A Shock That Shifted the World

The Nancy room of the Ronald Reagan Library was no place to get the news about Magic. But that’s where I was. A bunch of us were standing in front of the video monitor, watching a tape of Nancy passing out “Just Say No” T-shirts to some black kids from an unnamed ghetto. The kids were all scrubbed and smiling.

We stood there like auto-robots, absorbing the message, not thinking, letting the time pass. And that’s when the news came. Somehow the teen-agers found out first. Just how, inside the Reagan Library, I don’t know. Maybe teen-agers have learned to receive radio waves directly into their brains. In any case, they knew.

Two of them ran up to their father, who was standing with the video bunch. One of them tugged at his shirt and started speaking in the overheated whisper of a 14-year-old.

It’s impossible not to hear such a whisper. And soon all of us in the Nancy room knew what had happened. We had received the news.

Can you remember the exact spot where you stood, the time of day, when you heard the news about Rock Hudson? Or Paul Gann? I doubt it. But Magic is different. Those details will be remembered this time, as they always are when an event seems to shift the world in some undefinable way.

Driving back from the library, I turned on talk radio. They were playing a tape of the announcement and you could hear that lonely phrase again, “Because of the HIV virus that I have obtained. . . .” Yet it was spoken in the same, easy voice that usually addresses itself to fast breaks and championships.

When the calls started, I noticed that almost no one referred to “Magic.” On this afternoon, they used the name that implied family. They referred to “Earvin.”

They talked about the wind being taken from their lungs. One woman said that when she heard the news, she stopped breathing. A man said he felt his throat close. It was as if the news about Earvin had the momentary power to threaten their lives also.

No one talked much of basketball. The thing that mattered was Earvin, that he could be trusted with the love and hero worship of a million kids on a thousand basketball courts. Earvin didn’t do drugs, so far as we knew. Earvin did not reveal obstinate greed or egomania. Earvin was a ferocious competitor who never seemed to make enemies on the court. Earvin was like Lou Gehrig, the real thing.

Was . People couldn’t help it, they kept referring to him in the past tense. They seemed to be discovering a particular kind of loss for the first time--the loss of a young man, much loved and in his prime, to a wasting disease that cannot be stopped.

One caller said the news about Earvin had made him “understand.” Another said he realized now that “anybody could get it.”

And so it has gone, for three days. In one sense, this response is baffling. For most of a decade, this country has experienced a steady depopulation of its young men, many in their prime. Actors, cooks, race car drivers, stockbrokers and football players have turned sick and died of this disease. Some will die today.

On the morning after the announcement, for example, there was an interview with an AIDS doctor on a morning news show. The interviewer was talking about the national grief over Magic and suggested the doctor might have something to offer on this point.

The doctor smiled thinly. No, not much to offer, he said. Over the past five years he had informed two to three persons a day that their lives were going to end. Some had run out his office. Some had collapsed. And his practice was only one of thousands across the country. He said it was amazing to him that these deaths apparently had made such a small impact on the public consciousness.

Earvin, of course, is different because he has become an electronic member of many families, particularly in those with teen-age sons. You could argue that the outpouring of grief over his infection with HIV ranks as a testament to the continuing power of television and sports championships.

And to the true love and loyalty we reserve for those who earn it. Magic was one of those. No, pardon, Magic is one of those.

Will the new awareness of AIDS last? It will be interesting to see. On Friday, the day after the announcement, there was this clue: Stock prices of condom manufacturers leaped upward on Wall Street. Somebody out there was betting that Magic had accomplished what all others had failed.

They were betting on a winner, see. And that looks like smart money to me.