SETTLING THE SCORE - Never Mind Reliving Your Childhood. Executive Camp Lets You Rewrite It.

We were doctors, lawyers, real-estate developers, with a shrink, a TV sports show host, a reputed arms dealer and a columnist for this magazine thrown in for variety. We were campers. Within a parasail’s glide of the perfectly overdeveloped Kaanapali Beach on the island of Maui, we were spending five hours a day in an un-air-conditioned gym--20 guys in our 30s and 40s--having our basketball skills honed by Magic Johnson and Jerry West. Not by the likes of Magic and Jerry; by the legends themselves, hands-on, full-time.

Sports camps for grown-ups are now a growth industry. There are baseball camps, auto-racing camps, camps where you can learn to be a sportscaster. This thing even transcends sports: At rock ‘n’ roll camp, people who put down the guitar after college can cop licks from an Eddie Van Halen type and strut onstage to the delight of staff groupies.

Those are fantasy camps. That’s what they call themselves. Basketball, though, is different. Five days of instruction from Laker coaches and players is not called a fantasy camp. It’s an Executive Camp. Hold all calls, please.

It used to be that kids dreamed about being grown-ups: Student-government types in high school put on mock sessions of the state Legislature. Junior Achievement kids played at being entrepreneurs with real money (were their companies inspected by a Junior OSHA?). And all the variants of Little League exposed children to the thrills of grown-up competition (“Kick the damn ball, Jason!” screamed the Soccer Dad Tabernacle Choir).

All the while, some privileged grown-ups were reversing the fantasy trip. Each year, the richest and most powerful men in America were retreating to a spectacular Sonoma County redwood forest for a two-week reversion to their carefree college days. Bohemian Grove hosted your Nixons, your Weinbergers, your Bechtels--not the men and their wives, just the men as generic plurals. They spent their days in bouts of recreation and prodigious drinking and gave their nights over to elaborate drag spectacles and prodigious drinking. It used to be that if you were rich and white and Christian enough, your youth could be retrieved on an annual basis.

Despite 10 years of supply-side economics, that privilege hasn’t trickled down very far. I spent the week before Executive Camp fretting that this was the kind of extravagance that gave Donald Trump a bad name. But for me, this wasn’t a chance to relive youth. It was a chance to rewrite it.

Physical education--those two words have always carried the dread of an hour-a-day sentence on Devil’s Island. Who were those maniacs the state had licensed to use our bodies to play with our heads? Let’s not even talk about the ex-Marine sergeant who coached us in no game or event sanctioned by any league or associaton. All he did, after we stripped to gym shorts, was march us around the junior high school grounds in endless varieties of military formation. It was educational; you learned which foot was your left. But forget about him. Consider only the swimming teacher waiting for me in high school.

This lunatic had two rules: First, we were forbidden to wear trunks in the pool (that is to say, we boys were required to be more naked than the passengers on the good ship Monkey Business) and, second, the class began each day with all of us lining up to dive off the 10-meter board. Dive ? That’s what I took this class to learn. Naked ? Belly-flops unmediated by even the hint of cotton? Excuse the expression--oww!

It took me years to learn that physical activity was more than the hiding place of the credentialed sadist. Executive Camp was a chance to remake “Nightmare on Phys Ed Street” as the feel-good film of the summer. We were lined up and told, in soft, certain tones by Earvin himself, that our job was to work hard, learn some things and, most of all, have fun and not get hurt. So many years and dollars had to pile up before I found an instructor who would treat us guys with the respect I thought we’d always deserved.

In the big game at camp’s end, I blew the three-point attempt with four seconds to go, but I had fun. And at the pool, between practices, I kept imagining my swimming teacher, now old and enfeebled, buck naked on the 10-meter board, forced to belly-flop into the water to stay eligible for Medi-Cal.