View attachment 13119
Twenty years ago, Magic Johnson shocked the NBA world by revealing he had contracted HIV.
Writen by David Aldredge.
The thing you have to understand is, we all thought he was going to die.
My buddy Goffer, who worked on the edit desk at The Washington Post at the time, called me at home in the early afternoon of Nov. 7, 1991. I was the beat guy covering the Bullets at the time for the paper, and in those pre-Internet, pre-24/7 news cycle, pre-Twitter, Facebook and iPhone days, the day after a game was often a quiet one.
The Bullets had played in Orlando the night before (of course, they lost, and this was to the pre-Shaq/Penny Magic). I caught an early flight back to D.C. from Florida and was writing what was quaintly called the "follow" in those days. When a team had the day off after a game you would check on any injuries, see if there were any trends developing from recent games, call a player looking for something good that you could put in the paper the next day. But no heavy lifting. The 1991-'92 season was a week old. Nothing portentious was going to happen on an off-day Thursday afternoon.
And then Goffer called. We shared the house I was living in at the time with two other American University graduates. We all loved basketball. We loved Magic. Even Goffer, from New Hampshire and a die-hard Celtics fans, loved Magic.
"There's a story on the wire that says Magic Johnson is going to retire," Goffer said. "It says he is HIV-positive."
I remember I was eating cereal at the time. Why I remember that, I don't know. I also remember almost dropping the phone.
In 1991, HIV and AIDS were the same thing in our eyes. If you had HIV, you had AIDS, and that meant death. Rock Hudson got AIDS, and then he died. Ryan White, the Indiana teenager, got AIDS, and then he died. You got AIDS, you died, and no one quite knew what to do with that reality when it came to 32-year-old Earvin Johnson, who had just spent the last decade dominating the NBA as few players before or since had -- and none had done it with his smile and elan and imagination.
But he was going to die now, and it was going to be horrible to watch.
"Did you see the movie 'Philadelphia?,' " Jerry West asked Saturday night. "When I saw that movie -- which was afterwards -- it was like, 'Oh, my God, is this what his fate was going to be?' We all were naive as to what was going on. I sat in my office and thought, Jesus Christ. It was a shock for us. It was a shock for every sports fan. And it was a shock for every casual fan. When he got here (in 1979) he was like one of those skinny second-year racehorses. And then he became a man. It was one of those things where you couldn't even imagine what was going to happen to him."
1107-magic-johnson-300.jpg
Five months before finding out he had HIV, Magic Johnson had played in his seventh career Finals.
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
"I was in South Bend for a big Notre Dame game," recalled Dick Ebersol, the longtime executive producer of NBC Sports, on Sunday. "Notre Dame had a lot of big games back in those days. I broke down, weeping ... I remember being absolutely stunned and so sad."
Johnson had just played in The Finals for a seventh time in 12 seasons in June, 1991, against Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. The Lakers were getting older, but they had acquired guard Sedale Threatt from Seattle in the offseason, and Johnson had given up $1 million of his own salary -- you could do that then -- to help pay Threatt's. And then came Video Nov. 7, 1991.
"It wasn't just that day," Johnson's longtime agent, Lon Rosen, recalled. "Earvin first found out Oct. 25, when I found out with him. November 7th was obviously a horrible day, but in a way, because he was finally able to tell people, I can't say he was relieved, but it was a burden off of him. He had to tell his teammates."
Indeed, Johnson lived with the diagnosis in silence for almost two weeks, since flunking his medical exam for a new insurance policy. A series of tests ruled out other diseases, but the insurance company wouldn't disclose why it had flunked him until he showed up to their office in person. The Lakers were in Paris, playing at the McDonald's Open -- an overseas tourney between an NBA team and European league champions that was played in the preseason from 1987-99. Johnson was on the trip but the Lakers were holding him out because they, and he, didn't know what was wrong. The team covered up by saying he had the flu.
After the tournament in France ended, Johnson flew back home to Los Angeles and finally met with the insurance company on Oct. 21. But the Lakers were going right back out on the road, to Utah and Vancouver. Johnson went with the team to Salt Lake City, still unsure of what was wrong.
