supposed to be high school seniors together.

In time, however, Johnson understood Reggie’s vision. And today, barring an unexpected show of support for the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan, the vision will become complete.

MVP.

“It means a great deal in terms of there’s something missing,” said Magic Johnson, who has never won this award. “That would be like, ‘The door’s closed now,’ so it means a lot.

“I don’t want to leave here not doing everything. I don’t want to leave with Larry having three of them and I don’t have any.”

Larry Bird again, the 6-9 Boston Celtic yardstick by which Johnson measures his own greatness.

“We’re in competition with each other and that’s fun, that’s what makes me play like I play,” Magic Johnson said. “But right now, he’s 3 and I’m 0, and that’s sort of in the back of my mind. That bugs me a little bit.

“So to accomplish it would be nice. It would put me where I want to be as an individual player. So, I feel very strongly about it.”

Take it to ‘em, Earvin. Don’t take no stuff.

WHEN MAGIC BECAME MORE

After the Lakers’ loss to the Houston Rockets in the playoffs last spring, Magic Johnson took two weeks off. Then he went back to work.

He knew there would be changes. He knew that he would be asked to do more.

“Somehow, I knew it was going to come down,” he said. “But I didn’t know how it would be communicated, and I didn’t know how it would be accepted.”

But he didn’t wait to find out, Instead, he was determined to report to training camp in the best shape of his life. And he did.

“I knew it had to start with me,” he said. “I had to show everybody I was ready. I had to be an example that I would do whatever it takes to make us a winner.”

Last summer, Coach Pat Riley decided that for the Lakers to win, center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was looking at his 40th birthday, could no longer be the focal point of the Laker offense. The ball, which had always been in Magic’s hands, was now his to shoot.

But would Abdul-Jabbar understand?

“I always knew this would happen,” Johnson said. “But I always thought it would be after he was gone.”

It had taken nearly five years, Johnson said, for him and Abdul-Jabbar to warm to each other. Then, the summer after the Lakers had lost to Boston in the finals, Abdul-Jabbar telephoned Johnson.

“He called to see if I was all right,” Johnson said. “I appreciated that. Then we just started talking a lot, not only about basketball, but other things, like his kid (Amir). He started opening up.

“I also let my guard down, too. And we both just came together.”

Without that breakthrough, Johnson said, the torch could not have been passed last fall.

“But since that happened, he was, in his own way, pushing me to step forward. When you get the eye and the confidence from him, it’s like, ‘Go for it, man.’

“He just told me, ‘You got to go for it, brother. You got to average over 20 points a game.’ When he said that, I said, ‘OK.’ ”

In December, Abdul-Jabbar missed three games with an eye infection. The Lakers lost the first, to the Dallas Mavericks. The next night, in Houston, Johnson scored 38 points and was credited with 16 assists in a 103-96 Laker win. The third game, Johnson scored a career-high 46 points in a 127-117 overtime win against the Sacramento Kings.

“After those three games, I told myself, ‘OK, I can go out and do it every night,’ ” Johnson said.

Teammates relayed the same message.

“Coop (Michael Cooper) came to me and said, ‘Hey, you played great. Way to take over,’ ” Johnson said.

The Lakers were never the same. The wraps had finally come off.

“Yeah, I was waiting, but I wasn’t impatient,” Johnson said. “I was waiting because I had so many doubters that I couldn’t. I had to go back to the days in high school and college, when I used to come out firing.”

This had been Abdul-Jabbar’s team for 11 seasons. But it was the captain who went to Riley in training camp and enthusiastically endorsed the change. And it was the captain--who usually went his own way--who shocked Johnson in Cleveland by saying he wanted to join the group of players going to the movies that afternoon.

The torch had been passed without burning any egos. Pass the popcorn, please.

SON OF SKY HOOK

Magic passed as well as ever. He led the league in assists for the fourth time in five seasons, averaging 12.2, and his total of 977 broke the club record and was the third-highest single-season total in National Basketball Assn. history.

He rebounded like a forward, grabbing more than 500--504, to be precise--for the first time since the 1982-83 season.

And he scored as they had seen him at Everett High in Lansing, but never in the NBA. He averaged 23.9 points a game, almost six higher than his career average. He scored 40 or more points three times after having done so just twice in 487 regular-season games before this season. Forty-five times this season, he led the Lakers in scoring.

