Johnson announced his retirement from playing basketball immediately that November of 1991, when he was only 32 years old and had reached the top of his championship game. Then in the 1991-1992 season, he was brought out of retirement for the All Star Game, where he was named the Most Valuable Player. In that unforgettable game, he dominated the scene in leading the West team to a victory of 40 points. His All Star Coach, Don Nelson, talked of the victory as Magic Johnson’s last hurrah.
But it wasn’t a last hurrah, or even close to a next-to-last hurrah.
In 1991, the discovery of HIV in a person generally led to that person’s death within three years. But three years after that All Star game, Johnson was still playing all-star basketball for the Lakers, after he decided that he felt so good that he changed his mind and starting playing ball again. He finally retired in 1995 after leading the Lakers with yet another year of all-star quality.
In the years since the 1980’s began, Magic Johnson has simply become the worst nightmare that HIV and AIDS have ever seen.
At the 1980 NBA championship final, Johnson became the first man in NBA history to meaningfully play Laker positions as a point guard, power forward and center all in one game. This was also the first time that a rookie – it was Magic’s first NBA season – had ever won the Most Valuable Player award for an NBA championship series.
At first it was thought impossible that a man as big as Johnson – he was 6’9” and over 250 pounds – could ever successfully played the position of guard in the NBA. The largest star guard before Johnson had been Cazzie Russell of the 1970 world champion New York Knicks, who at 6’6” was thought to be an enormous server in the backcourt. Conventionally, the ideal size of an NBA guard was thought to be about 6 foot tall, such as the great Boston Celtic guard Bob Cousy.
He was overpowering
So a lot of people thought a very tall man such as Johnson would expose the basketball to being stolen in a higher arch with his up-court dribble. But when Johnson dribbled up the court, he effectively became as big as an NFL fullback to his opponents, few of whom could ever get the ball from him. In fact, Johnson’s size and power proved a turning-point asset as a point guard. Through his powerhouse passes to other players, he accumulated an NBA record for assists, or passing the ball to players who instantly tossed it into the basket.
The triple-threat quality of Magic Johnson would see him moving the ball from the backcourt as a guard, then slipping to the sideline as a second power forward, and then even sneaking into the key as a second center.
But in 1980, as Magic Johnson was developing in Los Angeles, in New York the virus that he would later triumphantly battle was slowly rising in New York City.
I lived in New York City at the time, and I watched as AIDS put the island of Manhattan under a state of siege. AIDS effectively devastated both the theater and the fashion cultures of New York. I first heard of AIDS in 1981 when a colleague of mine – Arthur Bell, the entertainment columnist of the Village Voice – told me he had remarkably contacted Karposi’s scarmona, an extremely rare skin cancer that had just recently become the face of what the newspapers were starting to describe as a mysterious gay cancer. Karposi’s scarmona first revealed itself in a single black mark that appeared on the skin.
In a short time, Bell was dead. He wasn’t going to be the last one by far. In 1983, I contracted the great Cartier jewelry designer Aldo Cipullo to build a wedding band for my wedding with Valrei Adams. Cipullo was best known for creating the famed Love Bracelet that has remained popular from the 1960’s. He was called a latter-day Cellini, mixing the most ambitious art and the most elegant gold together. I thought the work he did on a lightning-shaped gold wedding band with inlaid sapphires was the most elegant thing in gold I had ever seen. But every meeting I had with Cipullo, he complained more and more about his kidneys and then about his liver. Shortly after he had completed the wedding band, I was attending his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral after his death from complications with AIDS.
Sometime later, my work led me to have a business lunch with Steve Seifert, who was perhaps the most respected publicist for foreign films in New York City. Seifert at lunch was typically gregarious about the work he was immersed in. Then a little while later, in a follow-up call, he discussed with me a black mark that a dentist found in his mouth during a routine dental checkup. The dentist took out some tissue there for a biopsy, and tests revealed the tissue to be full of Karposi’s scarmona.
On the phone, Seifert said he was very optimistic he could live at least several more years and do the work he loved. He was working hard as we spoke on several projects and said he had never felt so healthy. A month later, I read that he had died.
In my Off Broadway duties as a theater critic, I watched Theater-of-the-Ridiculous artistic director Richard Ludlum perform a breathlessly virtuosic lead performance in his own satire, “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” Sometime after his last energized performance, he was dead of AIDS. I watched the same thing happen over a longer time period to the brilliant young actor Peter Evans after his spectacular performance in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater” at the Theatre de Lys.
The most graceful ballet dancer I have ever seen was Rudolf Nureyev. I saw him several times in Lincoln Center performing such standards as “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and even when his jumps began to take noticeable effort he would always make music of his movements. Down the road, he also died of AIDS but insisted on performing until he could barely stand.
I have often though that the definitive book of “The Siege of America by AIDS” has yet to be written, but I have no desire to starting writing that kind of book and to relive the experience. It would too much of reliving my hospital visits where I watched AIDS patients sweating profusely in their fevers until they had sweated themselves below 80 pounds, when they died of starvation and dehydration. When you are there, you are convinced that this is the worst way that people have ever died.
But n 1991, Magic Johnson – as he had done in many a basketball game – has to be credited as the one individual who has turned the whole picture of AIDS around. When everyone said he would die in a couple of years – as everyone else with HIV was dying then – he insisted on commanding his own therapy, mixing his own medicines that he chose from his own research. Once again, Magic Johnson succeeded where others had failed. And by making his personal regimen public, he has since given hope and a plan to people who before had no hope and no plan. Suddenly, it is not just Magic Johnson, but it is a lot of people who have been living with HIV going on for decades.
That is more than enough to earn a place in the American pageant. So happy birthday, Magic Johnson. And many more.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.