"We've got these terrible back-to-backs in Utah and Vancouver," said Mike Dunleavy, who was in his second season as the Lakers' coach that year. "I get to my room in Utah and I get a call from (then-assistant general manager) Mitch Kupchak. And he says, 'Hey, Mike, Earvin's got to come back to L.A. He's not feeling well. He's got to have some tests.' And I'm like, 'Mitch, that's (bleeping) stupid. He didn't have to fly back to Utah with us. He could have just flown straight back to L.A. (from France).' And Mitch said, 'Mike, that's not it, and I'm scared to death.'
"When he said that to me, the first thing I thought was, cancer or AIDS. I got off the phone and called Earvin, and I said 'Earvin, I hear you have to go back to L.A. I don't know what it's about. I just wanted you to know that anything you need, I'm here for you.' Then he had come back and there was all this (stuff) about he has a cold or something. And I'm like, 'Lon, what the (bleep) is going on? This is the longest cold in the world.' "
Of course, it wasn't a cold.
"The press conference was really supposed to happen the next day," Rosen said. "It wasn't supposed to be on Thursday the seventh; it was going to be on Friday the eighth. Somehow, part of the story got out early in the morning. Luckily, the reporter that was supposed to break it didn't break it (a local radio station had called Rosen and told him it had a story that Johnson was going to retire, which was true, and that he had AIDS, which was not true), and we were able to get together. The doctors and the experts thought he didn't have a lot of time to be here. He didn't think that. And he proved them wrong."
That morning, Dunleavy -- who'd finally gotten Rosen to tell him a few days before, adding him to a strict circle that also included West and longtime athletic trainer Gary Vitti -- was beginning practice.
"He's trying to keep it under wraps, and we're at practice at Loyola Marymount," Dunleavy said. "They call me and say, 'Stop practice. Send everybody to The Forum, right now. Don't let them take showers.' But then, some guys were going over in their cars and they were starting to hear things on the radio...
"We go into our locker room (at the Great Western Forum), and Earvin comes in and he tells the players. I cannot tell you how emotional that was. Every one of us, we're all thinking, Earvin's going to be dead in two years. He's going to wither away. Here's this guy we love, and you're just thinking the worst. Tears were just flowing. And then he goes upstairs and gives this press conference, and he's like, 'Ah, I'm going to beat this thing.' "
There had barely been time to call more than a few people before the news conference, held at The Forum. NBA Commissioner David Stern got the word the day before and had flown in. Dr. Michael Mellman, Johnson's physician and the man who had told him the diagnosis. West, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, and teammates Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kurt Rambis, along with Cookie Johnson, Magic's longtime girlfriend, whom he had just married a few months before, were also there. (Between Oct. 25 and until Nov. 6, the day before the news broke, Cookie -- who was also pregnant -- didn't know if she had contracted the virus as well. But her test came back clean. With in-utero testing unreliable at the time, the Johnsons wouldn't find out their unborn child was negative until he was born.)
Just before the presser started, Rosen got Magic in touch with Larry Bird. Johnson told Bird what he was about to tell the world.
Magic Johnson's absence from the NBA in the 1991-92 season left a void in L.A. ... and around the NBA.
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
"I felt like someone had sucked the air out of my lungs," Bird said in his co-biography with Johnson, When The Game Was Ours.
"I had this terrible empty feeling, like how I felt when my dad took his own life," he said.
And then, somehow, Magic pulled himself together, went out and told the world what he told Bird. He made clear he didn't have AIDS -- not yet, anyway. "I plan on going on, living for a long time, bugging you guys like I always have," he said. "So you'll see me around. I plan on being with the Lakers and the league. Hopefully David'll have me for a while. And going on with my life. I guess I get to enjoy some of the other sides of living."
But nobody believed him. Magic Johnson was supposed to go away and die.
And then, the most amazing thing happened.
He didn't.
It was not easy in those first weeks and months. There was much more we didn't know about HIV than what we did know. Johnson had a dalliance with President George H.W. Bush's National Commission on AIDS that lasted less than a year. Jazz forward Karl Malone and Cavs guard Mark Price publicly expressed some misgivings about being on the court with Magic, because few people really knew how the virus was transmitted. Could you get it from the sweat of someone who was HIV positive? Or if, somehow, they bled into an open cut on your arm?
"We spent so much time on it, more than anyone could ever know," Stern recalled Saturday night. "We thought our league and its future hung in the balance, based upon education of our players, of our fans, of what was legal and what was not legal in terms of testing, what the science was and how much we could get our hands around it. It was a tumultuous time for us."
