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Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

Day 6 (Monday, 7 Oct. 2002)

Now that I've taken the weekend off to collect my thoughts (I didn't figure that Magic Johnson would want me working during the Judeo-Christian Sabbath days), I've decided that maybe -- just maybe -- I've been overstating the case against Larry Bird. I mean, I'm not going to deny that I hated the bastard, but likening him to the Antichrist could well be taking things a bit too far.

Besides, as I said before, I'm a monotheistic type of guy, and monotheistic types of guys tend to focus their attentions on a single figure in the Firmament. For me, Magic was undeniably that figure, whether he'd befriended Bird or not. He was my Alpha and Omega, and when I wasn't trying to look like him, I was trying to learn to play like him.

As an oversized 5'3" fifth-grade point guard, therefore, I neglected all work on my fundamental dribbling skills and defense. Instead, I focused on throwing wild and needless no-look passes which, on the rare occasions they got past my defenders, usually caught my unsuspecting teammates squarely in the groin or glasses. I also practiced roaring in mock agony to draw fouls every time I lost control while driving down the lane, and I tirelessly drilled myself on backing the ball up the court methodically, in that Magic-like way that only a Mikan-sized point man could manage.

Even my work in these crucial areas, though, paled in comparison with the amount of practice I devoted to a horrendously ineffective hook shot, and to a blatantly illegal, ball-palming, two-footed-pivoting spin move. In my mind's eye, of course, these moves all looked like Magic's, which is why they figured so prominently in what, at the time, I considered to be the most glorious moment of my life.

That moment came during a sixth-grade basketball camp. Late in the fourth quarter of a blowout loss, I hauled in a long pass for a breakaway and, with no one between me and the basket, stumbled past an imaginary opponent with an entirely unnecessary 360-degree turn, then drove across the key from left to right and damn near shattered the backboard with a rim-rattling 12-foot straightaway bank-shot hook. It was an awesome move, truly awesome -- and I owed it all to Magic, who soon followed suit with his own immortal hook shot, in Boston Garden a few weeks later.

The extent of my joy at this was without bounds. Not only had Magic bested Bird again (this time, in the 1987 NBA Finals), but I had physically prophesied his triumph with my oncourt smoothness at camp. It was like I was Magic's oracle, or his apostle, and you'd better believe that everyone around me knew my good news.

Needless to say, then, although aping and anticipating Magic's game might well have hindered my development as a ballplayer (in addition to making me look like an idiot), it also made me feel unusually fulfilled. And isn't that really what matters? Well, isn't it?

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith Magic.

Day 7 (Monday, 8 Oct. 2002)

In any case, if emulating Magic was going to make me look like a moron, it probably wasn't so much for my doltish moves as for my beaming smile. Maybe I was only a kid during Magic's heyday, but even then, I was observant enough to see that he was always smiling, no matter how dire the circumstances seemed to get.

Did a call go against him at the end of a tight game? Magic smiled. Did Chick Hearn refer to him as Gail Goodrich? Magic smiled. Did Pat Riley allow a hair to slip out of place? Magic smiled. Were there fewer than 80 groupies waiting to satisfy him after the game? Magic ... well, you get the idea. A boy less trusting than myself might have looked for something slightly less than honest in all this smiling. I, on the other hand, was happy to take it as a sort of ordinance requiring me to grin my way through one disagreeable scenario after another.

Let me list a few of these scenarios: I fouled out of 10 straight games without scoring a point. I fell off a skateboard and broke a blood vessel in my head. My sister hit me in the eye with a flying "My Little Pony." My pants fell down at a school dance. My parrot flew away.

And yet I smiled through it all -- just like Magic did, and much to the distress of my parents and others around me. They were probably right to be uneasy: all that smiling must have caused me some sort of permanent psychological damage. But then what's a little psychosis between friends?

Saith Magic, ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall turn into joy.

Day 8 (Monday, 9 Oct. 2002)

I've got to say that this whole faith diary thing is starting to sound a bit too much like St. Augustine pilfering his neighbor's pears. Okay, so I acted like an idiot when I was a kid. What's the big deal? Why the remonstrative tone? After all, I wasn't just stupid about Magic when I was younger; I'm stupid about him now that I'm older, too.

