LOCKER ROOM:Anybody who truly believes that sport is trivial will never achieve greatness. You can't give that much to trivia, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

YEARS AGO, in the time of money, I interviewed the basketball player Magic Johnson in Los Angeles. Oddly, even then, access to the superstars of American sports was better than it is was to run-of-the-mill GAA players. Johnson sat for an hour-and-a-half after a game and chatted affably. Then we walked out of the deserted arena into the gloaming of the parking lot and chatted a little more. That’s not the point though.

Johnson had come back to play for the Lakers a few years after his diagnosis of being HIV positive. His announcement of his condition had caused considerable shock in the States. He had until then lead a charmed and happy life. Anybody who acquires the nickname Magic instead of the forename Earvin is blessed in that department. When the showtime era between the LA Lakers and the Boston Celtics was at its zenith it was Magic on the west coast, Larry Bird on the east coast and a world of marketing and partying opportunities in between.

Magic had “partied”, as the Americans call it, in a free and wholehearted manner. He had campaigned on the belief that every woman could do with a little magic in her life. Along the way he had contracted his condition.

By the time he came back to play for the Lakers his situation was more complicated. The shock and the sympathy had worn away in some people. As one American sportswriter said to me, if Magic didn’t die of full blown Aids then he was going to die from being stoned by the Christian right. A previous comeback had been aborted because players complained of the risk of being on the same court as him.

In a world which makes no sense to anybody some people had decided that there were Aids victims who deserved their fate and there were those (crack babies and transfusion patients) who were innocent, and this latter group were the only ones who could have an expectation of compassion.

For his part, Magic Johnson had come to that place where he looked at death and was forced to decide what he would do with his life while he was dodging the final whistle. He chose basketball. He chose life. He chose to honour the gift he had been given and to honour those who took joy from it. That was his poem, his symphony, his song. His happiness.

There were those who felt that if Magic Johnson had died of Aids it would be a punishment worthy of his sins, a proof of some vindictive god giving a sinner what he deserved. And there was Magic Johnson in a parking lot at midnight talking about his realisation that life isn’t about what anybody deserves, good or bad. God or no God. It’s about what everybody owes. It’s about finding ways to honour that debt to each other by giving the best of yourself. It’s about contributing. That, he said, was happiness.

I think of him a lot when on days like this we talk about perspective. The death of a young person as vibrant and lovely as Michaela Harte will never make any sense. Nor can it, as we tritely say, put the joy of sport into some neat and shrunken perspective. No. It puts into perspective Nama and Anglo and Cowengate. It measures the futility of our dumb worries over mortgages and promotions and repayments. It frames for us the wanton stupidity of simple arguments, the fretting over mistakes and our serial failures to love each other and forgive each other.

Look back on this single lifetime granted to you and calculate how much time you have lost on those things and there is your regret. There is your perspective.

Sport is on the other side of the ledger.

Michaela Harte, for those of us hacks who would encounter her at the dressingroom door after a triumph or a calamity for Tyrone’s footballers, was a happy, reassuring presence for the team in the room behind her. Some people, just by being themselves, become integral to the group around them.

We made jokes about her closeness with her Dad, the world’s first conjoined father and daughter. But we had an envy of their great pride in each other. We had the aching recognition that every man wants to be a hero to his daughter and we knew that few of us will ever truly be that. We saw that in this journey the two of them were making there was a trust and a love which genuinely put other things into perspective.

Other things except sport. Sport as a form of expression, an instrument for self-fulfilment and a source of communal happiness. They understood that. Anybody who truly believes that sport is trivial will never achieve greatness. You can’t give that much to trivia.

Ballygawley itself was once divided to its core in an argument over a summer league. What passion went into that long, long argument they had before Aireagal Chiaráin came into being! Mickey was at the centre of it and I suspect every time somebody said to Mickey to leave it be, that it was only football, he said to himself that if we can’t get football right between us, if football can’t be about the best of us, then what have we?

The questions sport asks don’t shape us. Our response exposes us for what we are. Over the years it has revealed for us Mickey Harte’s character and, by extension, the character of those around him, those he chooses and respects.

None of us today can presume to know Mickey Harte’s pain or that of the Harte and McAreavey families. Yet even if some of us are unable to share it, the faith which Mickey Harte and those close to him have shown over the past week is a grace which is beautiful and inspiring to see.

It puts paid to what has always seemed to me to be the trite “closure” in the matter of grief and mourning. There is only a dulling of the pain and then a couple of questions. How to keep on keeping on, how to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And how to honour and celebrate the life that has been lost.

Mickey Harte is a man to whom extraordinary gifts have been given and from whom great and unfair tolls have been taken. On this Monday morning, when he prepares to do one of the hardest things any man can ever be asked to do, the sense of feeling of compassion for him and for John McAreavey and for their families is as tangible and widespread as the weather on this island of ours.

On this desolate day it seems too early to think about summer, but when that season comes I hope Mickey Harte is on the sidelines again. He won’t have healed, but he will be still writing his poem, he will still be the difference one life can make in the lives of others. And he will be doing the hardest thing, which is to keep on keeping on. Doing it in the best way.

Why is sport different? Nobody told Mozart and Salieri that music was trivial. Mozart spent the final, ailing months of his life trying to complete his Requiem Mass in D Minor. Salieri, according to legend, spent the months after Mozart’s passing wondering how to steal it. Nobody said to them that this thing of beauty was trivial and that death should have given them perspective.

If you had what Magic Johnson had, if you had what, for all you knew, was a slender lease on life, a few more months or years, what would you do? Magic went back to his gift, and I know what Paul McGirr and Cormac McAnallen and Michaela Harte would do. They would immerse themselves in the lyric joy of the game and they’d stop sweating about the small stuff.

And if Mickey can keep going, keep drawing the fulfilment out of others, if he can keep giving – well, the good days will feel different and the bad days will feel worse.

Yet the sun on his back and the song in the wind which only he can hear, those things will be the gifts from his two lost players and his lovely daughter. They’ll be cheering him on.

We all will.