There were rumors that Johnson was gay. He denied it, just as simply as if someone asked him if he was a parrot. When he was applauded on the "Arsenio Hall Show" for saying he wasn't gay (as if that somehow mattered), that enraged gay activists. The gay community, which had been dealing with HIV and AIDS for a decade with next to no public support, was understandably angry that a heterosexual man's battle with HIV took all of the oxygen out of the room, and that most people were sympathetic toward him yet shunned others with the same horrible illness.
People reached out to help. One person who steadied Johnson in those first days was the activist Elizabeth Glaser, who had contracted HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth and unwittingly passed the virus on to her two children (Elizabeth Glaser was married to the actor Paul Michael Glaser). Their daughter died in 1988.
Before Elizabeth Glaser's death in 1994, she told Rosen how important Johnson's disclosure was.
"She told me, 'We need a face for this disease, and he can do that for us,' " Rosen recalled. "'He can raise awareness, and he'll help save my son's life.' And her son is now, I think, 27 years old."
Johnson's wealth also helped. He was able to begin taking a regimen of drugs almost immediately after his condition was discovered, something that many others with HIV and AIDS couldn't afford. He started taking the drug AZT, which was generally considered the premier treatment at the time.
"It was a very controversial drug at the time," Rosen recalled. "Sometimes it worked for people a little bit, sometimes it made you very, very ill. He was intelligent enough to get a really good doctor, who he listened to. He started taking AZT immediately. It made him sick ... he got ill. Stomach problems. But he never let on."
And he didn't die.
He was voted into the 1992 All-Star Game by the fans, and the league never hesitated in getting him to Orlando for the game. It was a two-hour lovefest, and ended in ridiculous, storybook fashion. In the final minutes, with Johnson on defense, Thomas ran a clearout, going between his legs, and starting, and stopping, and throwing up an airball over the 6-foot-9 Magic. The next time, it was Jordan with the ball, taking Magic to the baseline, and jumping over him, and missing. And then Magic had the ball, and Isiah almost ran out to midcourt to guard him, and Magic backed the 6-foot-1 Thomas down to the 3-point line, turned and Video half-shot-putted a half-hook from 27 feet.
Swish. Video And, bedlam. His third 3-pointer of the game, on three shots. The final 14.5 seconds of the 1992 NBA All-Star Game were never played.
"I remember when he hit that third straight 3-pointer," said Ebersol, whose network was broadcasting the game. "I ran out of my seat to go back to the truck to make sure the commentary was exactly what I wanted. And it was. I went running back to the truck. It was my decision on when the game would go off the air. The game was running a little long and I said don't you dare go off the air until you talk to him."
Said Stern: "He made that last shot, and I got a chance to hug him. I guess it was Tim Hardaway that gave up his starting spot (for Johnson). I felt good then and I feel good as I think about it now. I'd like to think about his state of mind, which was always good, had something to do with his ability to develop the courage and fortitude to do so much."
He found other things to do. He worked games for NBC as an analyst ("Whose game is it? It's Michael Jordan's game!!" he exulted during the 1992 Finals). He had a wondrous summer on the Dream Team, the catalyst who convinced Jordan to play, and who convinced Bird to take his balky back out for one more victory lap around the world. Players on teams around the world yelled "Majjeeek!" and took pictures of him while the U.S. team beat them by 30.
It was Magic Johnson who helped coax Larry Bird (left) and Michael Jordan (center) into joining the Dream Team in 1992.
Neil Leifer/NBAE via Getty Images
Ebersol found out personally that Johnson was sharp as ever on the court.
"He was with us during the Finals that year," Ebersol said. "The night between Game 1 and 2, we were in Chicago, and the hotel we were staying at was adjacent to a sports club. There was a full-length basketball court in it. We were all out there and he played in the game. I was about as wide open as you could be, because I was cheating. And he threw me a court-length pass. I'd never seen a ball move that fast. One finger just went back into my hand and it was swollen for two weeks. I was so stunned, somebody came back and blocked my shot, anyway."
