A Hire Power

There is one word the smallest Laker can say perfectly.

Deaf and virtually unable to speak, the smallest Laker can nonetheless say one word heard clearly by those who rarely listen, understood by those who never understand.

It is a word small enough to be uttered in a puff, yet powerful enough to blow down doors. To most, the word means basketball. To him, it is defined as Thanksgiving.

The smallest Laker can only say the name of the biggest Laker.

“Shaq,” says John Cortez Jr., lighting up, waving his arms, the possibilities endless. “Shaq. Shaq. Shaq.”

*

Even amid the cacophony of a Laker exhibition game, the 7-foot-1 center quickly spotted the 5-1 gym rat.

John Cortez Jr. was the one chasing water and stacking towels and bringing him bubble gum, even though he couldn’t hear the booming rap music, couldn’t talk to stars and wasn’t being paid.

“Who’s the little deaf dude?” Shaquille O’Neal asked officials four years ago.

They shrugged.

Cortez had shown up one day asking to help. The Lakers get a lot of people like that. Cortez was like the rest of them, only he wouldn’t stop smiling, and he wouldn’t go home.

He would be waiting for the team bus when it arrived in San Diego for an exhibition game and walk inside with equipment manager Rudy Garciduenas.

He would show up at their training camp in Palm Desert and start folding uniforms.

He had done the same thing for the Clippers, for the Long Beach summer league, for Santa Ana College.

“He was always just there,” Garciduenas said. “No matter where you turned, there was Johnny.”

Nobody knew where he came from, or why exactly he was there, and nobody took time to figure it out.

If only they knew sign language. If only a few words.

“Frustration,” Cortez, 35, signed through an interpreter.

They would have learned of a boy born in a Bronx tenement, whose mother says he lost his hearing because of illnesses in the first weeks of life and who never received any sort of speech education.

“Hurt,” Cortez signed.

They would have heard of a young man who, upon moving to California after graduating from a Colorado high school for the hearing impaired, didn’t have the patience for a junior college where he struggled to be understood.

“Torture,” Cortez signed.

They would listen to the story of the fast-food supervisor who insisted that Cortez speak to customers, causing him to quit.

They would hear of the fellow warehouse employee who, upon learning that Cortez is bothered by certain loud and tinny sounds, banged a can behind his ear. When he couldn’t communicate his complaint to a boss, Cortez punched the man and was fired.

His parents wanted him to return to school to train for jobs in more enlightened environments. He tearfully told them he could not.

“Everyone looked at me like I was a hassle,” Cortez signed. “I was tired of being a hassle.”

So he turned to the one place that never cares who you are as long as you can perform. He turned to something that, despite its seeming majesty, is actually society’s great equalizer.

He turned to sports.

If you can play, sports doesn’t question the color of your skin or the size of your tattoos. If you can wash jocks and sweep up tape, sports doesn’t care if you are mentally gifted or physically disabled.

For those needing a hand, sports is often the giant that will bend down and give it to them. Cortez began hanging out at basketball courts in hopes of getting a job with someone who wouldn’t care that he couldn’t sing the national anthem or listen to the coach.

When he met Shaq, he found that someone.

One day after their first encounter, stopping at a red light near their practice facility, O’Neal pulled his SUV alongside Cortez’ economy car.

O’Neal rolled down his window and smiled. Cortez rolled down his window and smiled back. Then something happened that O’Neal still talks about today.

Cortez started bopping his head in time to the music blaring from O’Neal’s car stereo.

“I thought you were deaf!” O’Neal screamed at him.

Cortez just kept smiling and bopping. It was then O’Neal realized who Cortez was and why he was here.

Cortez couldn’t hear the music, as he later acknowledged. But he wanted so badly to hear it, he could imagine it being played. He could imagine how it must feel. He was willing to risk embarrassment to imitate that feeling.

“He just wanted to be part of something,” O’Neal said.

The next day O’Neal approached Laker officials.

“The little deaf dude works his tail off,” he said. “You have to hire him.”

He was told were no openings among the eight coveted team attendant (ballboy) spots.

“Then I’ll pay him myself,” O’Neal said.

So he did, a couple hundred dollars a game, until a few weeks later, Cortez stopped showing up.