Take my lingering quasi-compulsive obsession with the number 32, for example. Because it was Magic's signature marker, this pair of digits has come to possess a mystical significance for me. The whole thing started back in fifth-grade basketball, when I first decided that I'd kill to wear our team's lone #32 jersey (and you think I'm kidding). The fixation didn't stop there, but soon expanded to encompass other sports, as well.

For instance, two great tailbacks were playing in town at the time, but I rooted for Marcus Allen instead of for Eric Dickerson almost entirely because Marcus wore Magic's number. When I bought a plastic "Gretzky 99" hockey stick, I refused to play with it until I'd scratched out Gretzky's sobriquet and replaced it with a blazing, purple-and-yellow-painted "Algra 32." And when Chick Hearn once commented that the strong-armed Magic should put on Sandy Koufax's old number and "go pitch for the Dodgers," I really liked the idea. I mean I REALLY LIKED THE IDEA.

My continuing fascination with the number, though, was probably only finally secured when, while posting a triple-double during an eighth-grade league game, an admiring opponent told me that my #32 couldn't be a coincidence. It has occurred to me since that maybe this guy was merely talking trash at me, or that maybe he was only referring to the cretinous smile I still wore at the time. Maybe so, but it didn't matter to me: I was absolutely thrilled. He had acknowledged a numerological connection which I'd thought that only I could see, and by doing so he made me feel like I had been apotheosized, like I'd attained some sort of agape with Magic.

Even today, I get a remnant sense of that symphonic thrill when I'm seated in row 32 on an airplane, or when I buy a Mars Bar for 32 cents, or when I'm given "Order #32" at Beef Bowl, among other things. And what's more, I'm probably the only twenty-something person on the face of the earth who's actually looking forward to his 32nd birthday.

Saith Magic, this is the number of the mighty men, who slay three hundred at a single stroke.

Day 9 (Monday, 10 Oct. 2002)

Thankfully, Magic's number 32 isn't the only part of his legacy that maintains an active presence in my life. Whenever I need to humble myself, or to summon myself out of some particular personal Hell, I still think back to the time I met the maker of my ugly game.

"Okay," I can hear you saying, "I can understand the redemption part. But how could meeting your lifelong hero have possibly been humbling?" Let's just say that, during the summer when I finally got to go to Magic's basketball camp in Santa Barbara, my game wasn't exactly the only ugly thing about me.

You see, I was on an acne medication at the time which (how shall I put this?) didn't tend to mix so well with eight straight afternoons of direct sunlight. Hence, it came as no surprise when, after beating down on me for hours each day, my friend the sun completely desiccated my face -- to the point, in fact, that my lips turned black with crusted, blistered, Job-like sores.

To make matters worse, it seemed like every other part of me immediately decided to join this happy parade of deformity. My hair resorted to its pre-kindergarten, cerebral-palsied bowl-cut look, my clothes started to hang at odd angles from my frame, and the metal on my teeth grew bloody from the oozing scabs which dotted my mouth. Add to these indignities my ever-present knee braces and finger tape, and I had to avoid sitting down, lest I be taken for Stephen Hawking.

I, for my part, would have been content to smile through this leprosy alone -- if nothing else, I remember reasoning to myself, it gave me plenty of offensive operating room during the games we played. But Magic, ever the All-Seeing One, refused to let this happen, and singled me out for special attention.

I'm not going to tell you that, when he called me up onstage to help him run a fastfoot drill, I didn't feel vaulted to the heights of pride. On the contrary, I felt exhilarated. I felt exalted. I felt possessed by Pentecostal fire, and feared that I might start speaking in blissful tongues. Even now, if my mood is right, I can still think back on that day and recapture some of its elation. But most of the time -- and here is where the humility comes in -- any joy in its memory is tempered by the nagging suspicion that, for all the rapture Magic granted me that day, I was only standing next to him because he thought I was a retard.

Saith Magic, he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

Day 10 (Monday, 11 Oct. 2002)

He hath put down the mighty from their seats.