He got into business for real. Michael Ovitz, who had made Creative Artists Agency into a Hollywood entertainment colossus, had taken him under his wing while he was still a player, and now, with some time on his hands, Magic jumped in with both feet. He found opportunities selling brand-name franchises in black neighborhoods that hadn't seen too many Starbucks open where they lived. He opened a chain of theatres bearing his name, pointing out to investors that black people went to the movies more loyally than any other minority group. He began to own instead of be an employee.
Everything didn't turn to gold. There was a chain of stores called Magic 32 with high-end, high-priced products that didn't sell. There was a last, unlamented comeback as a player, at age 36, that ended not with hosannas to his fortitude and courage, or even sympathy for his plight, but snickering and scorn. There was a 16-game coaching stint in '94 that was only memorable for the time he smashed Vlade Divac's cell phone when it went off during a meeting. There was, um, "The Magic Hour". (Well, you can never have enough Sheila E in your life to suit me.)
And, through it all, he didn't die.
"I know it sounds trite, but that's the only way I've seen him live his life," Rosen said. "It was a challenge. It was a challenge when he lost to the Boston Celtics in '84. He looked deep, looked at what he did wrong, he studied. And when he got this disease, that's what he did. He faced it straight up and that's how he looked at it. He looked at it as a challenge. What he did was he wanted to learn everything about this disease, and he did."
Today, he gets up every day between 4 and 4:15 a.m., and he works out before he goes to work. (He worked out so arduosly that he actually got too thick a couple of years ago, and decided he had to drop some pounds.) He developed a relationship with his son, Andre, who came from another relationship Johnson had in the early 1980s, and blended him into the family. He takes his current group of meds every day, at the same time, and he is still HIV positive, but the disease has been fought to a standstill. It does not advance. There are almost no traces of the virus in his blood.
In the early days of HIV and AIDS research, the normal pattern for most HIV-positive patients was for AIDS to develop within 10 years or so of their HIV diagnosis, with death occurring within a couple of years of the full-blown AIDS occurrence. Yet a small percentage of HIV-positive patients survived much longer, for two, and sometimes three decades. Today, those people, while still not the norm, are no longer the outliers they were. (An even smaller percentage of long-term survivors -- estimated as few as one in every 500 -- are known as "long-term non-progressors" or "elite controllers," who don't develop AIDS even though they are not on the normal antiretroviral therapy almost all other patients need to hold off the disease.)
Today, Magic Johnson is a successful businessman and devoted advocate for AIDS awareness.
Whatever category into which Johnson falls, he had great good fortune. The disease was diagnosed in him at a very early stage. He had the money to buy cutting-edge medications, and keep buying them, for years. He was already a world-class athlete in phenomenal shape. And he had a strong family whose faith helped steel him in tough times. Or, as Dunleavy put it succinctly, "Something worked."
Forbes listed Johnson's net worth at $500 million as of late 2009, making him one of the richest African-Americans on the planet, in the stratosphere with other one-named wonders: Oprah, Tiger, Diddy. He sold his 5 percent stake in the Lakers years ago and, rumor has it, is right in the middle of the fight to bring an NFL team back to Los Angeles after sniffing around the Pistons before Tom Gores bought them last spring.
But tonight, Johnson will host other notables, including Jordan, West, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Heat president -- and Johnson's former Laker coach -- Pat Riley, Buss and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert at "Point Forward Day" at Staples Center -- the name playing off of Johnson's status as one of the first "point forwards" in the NBA and his desire not to look back on what happened that day in 1991. His Magic Johnson Foundation, also 20 years old, has raised more than $15 million since '91 for underserved communities, providing scholarships to schools and HIV and AIDS education and testing. Donations from texters will further fund three of Johnson's philanthropic projects, including the 18 HIV testing centers around the country that are open today.
HIV and AIDS continue to ravage the African-American community. In 2009, the last year where full statistics are available, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 21,000 diagnoses of HIV infection were made by African-Americans, almost double that of the next highest ethnic group, white Americans. CDC estimates that the incidence rate of HIV in 2009 was seven times higher for black men and women than for white men and women.
"The reason is, when it gets right down to it, it's great that he's alive, and it's a major accomplishment, because a lot of people -- including him -- thought that he might not be here," Rosen said. "But this disease is still out there. It's not cured. People can get complacent ... he's using this day as another day to put out information."
The thing you have to understand is, we all thought he was going to die.
Except, he didn't.
