hero

They mentioned “The Odyssey,” they talked about “Lord of the Rings,” they referenced “The Hobbit,” they cited the hero’s journey, they predicted a season filled with mythological tales of triumph.

What they didn’t promise was that their Lakers’ team would contend for a championship.

What they couldn’t mention was what will happen to them if they don’t.

The bard Rob Pelinka? Off with your head!

The soothsayer JJ Redick? Drawn and quartered!

In their annual pre-training camp news conference at their practice facility Thursday, Pelinka and Redick talked about fictional characters perhaps because the reality is too grim for words.

Their jobs are on the line with a rebuilding team that might not be good enough to save them, and no amount of cute Gandalf references can change that.

With new ownership, the Lakers’ braintrust no longer has the protection of the benevolent Buss family or the baseball-centric Mark Walter.

Here’s guessing Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner will want any excuse to put their own people in charge of their $12.5-billion investment. And if this clearly rebuilding Lakers team doesn’t quickly measure up to the brand that Iger and Kushner purchased, they’ll have that excuse.

In his nine full seasons as the Lakers’ basketball boss, Pelinka constructed the 2020 bubble championship team, but destroyed it soon thereafter and hasn’t won since.

In his two seasons as Lakers coach, Redick became the first Lakers coach to win 50-plus games in consecutive seasons since Phil Jackson. But Redick was always LeBron James’ choice, and now that James is gone — thank goodness! — Redick will have to prove himself all over again to the new guys.

He’s already off to an awkward start considering his answer to a question about who would join Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves and Walker Kessler in the starting lineup. He referenced the lame internet criticism that the Lakers couldn’t win because they were now led by too many white guys.

“I’m pretty confident in three of the spots,” he said. “The other two spots will not be two white guys.”

Um, OK.

Redick acknowledged that all those new potential starters — Quentin Grimes, Collin Sexton, Kevon Looney, Matisse Thybulle and others — can band together to turn this season into a mythological masterpiece.

“Part of the Hero’s journey is allies and gods,” he said, referring to stories about ordinary folk who are transformed by triumphant adventures. “And so I think if you look at “Lord of the Rings,” right? All the guys from “The Hobbit,” those guys had to be connected. They had to embrace the fact that they were allies, right? … You’re not gonna get through the journey without that. Or the journey’s gonna be even more tumultuous than it is because the reality is there will be ordeals and trials along the way.”

At this point Pelinka jumped in, saying, “So I’m a big Tolkien guy. Are you Samwise or Frodo?”

Answered Redick, “Uh, I’m simultaneously Samwise and Gandalf.”

Replied Pelinka: “Gandalf. That’s even better.”

Rob Pelinka (left), the Lakers general manager/president of basketball operations, speaks to the media with coach JJ Redick on Thursday at the team’s training facility in El Segundo.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

In San Antonio they’re talking about Wemby, in Oklahoma City they’re talking about SGA, and in Los Angeles they’re talking about … Frodo?

Tumultuous indeed. Welcome to life after LeBron, with Pelinka essentially starting the news conference by answering the biggest question of the summer — why did the James and Laker marriage fail?

Except he didn’t answer it.

“I’m so thankful for the partnership that we had that continued up until this summer when a decision was made for him to play for another team,” he said.

A decision was made by whom? James said it was him. It says here it was the Lakers, who needed to move him out if they were going to move ahead.

Pelinka didn’t elaborate, instead focusing on a popular reference that he sort of botched.

“We’ve talked about every season is a little bit like ‘The Odyssey,’ if anyone has seen the movie,” he said before someone corrected him. “Oh, it was actually a poem. Fair enough.”

The poem wasn’t this complicated.

“You launch a season, and there’s things that happen throughout that you can’t predict, but you have to stay together as a group and stay strong,” Pelinka said. “That’s a great theme for us.”

Pelinka will be going through his own Odyssey this season, as evidenced by his defense of his accomplishments.

“If you look at the teams that we’re wanting to go shoulder-to-shoulder with, the Thunder and the Spurs maybe in the West. … They had to lose many seasons to get high picks and we just don’t have the luxury of that here,” he said. “Again, the expectations are every year (to) win, get in the playoffs, make a run, and so we feel like we’ve been able to do that. As I’ve started, since I’ve been here in the leadership position, we’ve been a playoff team and we have to continue to do that.”