What really made it unfair, though, was that Johnson not only scored more, he came up with a new shot.

Actually, what he did was adopt someone else’s shot--Abdul-Jabbar’s sky hook.

“I watched him so much, I’m saying, ‘Hey, that would be a good shot for me,’ ” Johnson said. “So I started shooting it a lot. I asked him about it, and he said the extension and the release were the key.”

At practice, Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar played H-O-R-S-E. Abdul-Jabbar would shoot the sky hook, Johnson would have to match it. Pretty soon, it became automatic.

“It’s been super this year,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re taller or nothing, that’s a shot I can always get off. I know that, so I go right to it.”

HE WILLED IT INTO THE BASKET

But there is another shot by which this season will be remembered, by Magic and anyone else who witnessed his full-court heave against the Denver Nuggets in the Lakers’ first game of the playoffs. The next day, they brought out the tape measure and calculated the distance of the shot as 77 feet 8 inches.

Lucky? James Worthy said Magic willed the ball into the basket. Mitch Kupchak, the Laker assistant general manager, said he doesn’t pay much attention when someone else launches a prayer at the end of a quarter, but always watches when Magic does.

Afterward, Magic watched the replay. “I was amazed, because it just went straight,” he said.

But what about what Worthy said? Does Magic believe in magic?

He nodded.

“That’s what you have to have,” he said. “Like a cockiness. You can think you can do anything, you can make any shot.

“It’s like when I hit it, I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I knew it, so I just walked off. ‘OK.’ “

HURTS SO BAD

It was the day after the Lakers had played nearly a perfect quarter, scoring 49 points against the Golden State Warriors in the third quarter of their playoff opener. Magic Johnson, sitting down for lunch at the Forum Club after practice, allowed as how he hadn’t gotten to sleep until after 3 that morning.

Most nights after games, he said, he doesn’t get to sleep until then. And that’s going straight home and into the tub, too.

“See this? I’ve got a black eye first of all,” said Johnson, pointing to the spot where Warrior center Joe Barry Carroll had inadvertently elbowed him.

“My calf muscle is so sore, because that’s where I got kneed. Then the Achilles’--after a game, it’s always sore the next day. And the knee.

“When I go home, I’m walking around real gingerly.”

When Earvin Johnson Sr.--Big E, as Magic calls him--would come home after working his two full-time jobs, he’d fall out right in the middle of the floor.

“I feel so much for him now,” Johnson said of his father. “When I was young, I didn’t really think about what he was doing, but now I understand how much he did for me and my brothers and sisters.”

As much as Magic demands of himself--no one, Riley said, is knocked to the floor as many times as Johnson--Big E gave even more.

“When a game would come on, he’d tell me, ‘Wake me up,’ ” Magic said. “He taught me so much, watching those games. We’d watch, and then he’d go back to sleep, and I’d go back on the court working on those things we talked about.”

They still talk now, three or four times a week, Magic said, and his father still makes observations about his son’s game.

“I really love him for what he did for me and everybody else,” Johnson said.

There was one game, in particular, that Magic played for his father this season. It was the day after Magic’s half-sister, Mary, had died after an extended illness. Big E, Mary’s father, was hurting, and Magic called his mother.

“What should I do?” Magic asked his mother. “Come home and be with Daddy, or play the game?”

Christine Johnson called him back later that night. The next day’s game, against the Mavericks in Dallas, was being televised nationally.

“Go ahead and stay,” she said. “It’ll give him something to do. I think he’d like that.”

Take it to ‘em, Earvin. Don’t take no stuff.

BASKETBALL 1, LOVE 0

Her name was Cookie, and they had met as freshmen at Michigan State. Magic Johnson’s eyes still soften when he speaks of her.

“She was . . . ooomm,” he exclaims softly. “It was nice.

“In high school, I was dating all over--you know, basketball player and stuff--just going crazy. Then I met this great young lady, a super girl. She brought me down to being a one-woman man.”

When the Lakers reported to training camp a year ago last fall, Magic Johnson had a little announcement to make--he and Cookie were engaged to be married.

Then last August, he called it off. Why?

“Well,” he said, choosing his words slowly, “I’m so into this--basketball and my work--that I felt it would be better if I got married after I’m done. Because I think I can be just as good a husband during that time as I am in basketball.

“I’d hate to send a lady through what I go through now. It would be unfair and I realize that.

