With 9:39 left in the first quarter and Laker forward Elden Campbell saddled with his second personal, coach Del Harris wheeled around to scan his bench. “Let’s go!” he nodded at No. 32. The sub checked in at the scorers’ table and jogged in for Campbell. Snagging a pass, he faked left and arced a baby hook from the low post. It bounded off the rim. On the Lakers’ next possession, he fired a no-look pass from the top of the key to Anthony Peeler, who swished it in for three. Seconds later, with the noise from the sellout crowd at the Great Western Forum reaching Garth Brooks levels, No. 82 took a pass on the run, head-faked his man smack into the photographers and drove to the basket for a gentle layup. The Forum erupted in an explosive cheer: it made the six retired jerseys on the rafters vibrate and found its echo in the “Yes!” screamed at the record 2.9 million cable sets tuned to the game. Magic was back in the NBA.
Earvin Johnson ended the first game of his second coming with 19 points, 8 rebounds and 10 assists in 27 minutes of play, but it wasn’t numbers he was after. R was answers. On Nov. 7,1991, Johnson had announced that he was retiring from basketball because he was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. He had contracted it through unprotected sex with one, or several, of the many women who are as available to the traveling giants of the NBA as room service. In the wake of Johnson’s announcement, entire forests were felled so that fans and doctors, pundits and players could sound off on (1) when he would come down with AIDS, (2) whether strenuous play would-hasten or postpone the disease and (3) whether teammates or opponents, trainers or coaches, had been endangered by his HIV status.
Four years of retirement has produced some answers. (1) Not for awhile: the median time between HIV infection and AIDS is 8.5 years. Though no one, not even Johnson, knows when he became infected, his doctors pronounce him free of symptoms. (2) Exercise, far from hastening the onset of AIDS, may postpone it–particularly if the athlete gets such a psychological lift from competing that it boosts his immune system (following story). (3) No teammate, opponent or fan ever was, or will be, in any danger from an HIV-positive player, unless they engage in wound-to-wound contact or meet for an after-game tryst. What players can catch from Johnson is his contagious joy in the game that “he’s been preparing to return to ever since he left,” says best friend Arsenio Hall.
One question his four years off did not answer, especially for Johnson himself, was whether he had made the right decision in 1991. “I didn’t think I went out the way I wanted to go out,” Johnson said last week. “[My wife] Cookie said, ‘I’m tired of hearing about this! Go back already!’” Even more decisive, “it bothered him that year-old son] E.J. hadn’t seen him play,” Hall told NEWSWEEK. Although Johnson had dazzled on the 1992 Olympic “Dream Team” that won gold in Barcelona and continued to charm charity all-star games with his rainbow hooks, he never shook the itch to get back to the Forum’s polished hardwood. Watching from the stands as San Antonio eliminated the Lakers in last year’s playoffs, Johnson was convinced his presence would have made a difference. And that, he says, “made me crazy.”
He began working out with the Lakers this season. But Magic doesn’t have NBA legs yet. At 255 pounds, he’s 27 pounds over his 1991 playing weight. And he’s 36 years old. It showed in last Friday’s much hyped game against Michael Jordan and the Bulls, when Johnson was outmuscled, outrun and outrebounded in the Lakers’ 99-84 loss. “I didn’t have as much fun,” Johnson said of his second game. But then, he’s not the only Bulls’ victim who’s felt that way this season (page 65).
Weight can be shed and legs powered up. But Johnson is still, and forever, HIV-positive. He started taking AZT, the drug that blocks HIV’s ability to replicate, as soon as he tested positive for the virus. He still takes it. Friends say he also made several trips to a Kenya clinic for Kemron, the patented name for low doses of interferon that some AIDS activists, particularly black nationalists, claim boosts the CD4 immune cells that HIV ravages. But the medicine remains unproved and untested. A side feet of the drug is weight gain. As associate of Johnson’s says that he merely “dabbled” in Kemron in the past; his doctors would not comment on whether he ever took it.