Redick was also playing defense, saying, “No one is a championship-level team on September 29. There’s not a team in the league that is a championship-level team. That is an ongoing process throughout the year. Rob talks about his job in that. Well, I have a job in that. Our players have a job in that. I’m confident we’re gonna develop as a team into a championship-level team this year. “

This season will live forever in Lakers folklore if they do.

There could be a medieval bloodbath if they don’t.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Staff nurse Razia Noreen was at a medicine cupboard on the nursery ward of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital. She was two doors from the babies in her care, preparing the morning’s injections.

As she shut the cupboard door, she saw through the nursery’s glass panel a light too sharp and too red to be anything ordinary. She did not wait to understand what it was.

It was 6:38am on Wednesday, August 26. Elsewhere in the ward, her colleague, Sister Nasreen, was already running out, shouting for help.

At 56 seconds past 6:38am, according to security camera timestamps later logged by a government inquiry committee, Noreen rushed into the nursery.

Eight seconds later, she emerged carrying a baby. She tried to go back in. She could not. By 6:40am, the room was gone, swallowed by smoke so thick that the security cameras could no longer see through it.

Noreen was recalling this eight days later, in a plain office beside the hostel warden’s room at PIMS, dressed in a pale pink shalwar kameez, her dupatta loose over one shoulder.

“There was a proper blast,” she told Al Jazeera. “Everything turned to smoke.”

Fifteen newborns had been in that nursery. Fourteen died. The baby Noreen carried out was the only one who lived.

On Thursday, Noreen was given an award by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for her courage. But for the nurse, the trauma of that Wednesday morning was still raw.

Barely two hours after meeting the prime minister, she sat down and talked, at length, about what happened inside.

‘Save the babies’

Noreen had been on duty since 8pm the previous night, working a routine dawn medication round with Sister Nasreen, with less than two hours left before the end of her shift.

When she saw the light through the nursery glass, she says she did not stop to work out what it was.

“I just told my sister nurse, save the babies,” she told Al Jazeera. “I went in. I didn’t think about what would happen next.”

Noreen said the fire was coming out of the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her.

“The AC was right in front of me, and the fire was coming out of its side,” she said. “We don’t know what was happening behind it. That’s just what I saw.”

The government’s interim inquiry, submitted on August 28, states that the precise cause of the fire “is not yet conclusively established”, with evidence pointing variously to the air conditioner, an incubator or an electrical short circuit.

Inside the nursery, Noreen reached the nearest baby. There was no time to choose between 15. She carried the infant out and handed her to Dr Abdul Rehman, a doctor who had been inserting a feeding tube in the next room and emerged into the corridor moments after her. Then she turned back.

“I thought I’d get five, six, seven, eight more of them out,” she said. “But the fire was moving faster than I was.”

A second doctor, Dr Rimsha, who had been doing rounds nearby and saw the same light Noreen had, followed her in.

The two of them, and later Sister Nasreen, tried to crawl back through the smoke below the worst of the heat. A sudden loss of power plunged the room into darkness. They could not get through.

Noreen’s phone, left behind on the medication table when she ran in, sat inside the burned ward overnight. Hospital guards found it and returned it to her the next afternoon. Its case is still scorched and cracked.

Noreen, Dr Rimsha and Sister Nasreen instead moved to where a separate rescue team was lowering babies from an adjoining gynaecology ward. They stood there catching newborns and running them to the neonatal intensive care unit until the smoke became too thick to remain.

The government’s inquiry later found that the available evidence “does not support generalised allegations that front-line medical and nursing staff simply abandoned the newborns”.

Ask Noreen what a nurse is to a newborn separated from its mother, and she has one answer: its first mother.

“A mother who gives birth endures a pain no one else can stand in for,” she said. “But once a baby is in our hands, no one else is watching over it the way we are, checking their oxygen, their feeding, whether they’re breathing right, every two hours, whatever else is happening around us. That is why we are their first mother.”

‘I am very happy with the children’

Noreen, 38, has spent 21 years in government nursing, the last 17 of them at PIMS. She trained in Karachi right after school, at the age of 17, before a transfer brought her to PIMS in 2009. She has never married.

“Thank God, I am very happy with the children,” she said, when asked about it directly.

Born in Punjab’s city of Sahiwal, she was one of seven children. Her father, Victor John, was a pastor; he died when she was in the eighth grade. Two of her sisters have died; a third, also a nurse, lives in Lahore.

