Come Back or Stay Put? : Let’s Take Whatever He’s Able to Give Us

After more than four years of absence and abstinence, Earvin (Magic) Johnson, forgotten but not gone, will evidently rejoin the Lakers as an active player. Now you see him; now you don’t; now you do, don’t, do.

This is good news for Los Angeles, which could use some. I know not everyone feels this way, but here’s hoping most do. Life is precious, so let’s enjoy it while we can, or, more to the point, while he can. If Picasso could paint again, would you deny him a brush? If Elvis could sing, would you tell him to shut up?

For a week, a month, a few years--take what you can get--put aside foolish fears and accept the fact that Magic Johnson’s body is his own to tax, that it does not contaminate on contact, that it doesn’t ooze deadly plasma into the open wounds of opponents, that he will not be playing NBA roulette. Infinitesimal chances of contagion and lingering HIV hysteria should not impede his right to work.

As for athletic consequence, come on, the team “chemistry” of the Lakers will hardly suffer, because no team exists that this guy could not enhance. Not a single improvement was made to a Laker squad that last season had to overachieve, simply to advance one round in the playoffs. Virtually overnight, this town would have itself a team that could knock your socks off.

And, for anyone curious why Shaquille O’Neal would be tempted to sign with the Lakers next summer as a free agent, how about the opportunity to be a teammate of one of the greatest basketball passers of the century? Shaq at center, Magic at his side, Nick Van Exel at the point . . . think about it. O’Neal only thinks he plays with the Magic now.

To think that as recently as a week or two ago, the typical L.A. sports fan had nothing much to talk about.

We’ll wake this place up yet.

Los Angeles is home to a couple of legends, Johnson and Wayne Gretzky, neither of whom knows whether he is coming or going. While others leave town or lock their jockstraps in an attic, permanently, Johnson continues to wonder whether the doorway of the Forum still has a welcome mat, whereas Gretzky frets that his has worn out.

The difference is, Gretzky must get help to give Los Angeles a championship team in his sport, but Johnson is the help Los Angeles needs to have a championship team in his sport. With him in the lineup, the Lakers can make it to the NBA finals, where even Chicago or Orlando wouldn’t necessarily overpower them.

For this and other reasons, I wholeheartedly support Earvin Johnson’s return, and hope basketball’s fans will do the same. His contemporaries, Michael Jordan and such, seem to be in favor of the idea as well. Karl Malone, a few others who expressed reservations in the past, well, let them take the night off if Johnson’s presence troubles them.

(Without Malone, I predict, Utah would lose to Magic and the Lakers a week from Sunday at the Forum, by a final score of 100-2. John Stockton, one assist.)

I once wrote that Johnson might want to avoid any place he wasn’t wanted, that if his being around was going to place other players under duress or in distress, that perhaps the wise course of action would be to withdraw and grant their wish. Having known Earvin since he was 18, I have never known him to back away from a challenge, but I have known him to respect other people’s feelings.

His agent phoned me next day and said, “We’d like to see you write a retraction.” I tried to explain that we retract errors of fact, not of opinion, but I understood what he meant. He meant it was misleading to suggest that anyone should kowtow to a mob mentality, that one should quit trying to reason with the unreasonable.

Magic Johnson, yes, has a virus. But if this is what he wants to do with the remainder of his life, and if his employers and his league’s authorities and his teammates now acknowledge that our knowledge of this virus is greater now, and that the health risk is so minimal as to be virtually invisible, then by all means, let’s let the man be a professional basketball player again.

I was thrilled to see Michael Jordan come back. I would be thrilled to see Magic Johnson come back. If you open your eyes and your heart, you won’t see one bit of difference between them.