THE NBA : This Was More Magic Than the Public Could Stand

Here’s the saddest truth of all:

By the end of his career, Magic Johnson, long one of our most popular athletes, was wearing thin.

To cover him was to hear more and more people ask, “Do you think he’s really a hero? Aren’t you getting tired of it? Isn’t it a bit much?” Roger Phillips of the Long Beach Press-Telegram got a death threat if he kept writing about Magic.

Pardon me, but where did the big guy go wrong?

Obviously, Johnson wasn’t a saint. More like a wide-eyed post-adolescent who pulled up a chair to the banquet of life and resolved to taste every dish.

But he did something remarkable.

He owned up to it.

This may not sound like much. But in these bent times, when we get lied to so often we get used to it, when TV ads pummel us with half-truths every second of every day, when politics becomes the art of the plausible fib, if this wasn’t heroism, it was remarkable enough. If what Johnson did was easy, some other celebrity would do it, but none has.

With world-wide sympathy, however, came overexposure, like 10 Michael Jordans or 100 John Maddens. Johnson was on SportsCenter, the evening news, the National Commission on AIDS, the presidential debate. He took over the Olympics, his mere presence disrupting every scene from the opening parade on. NBC used his smile for every reaction shot from Dream Team games. By the time of his announced return to the NBA, a backlash seemed well under way, as if a lot of people were saying, “Enough already.”

I did a radio show from Indianapolis, where the host told me he didn’t want Magic back.

I told him I couldn’t imagine why not.

He said because the Lakers were rivals of the Pacers.

Rivals of the Pacers? They play twice a year unless they meet in the NBA finals, and I don’t think anyone in Indiana minded too much having Johnson there for that game. Let’s put it this way: they will sell fewer tickets to the next Laker game than to Magic’s last one.

Much of the backlash was, “Why don’t you take your problems home and stop inflicting them on us?”

We view our games through a narrow prism: Someone wins, someone loses. They are an escape from real life. If an infected man participates and becomes a source of pride to others who have been shunted aside by society, who really cares? The story becomes: Magic’s Back, Laker Chances Improve.

If the story turns thorny, the preferred alternative is to clear up the unpleasantness as quickly as possible. Karl Malone is upset? Gee, we wouldn’t want that. Medical opinion says the risk is “infinitesimal,” but Mark Price says a risk is a risk, however small. He probably has a better chance of buying it driving his car to work.

The bald fact is that players do hundreds of things they don’t want to do. Lots of them are afraid to fly but for the sake of their million-dollar jobs, they board their planes, sweaty palms and all. Talk of a boycott was silly. A night off would cost Malone about $36,000. It would actually be refreshing to see a player with that much principle.

Johnson, faced with all this, seemed to do what he never had before.

He let someone else make his mind up for him.

Actually, he had returned with mixed feelings in the first place. By the end of last season, he was clearly over his need for the game. The man who had hinted for months that he would make a comeback now stopped coming around. He went to Hawaii when he felt like it and did showcase games for NBC. For the first time, he named a No. 1 priority: buying a team.

His Dream Team experience--all that easy camaraderie with fellow superstars, the adulation, scarcely a mention of the virus--turned him around again.

But that was only the honeymoon.

“The Olympics was a terrific high for him,” Jerry West said last week. “But that would have been pretty much the same if one of you guys had gotten selected for that team.

“Not having to play at your best and knowing you can win, that’s pretty easy. It’s like when you’re a kid: all the mind games, you never lose a game. That team was never going to lose. It was easy.”

Johnson left Barcelona intent on returning--then took eight weeks to make a decision he had planned to rubber-stamp in two.

In Hawaii at training camp, he vowed to stand up to the coming storm--”Fine. I’ve got to be stronger than that. And I am.”--but he had underestimated it.

When the Lakers returned to the mainland, the national press corps waited. The furor over the week-old Sporting News column was reborn. Johnson said a player was spreading the word that he was gay. It turned out, he thought it was Isiah Thomas, once his best friend and the man who set the tone of the Orlando All-Star Game, breaking from the script in pregame introductions to lead the East players over to embrace Johnson one-by-one.

It took only one of those old-fashioned preseason swings through St. Louis, Memphis and Chapel Hill, a few skeptical comments and a scratch on the forearm in the final exhibition, a stirring among the photographers and some perceived funny looks from the Cavaliers to convince Johnson that his lark had flown.

So he left.

Several Cavaliers protested later that they weren’t aware of having reacted to Johnson’s cut. Craig Ehlo went so far as to say Johnson was “making excuses.”

Johnson was already gone.

I wish his last act had been to stand up and say goodby to everyone as forthrightly as he had every other time but it’s OK. He has already done enough through the years with his grace, his artistry and most of all, with his most majestic moment of all, Nov. 7, 1991, a day when the Forum seemed ready to sink under the tears and he set aside his fears to smile the old smile for us.

Of this man, it can be truly said: He gave at the office.