Her mother, 83, a retired government school teacher who is hard of hearing, lives in Lahore with one of Noreen’s brothers.

Noreen herself has lived in the PIMS staff hostel, across from the ward where she works, for most of the past two decades.

With her own phone trapped inside the burning ward, Noreen could not call her family herself.

Noreen’s niece happened to be staying with her that week. It was the niece the warden found, and who got word to the family in Lahore: Noreen was safe.

‘It’s always the two of us’

On the morning of the fire, Noreen and Sister Nasreen were the only two nurses on duty in a nursery holding 15 babies, backed by two doctors, one of them two rooms away. She says it was not an unusual night.

“Sometimes there are 20 babies, sometimes 25,” she said. “It’s always the two of us.”

Doctors on her ward work 36-hour shifts, she said, arriving at 8am and going off duty at 2pm the following day.

Handover between nursing shifts, checking each baby’s medication, feeding and vital signs, takes roughly 45 minutes given the numbers involved. The cost of drugs can also run to tens of thousands of Pakistani rupees per injection, all provided by PIMS to its patients.

“Sometimes we get a break, sometimes we don’t,” she said. “When the workload is heavy, even the water we carry with us goes back home untouched.”

No fire drill had been run in the nursery before August 26, not even after an earlier fire at a nearby PIMS hostel in July.

Asked what is required after an incident like this, she does not hesitate.

“We should all have proper drills. If a fire starts, everyone needs to already know what to do.”

She lists what should follow: extinguishers within reach, cross-ventilation to clear smoke, and a rehearsed evacuation route for babies who cannot walk or call out for help.

‘Golden letters in history’

Until the fire, almost nobody outside her own ward knew her name, Noreen says.

“I have almost no presence in the main hospital,” she said. “Nobody there knows who I am. I work in the nursery, in my own department. I never imagined that saving one baby would take me this far.”

She travelled on Thursday to meet the prime minister in a car the government sent.

During the meeting, Sharif called her “the nation’s daughter” and said her act would be remembered “in golden letters” in Pakistan’s history.

He confirmed Noreen will formally receive the country’s Sitara-i-Khidmat (Star of Service) award at a ceremony on March 23, and handed her a cheque for 10 million Pakistani rupees ($36,000).

She used the meeting to say what she had already told her own colleagues privately.

“My fellow nurses work with just as much dedication,” she said. “This was a very heartbreaking incident.”

‘I haven’t slept since that day’

Eight days on, Noreen is unwell. She has had a fever of 102 to 103 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9C to 39.4C) on and off, and a cough she says came from smoke she breathed in from the fire that morning — a morning she will never forget. She takes an antibiotic and sleeping tablets at night. Neither has worked as it should.

“I haven’t slept, not since that day,” she said. “I take the tablets, I drink the cough syrup, but sleep doesn’t come. I close my eyes, and I open them again.”

Asked whether the same dawn shift keeps replaying in her mind, she did not need the question finished.

“The whole incident. The same babies. The mothers’ screams, and the babies’ screams, how they must have screamed. Those are the things that don’t let me sleep.”

She was signed off on medical rest only the day before this interview. Colleagues have been steadying her since.

“I would just start crying, sitting there,” she said. “They supported me like I was a child.”

But the nights are still hers alone.

“It comes back to the same thing,” she said. “When I’m in the hostel, when I’m alone, it all comes back.”

‘That, I regret’

The baby Noreen carried out — she hasn’t been named yet, according to the nurse — remains in the neonatal intensive care unit a week on.

Born preterm at just over a kilogramme (2 pounds, 3 ounces), the baby was already unwell before the fire. She remains critical.

Noreen met the baby’s parents for the first time the day before the meeting with the prime minister.

“She [the baby’s mother Asifa] hugged me and thanked me, and cried, and I cried with her,” Noreen said, “because for the rest of the children, my heart is still exactly where it was.”

She has told the mother the same thing she tells herself.

“I said, look, your child survived such a huge storm, she will survive what comes next, too. You pray, and I will pray.”

Asked what she would tell other nurses, Noreen urged them to work with honesty and without conditions.

“When you work somewhere with honesty, the reward comes eventually,” she said. “It came to me after 21 years. Work with the same loyalty. That is our real strength.”

Then, unprompted, she returned to the 14 babies who died.

“I do regret it,” she said. “I could not save the rest of the children. That, I regret.”