COMMENTARY : Last 10 Years of Sports Have Been Dose of Reality

Someday, long after we are all gone, a bright historian with the benefit of time and hindsight will look back upon these last 10 years or so and correctly label them the era of the bursting bubble.

And this historian will be writing solely about sports.

Magic Johnson stood up Thursday, smiled and told us he has the virus that causes AIDS. It shocked us, knocked us on our backs. How could this happen to one of our heroes?

I have a better question: Why are we so shocked?

Pete Rose shocked us. Charlie Hustle a big-time gambler? Naw, couldn’t be.

Len Bias shocked us, followed all too quickly by Don Rogers. Cocaine could actually kill people, even big, strong, heroic people like these? Stunning.

Sugar Ray Leonard shocked us. Drugs could turn one of the sweetest personalities in all of sports history so sour that he would hit his wife.

The sports pages aren’t sports pages anymore. They are court dockets, daily police blotters.

A former Ram, driving under the influence near Anaheim Stadium, causes a fatal accident. A Raider does the same thing in Marina Del Rey, only in this case the fatality in the accident he causes is himself.

Your morning coffee doesn’t taste the same anymore, because what you are reading with it is not an easy swallow. Now, sprinkled liberally among the runs and hits and touchdowns and goals and free throws are the rapes and robberies and panderers and prostitutes. More beatings are happening off the field than on it.

This is not so much about Magic Johnson as it is about the generic athlete of our day. Johnson did nothing illegal, and his stand-up-and-tell-all courage is to be commended. It already appears obvious that his public stance has created an unprecedented awareness and hunger for knowledge about AIDS, and that can only serve the common good.

Obviously, Magic was unlucky. His doctor was quoted Friday as saying that Johnson’s HIV condition was acquired through heterosexual activity. How much is a question directly connected to what degree Magic gambled with his own luck.

To my mind, because of the pedestal he stands on in our society, a major athlete has the responsibility to be responsible--to himself and to the public that puts him on that pedestal. Magic Johnson was wonderfully responsible after the fact. Was he beforehand?

We will probably never know that, even though, unfortunately, this story has huge potential for long shelf life on the supermarket tabloid racks. Merely answering the phones at The Times Friday was proof enough of that. The tipsters and sleaze artists all had a story, all knew the real inside truth, all were willing to tell all. For an average of $5,000.

The story of Magic Johnson will calm down in a while. His ongoing health will remain a constant concern of us all.

But there will be other stories, of other athletes, in other situations of trial and tribulation. And each, as even Magic Johnson’s does, will call into question the one thing that is so pervasive in the world of sports today: the lack of responsibility.

Bill Shoemaker was a wonderful jockey, a popular person, a hero to anybody who cared two hoots about sports of any kind. Then, one day, he drank too much, had an auto accident and now lives in a wheelchair.

After he returned from a long rehabilitation and eventually met reporters, he was asked about the accident and said that he hadn’t been drunk. Scientific chemical tests taken after the accident and placed in police reports, of course, showed otherwise.

As a friend said recently, commenting about Rose’s post-jail-term tour of talk shows, many of which demonstrated that Rose had learned little in the way of remorse: “He doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t get it.”

Nor did Shoemaker, or so many more of our heroes whose sense of responsibility these days seems to reach no further than their next night out.

And all the while, the bubbles keep bursting, one after another.