NBA TV
Twenty years ago, Magic Johnson shocked the NBA world by revealing he had contracted HIV.
Writen by David Aldredge.
The thing you have to understand is, we all thought he was going to die.
My buddy Goffer, who worked on the edit desk at The Washington Post at the time, called me at home in the early afternoon of Nov. 7, 1991. I was the beat guy covering the Bullets at the time for the paper, and in those pre-Internet, pre-24/7 news cycle, pre-Twitter, Facebook and iPhone days, the day after a game was often a quiet one.
The Bullets had played in Orlando the night before (of course, they lost, and this was to the pre-Shaq/Penny Magic). I caught an early flight back to D.C. from Florida and was writing what was quaintly called the "follow" in those days. When a team had the day off after a game you would check on any injuries, see if there were any trends developing from recent games, call a player looking for something good that you could put in the paper the next day. But no heavy lifting. The 1991-'92 season was a week old. Nothing portentious was going to happen on an off-day Thursday afternoon.
And then Goffer called. We shared the house I was living in at the time with two other American University graduates. We all loved basketball. We loved Magic. Even Goffer, from New Hampshire and a die-hard Celtics fans, loved Magic.
"There's a story on the wire that says Magic Johnson is going to retire," Goffer said. "It says he is HIV-positive."
I remember I was eating cereal at the time. Why I remember that, I don't know. I also remember almost dropping the phone.
In 1991, HIV and AIDS were the same thing in our eyes. If you had HIV, you had AIDS, and that meant death. Rock Hudson got AIDS, and then he died. Ryan White, the Indiana teenager, got AIDS, and then he died. You got AIDS, you died, and no one quite knew what to do with that reality when it came to 32-year-old Earvin Johnson, who had just spent the last decade dominating the NBA as few players before or since had -- and none had done it with his smile and elan and imagination.
But he was going to die now, and it was going to be horrible to watch.
"Did you see the movie 'Philadelphia?,' " Jerry West asked Saturday night. "When I saw that movie -- which was afterwards -- it was like, 'Oh, my God, is this what his fate was going to be?' We all were naive as to what was going on. I sat in my office and thought, Jesus Christ. It was a shock for us. It was a shock for every sports fan. And it was a shock for every casual fan. When he got here (in 1979) he was like one of those skinny second-year racehorses. And then he became a man. It was one of those things where you couldn't even imagine what was going to happen to him."
1107-magic-johnson-300.jpg
Five months before finding out he had HIV, Magic Johnson had played in his seventh career Finals.
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
"I was in South Bend for a big Notre Dame game," recalled Dick Ebersol, the longtime executive producer of NBC Sports, on Sunday. "Notre Dame had a lot of big games back in those days. I broke down, weeping ... I remember being absolutely stunned and so sad."
Johnson had just played in The Finals for a seventh time in 12 seasons in June, 1991, against Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls. The Lakers were getting older, but they had acquired guard Sedale Threatt from Seattle in the offseason, and Johnson had given up $1 million of his own salary -- you could do that then -- to help pay Threatt's. And then came Video Nov. 7, 1991.
"It wasn't just that day," Johnson's longtime agent, Lon Rosen, recalled. "Earvin first found out Oct. 25, when I found out with him. November 7th was obviously a horrible day, but in a way, because he was finally able to tell people, I can't say he was relieved, but it was a burden off of him. He had to tell his teammates."
Indeed, Johnson lived with the diagnosis in silence for almost two weeks, since flunking his medical exam for a new insurance policy. A series of tests ruled out other diseases, but the insurance company wouldn't disclose why it had flunked him until he showed up to their office in person. The Lakers were in Paris, playing at the McDonald's Open -- an overseas tourney between an NBA team and European league champions that was played in the preseason from 1987-99. Johnson was on the trip but the Lakers were holding him out because they, and he, didn't know what was wrong. The team covered up by saying he had the flu.
After the tournament in France ended, Johnson flew back home to Los Angeles and finally met with the insurance company on Oct. 21. But the Lakers were going right back out on the road, to Utah and Vancouver. Johnson went with the team to Salt Lake City, still unsure of what was wrong.