In the end, of course, even Magic himself had to be humbled -- a turn of events which in many ways only magnified his godhead. I wonder, has there ever been a god worth following who couldn't teach us all a thing or two about suffering and death?

I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but that didn't lessen the impact of that fateful day in November 1991. In light of what I've written so far, you can probably imagine that, to my mind, Magic's Annunciation was a lot like what I imagine JFK's assassination was like for my parents and grandparents. I remember exactly where I was, and exactly what I was doing, when the word came through that he'd contracted HIV.

It was during fall basketball fitness training, and I was sitting in the locker room trading insults with my teammates, when our JV coach walked in and gave us the news. As soon as I caught the first few words of his speech, my consciousness collapsed upon itself. I couldn't hear anymore what he was saying, or see what anyone else was doing.

I remember that I was wearing one of my old Magic t-shirts at the time, and I remember that -- to my everlasting shame -- I thought I should maybe take it off. After that I lapsed into a sort of indeterminate numbness, until suddenly I found myself in the car after practice, headed home with my Magic shirt still on, and somehow relieved to feel it touching my skin. It took awhile for my thoughts to clear, but once they did, I also remember musing, bizarrely, that until that day I hadn't yet faced any deaths within my immediate family.

Magic didn't die, it's true, but watching him deal with the AIDS virus forced me, in a very real way, to face the spectre of mortality for the first time.

I'll never quite know how much Magic fit into it all, I guess, but as things turned out, this period of his suffering (a period which also included his disastrous addiction to serial unretirement, and a hilariously unsuccessful talk-show stint) proved to be a watershed period for me, as well. Indeed, for better or for worse, it was around that time that I stepped back from boyish exuberance, and began to consider my life at a maturer remove. Magic's tragedy had made him from a player into a man, and it was doing the same for me.

Saith Magic, If any man seemeth to be wise in this world, let him suffer, that he may be wise.

It somehow seems appropriate that my faith diary has progressed from its playful origins to this, its relatively somber note of conclusion. In its tone as well as in its time frame, after all, it has mirrored my own growth from blind and youthful enthusiasm for all things Magic Johnson, to the more thoughtful and considered interest I take in him today.

Don't get me wrong: when it comes to Magic, I will never completely put away childish things. But I have, I think, put away childish ways of thinking about them. And so, as I sit here now and type, I see the story of Magic's influence in my life as a parable: not as a dogmatic call to imitation, but as a complicated interaction, pointing (as Webster's has it) to a larger set of "moral attitudes."

Which is to say that, although there is certainly something faintly ridiculous about Magic's flashy but ground-bound game, about his beaming smile and his infectiously enthusiastic manner of speech, and even about the fact that HIV has made him hugely ripped and diesel, there is something seriously life-affirming about him, as well. In many ways, I've gleaned as much from Magic's certain "something" as I have from the High Church, or from the Good Book.

In the beginning, these lessons were easy and uncomplicated. Magic taught me, in the ardor of my youth, to love my hometown and those who represent it. He taught me how to call for the ball at the end of a close game, how to throw a no-look pass, how to wear a knee brace like a badge of honor, and how to think of Larry Bird as something other than the Devil.

At the time, these truths seemed self-evident, and self-contained -- like commandments whose only purpose was only to be obeyed. But as with any collection of holy orders, Magic's directives have also shown themselves -- over these two weeks' worth of meditation -- to augur the wider beauties of a well-lived life.

I can honestly say, therefore, that Magic has taught me more than merely smiles and spin moves. Through him I have learned about pride in the places and people I come from. I have learned a lot about poise under pressure, about sharing with those less fortunate than I am, about turning adversity into advantage, and about tolerating those from whom I differ.

When Magic was elected to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame at the end of last month, he thanked a crowd of eager admirers for "allowing me for 12 or 13 years to be a little boy, to play the game I love, [and] to try to be the best player I could be."

In writing about Magic here, I have come to realize that I am thanking him for exactly the same thing -- and for much, much more. For in his image I can see not just the little boy I used to be, but the adult I am now, and the man I hope to become.

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