Their Game Is Same, Their Stories Aren’t

The good side of being Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan is pretty obvious. You win championships, you make people happy and you make more money than almost everybody but Oprah.

The bad side of being Magic or Michael must be becoming clearer by now. Everything you do is out in the open--or eventually will be. You can run and shoot, but you can’t hide.

Now, new books taking new looks at America’s most flaunted active basketball players are making their way to your shelves. They are Earvin Johnson’s “My Life,” one of those oxymoronic autobiographies that someone else authors, and Bob Greene’s “Hang Time,” which is mainly about Michael Jordan and partly about Bob Greene.

All I can say is, if you ever needed evidence of the principal difference between these two athletes who have so much else in common, then read these books.

They prove what you might already expect: That Magic Johnson is a man who has a good time everywhere he goes, and that Michael Jordan is a man who no longer seems to be having a good time.

Earvin is everywhere, once again furthering my theory that there are 12 Magic Johnsons who travel around the globe, the real one and 11 duplicates. He is in Honolulu, in Hollywood, in the White House, in Barcelona, in Michigan, in Monte Carlo and on Arsenio. He is in the Wall Street Journal and in the National Enquirer. He is in the stands or in other lands, slapping hands. He could be the most accessible athlete since Ali.

Michael is nowhere, a prisoner of his fame, leery of the public eye, afraid to leave his hotel room on the road, isolated to the Elba of private golf courses to get away from the madding crowds. When Greene asks him which of his teammates Jordan would call at 3 o’clock in the morning for a confidential talk or a personal favor, Michael’s reply is rather sad: “There’s not one of the 11 I’d call.”

Not, say, Scottie Pippen?

“Are you kidding?” Jordan asks. “I’d rather lie awake and stare at the ceiling the rest of the night.”

I have the feeling that if Earvin Johnson had something on his mind, he wouldn’t mind talking it over with the kid outside the hotel parking cars. Earvin is so open, such a “people person.”

In his new book, written with (or by, take your pick) William Novak, after the athlete is informed that he has contracted the virus that leads to AIDS, he and his agent place dozens of phone calls to friends, and have a houseful of people over to the Johnsons’ home the next night to eat and talk.

Something tells me Michael Jordan would have kept pretty much to himself. Like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he is not always sociable. Magic himself tells how, as a child at a game in Detroit, he once asked for Abdul-Jabbar’s autograph and he “brushed right past me without even making eye contact.”

I have always contended that the difference between Magic and Kareem is that when you ask Magic, “How are you?” his reply is: “Fine, how are you?” And when you ask Kareem, “How are you?” his reply is: “Fine.”

In his book, Johnson calls Abdul-Jabbar the most intelligent and most mysterious athlete he has known, one who “barely spoke to me during my first five years on the team.” He says Kareem also behaved that way with other teammates, who called him “the Brother from Another Planet,” and with outsiders who could stand right alongside Abdul-Jabbar without being acknowledged.

Says Magic in the book: “ ‘You know,’ I told him, ‘you could be a lot nicer to the fans. It wouldn’t cost you anything.’ . . . Whatever happens during those five seconds is what the other person will remember for the rest of their life.”

Much of Johnson’s book will not be new to anyone who has followed his career or read previous accounts of his life. Certain stories are rehashed for the umpteenth time, including the luncheon with Jack Kent Cooke and the hate-love relationship with Larry Bird. Also, while written in Johnson’s first-person voice, a lot of the narrative doesn’t sound much like him, as was the case with Darryl Strawberry’s book earlier this year.

The Jordan book is not a biography, any more than was Sam Smith’s best-seller, “The Jordan Rules.” Bob Greene, like his Chicago Tribune colleague, assembled a year’s worth of notes and anecdotes based on observation and private conversation. But his is of a more hands-on nature, including a photograph of Jordan leaning on Greene that appears not once, not twice but four times on the book’s dust jacket.

The author got a courtside seat at Chicago Stadium, rare as gems, simply to view Michael, night after night. He also takes us backstage to a Jordan who suddenly finds basketball to be more work than play, who retreats into hotel suites that he keeps at high enough temperatures to grow orchids.

Greene isn’t interested in Jordan the jock but in Jordan the individual and idol, and he paints a sympathetic picture of someone who, for a man dressed in red, sure does seem blue.

Funny how life is. Michael Jordan, whose world should be full of joy, sounds so very unhappy. Magic Johnson, whose world should be full of doubts, never sounded better.