"We've got these terrible back-to-backs in Utah and Vancouver," said Mike Dunleavy, who was in his second season as the Lakers' coach that year. "I get to my room in Utah and I get a call from (then-assistant general manager) Mitch Kupchak. And he says, 'Hey, Mike, Earvin's got to come back to L.A. He's not feeling well. He's got to have some tests.' And I'm like, 'Mitch, that's (bleeping) stupid. He didn't have to fly back to Utah with us. He could have just flown straight back to L.A. (from France).' And Mitch said, 'Mike, that's not it, and I'm scared to death.'
"When he said that to me, the first thing I thought was, cancer or AIDS. I got off the phone and called Earvin, and I said 'Earvin, I hear you have to go back to L.A. I don't know what it's about. I just wanted you to know that anything you need, I'm here for you.' Then he had come back and there was all this (stuff) about he has a cold or something. And I'm like, 'Lon, what the (bleep) is going on? This is the longest cold in the world.' "
Of course, it wasn't a cold.
"The press conference was really supposed to happen the next day," Rosen said. "It wasn't supposed to be on Thursday the seventh; it was going to be on Friday the eighth. Somehow, part of the story got out early in the morning. Luckily, the reporter that was supposed to break it didn't break it (a local radio station had called Rosen and told him it had a story that Johnson was going to retire, which was true, and that he had AIDS, which was not true), and we were able to get together. The doctors and the experts thought he didn't have a lot of time to be here. He didn't think that. And he proved them wrong."
That morning, Dunleavy -- who'd finally gotten Rosen to tell him a few days before, adding him to a strict circle that also included West and longtime athletic trainer Gary Vitti -- was beginning practice.
"He's trying to keep it under wraps, and we're at practice at Loyola Marymount," Dunleavy said. "They call me and say, 'Stop practice. Send everybody to The Forum, right now. Don't let them take showers.' But then, some guys were going over in their cars and they were starting to hear things on the radio...
"We go into our locker room (at the Great Western Forum), and Earvin comes in and he tells the players. I cannot tell you how emotional that was. Every one of us, we're all thinking, Earvin's going to be dead in two years. He's going to wither away. Here's this guy we love, and you're just thinking the worst. Tears were just flowing. And then he goes upstairs and gives this press conference, and he's like, 'Ah, I'm going to beat this thing.' "
There had barely been time to call more than a few people before the news conference, held at The Forum. NBA Commissioner David Stern got the word the day before and had flown in. Dr. Michael Mellman, Johnson's physician and the man who had told him the diagnosis. West, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, and teammates Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kurt Rambis, along with Cookie Johnson, Magic's longtime girlfriend, whom he had just married a few months before, were also there. (Between Oct. 25 and until Nov. 6, the day before the news broke, Cookie -- who was also pregnant -- didn't know if she had contracted the virus as well. But her test came back clean. With in-utero testing unreliable at the time, the Johnsons wouldn't find out their unborn child was negative until he was born.)
Just before the presser started, Rosen got Magic in touch with Larry Bird. Johnson told Bird what he was about to tell the world.
Magic Johnson's absence from the NBA in the 1991-92 season left a void in L.A. ... and around the NBA.
Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images
"I felt like someone had sucked the air out of my lungs," Bird said in his co-biography with Johnson, When The Game Was Ours.
"I had this terrible empty feeling, like how I felt when my dad took his own life," he said.
And then, somehow, Magic pulled himself together, went out and told the world what he told Bird. He made clear he didn't have AIDS -- not yet, anyway. "I plan on going on, living for a long time, bugging you guys like I always have," he said. "So you'll see me around. I plan on being with the Lakers and the league. Hopefully David'll have me for a while. And going on with my life. I guess I get to enjoy some of the other sides of living."
But nobody believed him. Magic Johnson was supposed to go away and die.
And then, the most amazing thing happened.
He didn't.
It was not easy in those first weeks and months. There was much more we didn't know about HIV than what we did know. Johnson had a dalliance with President George H.W. Bush's National Commission on AIDS that lasted less than a year. Jazz forward Karl Malone and Cavs guard Mark Price publicly expressed some misgivings about being on the court with Magic, because few people really knew how the virus was transmitted. Could you get it from the sweat of someone who was HIV positive? Or if, somehow, they bled into an open cut on your arm?
"We spent so much time on it, more than anyone could ever know," Stern recalled Saturday night. "We thought our league and its future hung in the balance, based upon education of our players, of our fans, of what was legal and what was not legal in terms of testing, what the science was and how much we could get our hands around it. It was a tumultuous time for us."