Throughout his aborted retirement Johnson was busy living, not dying. Hall, who made a moving AIDS-education video with Johnson in 1992, says Magic “watches everything he does and eats. There was a time when we would devour two plates of chicken wings on a night out, but now I order french fries and he orders broccoli.” He also did regular strength workouts “with guys who would rough him up so he’d be ready for [Phoenix Suns forward Charles] Barkley and [Chicago Bulls forward Dennis] Rodman,” says Hall, “and then play ball hard every night.” Friday nights often found him at Georgia, the hip L.A. restaurant owned by friends Denzel Washington, Norm Nixon and Eddie Murphy. Earlier this month he threw a giant birthday bash in a hangar at the Santa Monica Airport for his wife, Cookie. Though he’d known her since their days at Michigan State in the 1970s, they were married less than a year before Magic tested HIV-positive. “She stood by him and waited while he had his good time and has been there for him ever since,” says a party guest. E.J. is free of the virus; so is Cookie, though in any conjugal relationship the partners must practice safe sex forever. Last year the couple adopted a baby girl, Elisa, who sat on Cookie’s lap at Magio’s first comeback game.
Even before his retirement Johnson had licensed his name and, in 1991, opened Magic 32, a chain of sports-paraphernalia stores in L.A. malls. He also bought an interest in a Pepsi bottling plant. “I got to have real hands-on experience;” he told NEWSWEEK in his spacious Beverly Hills office, “going into mom-and-pop stores and setting up displays. It was a blast!” It also laid the groundwork for his proudest investment: the 12-screen Magic Johnson Theatres that opened in the heart of South-Central L.A. six months ago. “African-Americans are the No. 1 people who go to movies,” Johnson says. “So it was just natural, investment-wise, to build something that would give back some pleasure to my community.” Every show starts with a clip of Magic telling the audience that the theater is theirs, and asking them to keep it clean, quiet and safe. House rules ban gang-related clothing. “People understand that we’re just trying to keep everyone safe and alive,” Johnson says. “They are so grateful someone had faith in their community.” Sony, his partner in the theaters, will open Magic theaters across the country, starting with Atlanta and Houston this year. In Johnson’s view, Hollywood has room for two Magic Kingdoms.
Johnson had un-retired once before, at the start of 1993-94 season. But he cut himself in a preseason game and terrified players. So he benched himself. “He was subjected to a lot of negative things, and that hurt him,” says Hall. This time, the NBA’s AIDS-education program seems to have gotten through. As three-point artisan Steve Kerr of the Chicago Bulls says, “We’re not going to be on the court having unprotected sex with Magic.” But subtler worries abound. “I don’t want to play against him,” declares one NBA starter who insists on anonymity. He is confounded by how to play someone who is under a death sentence. Should he attack Magic full force, or–reminiscent of opponents who thought twice before spiking Cal Ripken Jr. during his run for the record-cut him some slack? Bull Rodman had no such qualms. In Friday’s game he fouled Magic–hard–on his first drive to the basket. Yet one could almost take it as a compliment. “Tonight sent a message about what is and isn’t real about the disease,” Johnson-said afterward. “Now we can just play ball and move beyond the controversy.” (In the NBA, maybe. Back in real life, President Clinton is about to sign a bill that requires the military to discharge anyone who tests positive for HIV, even if he or she is as healthy as a Laker star. Legislative and legal challenges are coming.)
The 25-19 Lakers, who will use Magic as a power forward rather than the point guard he was, can only benefit from Johnson’s return. His unselfish play has already been contagious: last week he even got teammate Cedric Ceballos, who has never been known to pass when he could shoot, to pass the ball a few times. The NBA, spread too thin by endless expansion (are there really two teams in Canada?), will benefit, too, just as it did when the baby-faced kid with the ear-to-ear grin bounded into the stale league in 1070. So, too, will Americans who don’t know a low post from a doorpost. For by his very presence on the NBA stage, Johnson shows the world that HIV isn’t something you die with; it’s something you live with. Johnson hasn’t said how long he’ll play. But whether it’s just the rest of this season, or a few more, once again it feels right to believe in magic.