“Take now, for example. During the playoffs, I’m so intense. Every day I’m intense and I’m moody and I need to be by myself. . . . I know just dating that it’s hard on a date because I’m just snapping.

“Just think--if it was my wife, I’d probably just go off, and I don’t want that to happen.”

Cookie was disappointed, he said. And at first, she didn’t understand. As for him, Johnson was left to contemplate how insanely high the demands of a game can get.

“I love it that much, and I will pay the price but it makes you lonely, too,” he said softly.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Man, this takes a lot of you. But I love it so much. I have to do it. Whatever it takes to win.”

HOW EASY RESTS THE CARDBOARD CROWN

Before he ever feels too lonely, Magic Johnson gets out of his house in Bel-Air. He’ll go to a movie in Westwood, standing in line like everybody else, or take in a Dodger game, show up backstage at a concert, or break out the tux for a black-tie dinner. He’ll invite 30 people over for a barbecue--he does the grilling himself--or grab a rod and go fishing.

“I get out a lot,” he said. “I have to. I like talking to people, seeing what’s going on. I like to see it live instead of on TV.”

On the spur of the moment, he will call up his best friends in basketball, Mark Aguirre and Isiah Thomas, and rendezvous in New York for a weekend. They did it once, just riding in Central Park all day long.

“People were going nuts,” Magic said, laughing. “But we’d just wave and go on.”

His idea of kicking back, he said, is to head for a park in the Valley, buy an ice cream, and watch friends play softball. Some of those friends include the brothers of singer Michael Jackson.

“I know Michael. He wants to have that, too, but he knows that he can’t,” Johnson said. “That’s why you see him now going to Disneyland and stuff, just to relax.”

Jackson has been known to don a disguise and show up at the Forum, too, to see Magic play.

“He can’t get out like he wants to,” Johnson said. “And I feel sorry for him.”

But, as he has said several times in the past, just once Johnson would like to become Jackson on stage.

“The energy, the stage presence, the way he makes people feel,” Johnson said wistfully. “He has that aura about him that makes him stand out.”

Somehow, Johnson doesn’t quite grasp that, on his own personal stage, he has a similar aura. His fans, however, don’t have that problem.

Like the little girls at the school in Inglewood where Magic had gone to speak. Please, would you be the king of our prom, they asked. Johnson said he would, and sure enough, he came back a couple of weeks later, and wore a cardboard crown.

Or the cast and crew of the TV show, “Dynasty,” which Johnson visited while shooting a TV pilot on an adjacent set.

“There I am, acting like a kid--’There’s Joan Collins, there’s so-and-so,’ but what blew me away was that they were going crazy over me ,” Johnson said, giggling again. “It’s nice to see people respond.”

Until now, Magic hasn’t gone Hollywood. But he believes the time has come. Lights, cameras, Magic.

“I’ve turned down a lot of roles, but I’m going to start doing a little acting,” he said. “That’s the fun of playing here.”

THE FINAL SCENE

Magic Johnson will be 28 on Aug. 14. His contract expires in 1994, but it’s likely he’ll be gone by then.

“I think what’s going to happen: Larry’s going to go first, and I’m going to go right after him,” Magic said. “He’s talking about three or four years, I’ll go four or five.

“We feed off one another, that’s why we go on. That’s why we always want to top each other.”

Jordan, with all his gifts, has not yet broken into this privileged Magic-Bird fraternity.

“Not yet,” Magic said. “I mean, shoot, he’s a great, great player, no question. But that all-around club, that winner’s circle, it ain’t too big and everybody knows that.

“If someone says (Bill) Russell, what do you say? Championship, every time.

“It’s an exclusive club. There’s just something about guys that can make a team win and make players respond. He (Jordan) is young, but I’m sure he’ll join in.”

When the time comes, will Johnson be able to walk away from the game? He smiles that trademark smile, which lights up a room every bit as much now as it did eight years ago.

“I think I’ll be done, and then I’ll want to come back,” he said. “I think I’ll call Larry and say, ‘Let’s go to the NBA All-Star game and have some fun.’

“And then I think we’ll bring a team out and play in summer leagues on the playground. That would be wild. We’ll give all the fans a chance to see us.”

And then it truly would come full circle. Back to the playground. You can hear Reggie’s voice.

Take it to ‘em, Earvin. Bring it on. C’mon.