Remembering the Magic of a Youth Back in Michigan

Daylight was rapidly slipping away as 10-year-old Mike Kinder, by now in a full sweat, tried to work free for a shot. He dribbled around to the right of the basket, stopped and put a fake on his defender, an unusually tall blond girl who looked to be in her late teens. Spotting an opening, Mike shot and . . . the ball clanked off the iron.

“O-o-oh!” Mike’s father says. Father and son were teammates in this two-on-two game with the girl and another tall kid who combined for a decided height mismatch against the Kinders.

Just another pickup basketball game among the thousands that get played every day on America’s playgrounds.

This is where the Magic Johnson wanna-bes come to play ball, here on the asphalt courts of Main Beach next to the boardwalk at Laguna Beach. This is where the dribble-drives, the no-look passes and arching 20-foot set shots that Magic used to launch at the Forum get imitated by mere mortals.

This is where young boys like Mike Kinder learn the game. This is where grown-up boys like Rick Kinder, 38, teach their sons and also retain some of their own youth. The Kinders come in search of hoops several times a week--the old man still shoots pretty well and the kid looks like a future player.

Rick Kinder grew up in Lansing, Mich. His parents lived near the Johnsons, who happened to have a son named Earvin who was 6 years younger than Rick. Like everyone else in Lansing, Kinder knew the Johnson kid was something special on a basketball court. First in high school and later at Michigan State in East Lansing, Kinder watched Earvin Johnson flower.

He was in his car Thursday when he heard the news about Johnson and made it a point to be in front of a TV for the press conference, where Magic Johnson announced that he was retiring because he had the AIDS virus.

“The last thing in the world you think about is having him retire, and especially because of something like that,” Rick Kinder said. While watching the broadcast, he thought of natural disasters like earthquakes that get saturation news coverage and marveled that Johnson was getting the same treatment.

Does it seem inappropriate? I asked him.

“No,” Kinder said. “He’s done a lot for basketball and for people.” He talked about all the charity events that Johnson has taken part in, both out here and back home in Lansing. This is a guy, Kinder said, who didn’t forget where he came from.

He’s also the kind of superstar whose star quality grabbed both adults and kids. He pictured how the courts at Laguna Beach would come to a standstill if Magic ever made an appearance. “Nobody would want to play,” he said. “They’d just want to watch.”

“The kids would love it,” I said.

“Forget the kids. I’d love it,” Kinder said. “I’d give anything to see him here. Just to go one-on-one with him.”

You get the sense that the country is about to embark on a new phase in thinking about AIDS. People who know little about AIDS--and you’d be surprised at how many there are--will now take time to learn a little more.

That’s also what Steven Sharp thinks. He was finishing off a can of beer while four of his buddies were shooting around on the Main Beach court before the Kinders arrived. Because the presumption is that Johnson attracted the virus through heterosexual sex, Sharp said: “It seems like we’re going to come full circle on AIDS. I think there will be more funding for research.”

Sharp said a friend told him three times about the news but that he didn’t believe him. “It’s just hard to take,” Sharp said. “Very hard to take. Even a guy at the gas station said, ‘Did you hear the news?’ It traveled so fast. That’s because it was so unbelievable. The more unbelievable the news is, the faster it travels.”

Sharp called out to one of his friends. “Tell this guy what you think about Magic Johnson,” he said.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” his friend said. “Write that down. He’s the heart and soul of the NBA. The NBA might die with him.”

That was the first time in an afternoon of talking about Johnson that anyone said anything about dying. From the radio and TV reports I heard, everyone was tippy-toeing around the question of Johnson’s mortality.

But Kinder, whose sense of personal connection with Johnson goes back more than 15 years, had the subject in the back of his mind too.

“I just hope it doesn’t physically affect him so that he passes away before his time,” he said softly.

By now, it was dark.

And the playground got very quiet.