There were rumors that Johnson was gay. He denied it, just as simply as if someone asked him if he was a parrot. When he was applauded on the "Arsenio Hall Show" for saying he wasn't gay (as if that somehow mattered), that enraged gay activists. The gay community, which had been dealing with HIV and AIDS for a decade with next to no public support, was understandably angry that a heterosexual man's battle with HIV took all of the oxygen out of the room, and that most people were sympathetic toward him yet shunned others with the same horrible illness.
People reached out to help. One person who steadied Johnson in those first days was the activist Elizabeth Glaser, who had contracted HIV from a contaminated blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth and unwittingly passed the virus on to her two children (Elizabeth Glaser was married to the actor Paul Michael Glaser). Their daughter died in 1988.
Before Elizabeth Glaser's death in 1994, she told Rosen how important Johnson's disclosure was.
"She told me, 'We need a face for this disease, and he can do that for us,' " Rosen recalled. "'He can raise awareness, and he'll help save my son's life.' And her son is now, I think, 27 years old."
Johnson's wealth also helped. He was able to begin taking a regimen of drugs almost immediately after his condition was discovered, something that many others with HIV and AIDS couldn't afford. He started taking the drug AZT, which was generally considered the premier treatment at the time.
"It was a very controversial drug at the time," Rosen recalled. "Sometimes it worked for people a little bit, sometimes it made you very, very ill. He was intelligent enough to get a really good doctor, who he listened to. He started taking AZT immediately. It made him sick ... he got ill. Stomach problems. But he never let on."
And he didn't die.
He was voted into the 1992 All-Star Game by the fans, and the league never hesitated in getting him to Orlando for the game. It was a two-hour lovefest, and ended in ridiculous, storybook fashion. In the final minutes, with Johnson on defense, Thomas ran a clearout, going between his legs, and starting, and stopping, and throwing up an airball over the 6-foot-9 Magic. The next time, it was Jordan with the ball, taking Magic to the baseline, and jumping over him, and missing. And then Magic had the ball, and Isiah almost ran out to midcourt to guard him, and Magic backed the 6-foot-1 Thomas down to the 3-point line, turned and Video half-shot-putted a half-hook from 27 feet.
Swish. Video And, bedlam. His third 3-pointer of the game, on three shots. The final 14.5 seconds of the 1992 NBA All-Star Game were never played.
"I remember when he hit that third straight 3-pointer," said Ebersol, whose network was broadcasting the game. "I ran out of my seat to go back to the truck to make sure the commentary was exactly what I wanted. And it was. I went running back to the truck. It was my decision on when the game would go off the air. The game was running a little long and I said don't you dare go off the air until you talk to him."
Said Stern: "He made that last shot, and I got a chance to hug him. I guess it was Tim Hardaway that gave up his starting spot (for Johnson). I felt good then and I feel good as I think about it now. I'd like to think about his state of mind, which was always good, had something to do with his ability to develop the courage and fortitude to do so much."
He found other things to do. He worked games for NBC as an analyst ("Whose game is it? It's Michael Jordan's game!!" he exulted during the 1992 Finals). He had a wondrous summer on the Dream Team, the catalyst who convinced Jordan to play, and who convinced Bird to take his balky back out for one more victory lap around the world. Players on teams around the world yelled "Majjeeek!" and took pictures of him while the U.S. team beat them by 30.
It was Magic Johnson who helped coax Larry Bird (left) and Michael Jordan (center) into joining the Dream Team in 1992.
Neil Leifer/NBAE via Getty Images
Ebersol found out personally that Johnson was sharp as ever on the court.
"He was with us during the Finals that year," Ebersol said. "The night between Game 1 and 2, we were in Chicago, and the hotel we were staying at was adjacent to a sports club. There was a full-length basketball court in it. We were all out there and he played in the game. I was about as wide open as you could be, because I was cheating. And he threw me a court-length pass. I'd never seen a ball move that fast. One finger just went back into my hand and it was swollen for two weeks. I was so stunned, somebody came back and blocked my shot, anyway."
