Sense of Loss Becomes One : 1st-Chair Virtuoso Is Missed

An MGM Grand luxury airliner took off Friday morning toward the valley of the sun, carrying the Lakers, minus one. The seating arrangement was, as is common among athletes, territorial, places reserved like desks in a schoolroom, and long-limbed basketball players nestled into plush, comfortable chairs, an exception being the seat beside Byron Scott, the one occupied customarily by Earvin Johnson.

Magic Johnson, the man they left behind. Out of sight he is, but never out of mind.

Terry Teagle saw the seat vacant, stepped forward, claimed it for his own. You don’t replace Magic Johnson. But it is important that you try.

“Our intention,” former teammate--how the words practically echo; former teammate --James Worthy said before a game against the Phoenix Suns, sunglasses worn indoors over reddened eyes, “is just to be strong for him, because that’s what he wants from us, because that’s what he expects from us.”

How, exactly, do the Lakers expect to go on without him?

“Well, you don’t,” Worthy said. “You just pick up the pieces the best you can. There’s no formula for this.”

Something other than Magic Johnson wasn’t flying with the Lakers any longer, and that was time.

Time crawled.

While scoreboard clocks mark time in hundredths of a second, numbers dancing, this was an hour or two of basketball that could have been timed with a sundial. A final score, Suns 113, Lakers 85, certainly revealed something, but what? That the losers’ hearts were not in it? That their heads were not in it? Or merely, a fact of life now, that the player they miss most was not in it?

At practice beforehand, Lakers fidgeted, spoke without volume, joked without enthusiasm. Nor did that hourlong plane ride exactly fly by. Ball-playing businessmen, they kept telling themselves it was business as usual. Trouble is, there was nothing usual about it.

What this has become is a Laker wake, and what the team must do is exactly what Earvin Johnson wants them to do--get over it.

Only one day earlier, there were members of the Laker family who had been recounting how, as a brash rookie, Magic Johnson had stepped forward to the front of the class to assume Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s rightful place by the bulkhead, Row 1, Seat 1, anointing himself royalty, if only for a day. This was nothing but a lark, prince trying king’s seat for size, because the king, everyone knew, ultimately would return.

Yet from that day forward, Magic Johnson took a back seat to nobody.

Now that he no longer is at their side, however, what is to become of them? The Lakers were hardly the Lakers this night. They were Sedale Threatt and Demetrius Calip and Keith Owens and Jack Haley. They were Worthy missing all but four of 22 shots. They were a team--an entire team, mind you--that accounted for 14 assists. Magic would have had that many by halftime.

Is that what the future will become? Magic would have done this? Magic would have done that?

“What’s done is done,” Coach Mike Dunleavy said. “There’s no sense crying over it.”

“We don’t want to use anything as an excuse,” Worthy said.

They are saying all the right things, trying to do the right things. But it takes more to be victorious than just a state of mind. What the Lakers experienced here Friday was more than a loss. It was a sense of loss.

Byron Scott has more on his mind than an empty chair. He must become the backbone of the backcourt now, paired with unfamiliar people, dancing no longer with a partner who knows his every move.

There are cobwebs to shake off, too, memories of being a couple of Americans in Paris, of going out for a hamburger and getting caught in the rain, coming down with two bad cases of flu. Memories of Magic’s flu getting worse and worse, of Magic missing another game, of him making an appearance Tuesday night at a party Scott threw for friends at a place called the Shark Club after the game, of discovering Thursday that Magic would never play basketball with him again.

Or what of a younger, newer player, Haley, who waited his whole adult life for a chance to play basketball alongside Magic Johnson, then never got to play with him in one official NBA game.

“He’s the reason I’m with the Lakers in the first place,” Haley said. “He’s the one who went to Jerry West and Mike Dunleavy and suggested they sign me. At least I achieved one of the great goals of my life, and I’m happy that I had that one month of preseason games to play with him. I’m just grateful for the time we had together.”

They will always have Paris. But the Lakers no longer have Magic Johnson, and it becomes painfully evident now that adjusting to playing without him is only part of their problem. Actually playing without him is the other. They can run, but they can’t fly.