A Lifetime Hall Pass

The one, the only, the unforgettable and irreplaceable Magic Johnson is going into the Hall of Fame.

Gee, no kidding.

This one has been on the schedule since that night in 1980 when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was out and Johnson jumped center in the Finals, getting 42 points, 15 rebounds and seven assists against the 76ers and leading the Showtime Lakers to the first of five titles.

He was a 20-year-old rookie. Forget the old line about waiving the five-year rule. After that, they could have waived the rest of his career.

Johnson says it showed him he was as good as he hoped. It settled everyone else’s doubts too, making this night inevitable, a pleasant (yawn) formality ... except for the fact this is Magic we’re talking about.

He’s having his friend and arch-foe Larry Bird present him tonight and gets goose pimples talking about it. Magic’s family is thrilled at the honor being bestowed upon him. Magic is thrilled. In this life, even the inevitable is fun.

That was the secret of his success, immense as it would be. He was a discipline-transcending genius: at basketball, with people, most of all in life, a never-ending joy for him that he communicated to everyone around him.

He wasn’t perfect. He could fire a coach and dribble out the clock in the Finals in Boston. In retirement, he lost his Teflon protection altogether and suffered embarrassments, for revelations about his sex life in his autobiography, for his awkward comebacks, for his brief career as a late-night TV talk show host. Once the world couldn’t get enough of him; now he seemed overexposed.

Yet, unsinkable he was and is. Nothing ever kept him down, not even becoming HIV positive, which may be one reason he could surmount the death sentence that seemed to await him.

“When you think about it, it’s not like he wasn’t going to get elected,” said Memphis Grizzly General Manager Jerry West. “He knew he was going to get elected.... [But] knowing him, he would be terribly excited, even though he knew he was going to be in there.

“It’s a wonderful honor for one of the handful of great players that ever played the game. And he’s one of the handful. And you could probably take one of those fingers off and he’d be one of four, five guys that left an indelible mark on this league.”

West understands the implications of his math. He left his own indelible mark, but it’s his place that Johnson took on the mythical all-time team.

Once, the Dream Backcourt was West and Oscar Robertson; now it’s Magic and Michael Jordan. With Shaquille O’Neal emerging as the game’s best center, and Bird, there’s your five fingers, minus one.

All are/were not merely great, but transcendent, and none more than Johnson, who was such a brilliant point guard at his impossible height of 6 feet 9, he rendered the old concept of “position” meaningless, while additionally suffusing every team he was on with his will and enthusiasm, even when he was 20 and the guys he was ordering around were way older.

He came, he saw, he took over. No one could resist, even if veterans like Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes flipped out at the overt favoritism--like a $25-million “lifetime contract”--lavished on Johnson by the new owner, Jerry Buss.

Norm Nixon, the incumbent point guard who’d had to give up the ball, had famously mixed feelings, leading to a blowup in the first round of the ’81 playoffs--a shocking loss to Houston, the last game ending after Magic, who was supposed to throw the ball to Kareem, drove into the lane and put up an airball.

Nevertheless, Nixon and Johnson also were tight, with Michael Cooper as Third Musketeer. They were so close that when Nixon was traded for Byron Scott, the remaining musketeers beat up Scott in practice for a week or two before finding out he could take it and becoming best friends with him too.

“There was a uniqueness about that whole [first] year and that started in the summer pro league,” said Michael Cooper, who broke in alongside Johnson in 1980.

“They were playing that summer pro league at Cal State L.A. And all of a sudden they said, ‘Hey, Magic’s going to come play with us on a Friday night.’ ... They opened up the top [deck]. And that had never been open the whole summer.

“And you could see the magicalness of it all. The place was full, it was hot. I remember that game so well. That was the time when we got our first Coop-a-Loop. We went over the top and I got a dunk. You could tell there was going to be something special, not only that young man but what he was bringing to the game of basketball....

“We’re in our first game and Kareem hits that [game-winning] sky hook down in San Diego and Magic is wrapped around his neck. He’s jumping up and down like we’ve just won a championship. And I know everybody has heard this, Kareem says, ‘Hey, what you doing guy, we still got 81 more games to play.’

“That’s the way Magic approached it. Every game was fun. And in turn, when the players are having fun, the fans are having fun. He brings them out on the court, even though they can’t physically be out there....

“He made them part of Laker Showtime and I think that was the specialness and uniqueness about Magic Johnson. It’s very rare that a player can do that, to get everybody excited about playing.”

Johnson had size and strength, although he wasn’t high on the running/jumping scale. But no one could match his package: the court sense, the wizardry, the poise, the charisma, the will.

“He was unique in almost every way, OK?” West said. “I’ve said, I’ve seen guys have size advantages--and the Lakers have one now in Shaquille--but he probably had the greatest size advantage playing his position of anyone I’ve ever seen....

“He just had such a confidence about his ability to make other people better, to make ‘em play hard.... He started every season with an incredible optimism. More importantly, he started every season an improved player, ‘cause he worked so hard on his game in the off-season.

“When I look back at him, my God, what a treat for the city of Los Angeles.”

When Johnson left the scene so suddenly in 1991, a numb West noted: “I think somewhere out there, there’s a young little kid who’ll be as great as Magic Johnson as a player. But he won’t be as great as a leader.”

Sure enough, no one has come close as a leader.

In Johnson’s time, the All-Star game was more than the mandatory, desultory exhibition it has become, because Magic would always be woofing about winning, which would, in turn, fire up Isiah Thomas and their pals on the East team--and then, of course, there was Bird’s mouth--so that the guys actually competed.

In Johnson’s time, U.S. pro teams didn’t get carried out of international competitions feet first, as this summer’s did in Indianapolis. Nor did they go down to the wire with Lithuania and France, as our 2000 Olympic gold medalists did.

Johnson’s 1992 team, the only real Dream Team, was the greatest collection of players ever put together (Magic, Jordan, Bird, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullin, etc.), but they didn’t get full of themselves (well, aside from Barkley) or yawn their way through it. They blew away all opponents. In between, they went after each other as their coaches marveled at the pre-tournament scrimmages in Monte Carlo, which some called the highest-level basketball ever played.

Johnson was 33 and officially retired but his personality still towered above everyone’s, even Jordan’s. No player has so dominated any of the other U.S. teams, nor have any of those teams played as hard, or as well, or looked as if they were having any fun at all.

Careers were planned around Johnson. Pat Riley used to say he’d leave when Johnson did (although Magic has been gone a long time and Riley is still coaching). In the fall of ‘92, when Magic was planning his first comeback, my boss asked if I’d like to become the national NBA writer. I asked to stay on the Laker beat, because it was so much fun being around Johnson.

Of course, when Magic called it off during the exhibition season, I went scurrying back to the boss to see if that national job was still open.

It was a transitional period all around but it ended happily, as all Johnson’s other periods had. Now he’s a business magnate, into movie houses, hamburger stands and soft-drink distributorships, still looking for an NBA team he can run as his very own. Once he tried to buy into the expansion Raptors. Last spring, he talked to SuperSonic owner Howard Schultz. Sooner or later something figures to work out for him because something always does.

“I don’t feel ill,” he said last week. “I never have. I still work out every day like I normally do. Everything has been super since Day 1. I just had my physical last week and [the doctor] said, ‘Man, whatever you’re doing, just keep it up.’ I passed all the tests again. To me, everything is wonderful. Life is wonderful.”

His life always has been. Now that you’re an all-time great, officially, here’s a formal thank-you, for the laughs even more than the thrills.