He got into business for real. Michael Ovitz, who had made Creative Artists Agency into a Hollywood entertainment colossus, had taken him under his wing while he was still a player, and now, with some time on his hands, Magic jumped in with both feet. He found opportunities selling brand-name franchises in black neighborhoods that hadn't seen too many Starbucks open where they lived. He opened a chain of theatres bearing his name, pointing out to investors that black people went to the movies more loyally than any other minority group. He began to own instead of be an employee.
Everything didn't turn to gold. There was a chain of stores called Magic 32 with high-end, high-priced products that didn't sell. There was a last, unlamented comeback as a player, at age 36, that ended not with hosannas to his fortitude and courage, or even sympathy for his plight, but snickering and scorn. There was a 16-game coaching stint in '94 that was only memorable for the time he smashed Vlade Divac's cell phone when it went off during a meeting. There was, um, "The Magic Hour". (Well, you can never have enough Sheila E in your life to suit me.)
And, through it all, he didn't die.
"I know it sounds trite, but that's the only way I've seen him live his life," Rosen said. "It was a challenge. It was a challenge when he lost to the Boston Celtics in '84. He looked deep, looked at what he did wrong, he studied. And when he got this disease, that's what he did. He faced it straight up and that's how he looked at it. He looked at it as a challenge. What he did was he wanted to learn everything about this disease, and he did."
Today, he gets up every day between 4 and 4:15 a.m., and he works out before he goes to work. (He worked out so arduosly that he actually got too thick a couple of years ago, and decided he had to drop some pounds.) He developed a relationship with his son, Andre, who came from another relationship Johnson had in the early 1980s, and blended him into the family. He takes his current group of meds every day, at the same time, and he is still HIV positive, but the disease has been fought to a standstill. It does not advance. There are almost no traces of the virus in his blood.
In the early days of HIV and AIDS research, the normal pattern for most HIV-positive patients was for AIDS to develop within 10 years or so of their HIV diagnosis, with death occurring within a couple of years of the full-blown AIDS occurrence. Yet a small percentage of HIV-positive patients survived much longer, for two, and sometimes three decades. Today, those people, while still not the norm, are no longer the outliers they were. (An even smaller percentage of long-term survivors -- estimated as few as one in every 500 -- are known as "long-term non-progressors" or "elite controllers," who don't develop AIDS even though they are not on the normal antiretroviral therapy almost all other patients need to hold off the disease.)
Today, Magic Johnson is a successful businessman and devoted advocate for AIDS awareness.
Whatever category into which Johnson falls, he had great good fortune. The disease was diagnosed in him at a very early stage. He had the money to buy cutting-edge medications, and keep buying them, for years. He was already a world-class athlete in phenomenal shape. And he had a strong family whose faith helped steel him in tough times. Or, as Dunleavy put it succinctly, "Something worked."
Forbes listed Johnson's net worth at $500 million as of late 2009, making him one of the richest African-Americans on the planet, in the stratosphere with other one-named wonders: Oprah, Tiger, Diddy. He sold his 5 percent stake in the Lakers years ago and, rumor has it, is right in the middle of the fight to bring an NFL team back to Los Angeles after sniffing around the Pistons before Tom Gores bought them last spring.
But tonight, Johnson will host other notables, including Jordan, West, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Heat president -- and Johnson's former Laker coach -- Pat Riley, Buss and Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert at "Point Forward Day" at Staples Center -- the name playing off of Johnson's status as one of the first "point forwards" in the NBA and his desire not to look back on what happened that day in 1991. His Magic Johnson Foundation, also 20 years old, has raised more than $15 million since '91 for underserved communities, providing scholarships to schools and HIV and AIDS education and testing. Donations from texters will further fund three of Johnson's philanthropic projects, including the 18 HIV testing centers around the country that are open today.
HIV and AIDS continue to ravage the African-American community. In 2009, the last year where full statistics are available, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 21,000 diagnoses of HIV infection were made by African-Americans, almost double that of the next highest ethnic group, white Americans. CDC estimates that the incidence rate of HIV in 2009 was seven times higher for black men and women than for white men and women.
"The reason is, when it gets right down to it, it's great that he's alive, and it's a major accomplishment, because a lot of people -- including him -- thought that he might not be here," Rosen said. "But this disease is still out there. It's not cured. People can get complacent ... he's using this day as another day to put out information."
The thing you have to understand is, we all thought he was going to die.
Except, he didn't.
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