“What happened to the little deaf dude?” O’Neal asked.

Officials said that because he wasn’t on the payroll, there wasn’t always enough work for him.

“I’m going upstairs,” O’Neal said.

And so he did, directly into the Laker front office, where he requested that the Lakers add one more team attendant to the payroll.

He was told by business officials there were possible safety concerns. He was told there were potential legal issues.

O’Neal knew what they were telling him.

He put down his sizable foot, causing a vibration that John Cortez Jr. can feel today.

“Deaf don’t matter,” O’Neal said.

*

It was a recent night at Staples Center, four years after a guy with no chance for a Laker job was given one that didn’t exist.

John Cortez Jr. now works behind the visitors’ bench. He sits on a padded seat--so he can see--and passes out water and towels. He reads the lips of those players who need Kleenex or tape. He uses hand gestures to talk back.

Before games, he sets up the visitors’ locker room. Afterward, he helps players pack their bags.

He works every home game, collecting a per-game paycheck plus tips. He returns to his parents’ home in Fontana after midnight. He sleeps only a couple of hours before awakening to work a part-time early shift at an express delivery company.

He has lived up to every bit of Shaquille O’Neal’s giant promise.

Garciduenas said Cortez works as hard--if not harder--than the other attendants, often showing up earlier and staying later.

“He is a hustler,” he said. “He does everything we ask. He’s always there when you need him. He makes things happen for himself.”

In what must be construed as the ultimate compliment, the other attendants often forget he’s hearing impaired.

“I’ll be like, ‘Johnny, get the door!’ ” Carlos Maples said. “Then I realize, oh, wait a minute . . . “

Indeed, in all of pro sports, there might be nobody so physically impaired working so close to the action.

“I remember watching TV and seeing Johnny behind the bench and thinking, ‘How did he get there?’ ” said Don Sneddon, longtime baseball coach at Santa Ana College for whom Cortez served as a batboy. “The stuff he does amazes me.”

Certainly, nobody in pro sports is more beloved.

“Johnny is like a little light around here,” said Nick Van Exel, the former Laker now with the Denver Nuggets. “He is always messing around, always joking, brightening everything up. If I want his attention, I just sock the little sucker in the stomach.”

Van Exel looked up from his locker and spotted Cortez putting uniforms in a duffel bag.

“Ain’t that right, Johnny!” he shouted.

Cortez shrugged, grimaced, pumped his fist several different ways at Van Exel, flashed what was apparently a sign-language obscenity, and soon several players were laughing.

Later, in the home locker room, Cortez had an easier time communicating with O’Neal.

“That’s because I made up my own sign language,” O’Neal said. “Ghetto sign language.”

With that, he turned to Cortez and widened his eyes and wiggled a finger and shook his hips.

“I just told him, ‘Will you stop playing around with me?’ ” O’Neal said.

O’Neal then used an elaborate gesture featuring his fingers as horns, saying that he thinks Cortez is full of bull.

Cortez elaborately gestured back, saying more with one roll of his eyes than most people can say during a dinner-time conversation.

Those same eyes told O’Neal “thank you” after the several times O’Neal has sent him a box of clothes and shoes. All small sizes. Fit Cortez just right.

O’Neal said he relates to Cortez because, while in high school in San Antonio, his basketball coach daily made him visit a group of hearing-impaired students on campus.

“I learned, they’re just like us, they’re cool, you just have to pay attention,” he said.

O’Neal pays attention to many things in our community. Because of his reticence to discuss them, we learn about them only in glimpses.

His relationship with Cortez was not offered by him or Cortez or anybody on the Lakers. This story surfaced only after this writer saw Cortez wildly gesturing to one of the Clippers in their locker room one night after they played the Lakers and wondered who he was.

“The little dude may be deaf, but watch this,” O’Neal was saying the other night.

As Cortez passed him in a narrow locker-room hallway, O’Neal lowered his baritone voice and said, “Johnnnnny.”

The walls seemed to vibrate. The smallest Laker turned and laughed. The biggest Laker beamed.

“I swear, he can hear me,” Shaquille O’Neal said.

“Shaq,” shouted Johnny Cortez Jr.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.