But if the nation was saddened, it was galvanized, too. “If you tried to come up with the perfect person to carry the message of AIDS awareness to the people it ought to reach,” said New York AIDS activist Rodger McFarlane, “you couldn’t do better than Magic Johnson.” The National AIDS Hotline lit up with 40,000 phone calls on the day of Johnson’s announcement, instead of the usual 3,800. At the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, AIDS-related calls, which usually average 200 per hour, jumped to 10,000 in a single hour on Thursday night. Certainly the macho world of sports will never be the same. When the Phoenix Suns played host to the Lakers on Friday night, the home team invited an AIDS support and information group to set up a display and hand out information at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. People in the stands held signs that said, GOD BLESS MAGIC. And shares of Carter-Wallace, Inc., the maker of Trojan condoms, were up $3 on Johnson’s announcement that he would become a spokesperson for safe sex.
The biggest thing to happen to AIDS since Rock Hudson, activists are saying, but the impact of Johnson’s admission dwarfs that 1985 news. Besides seeming more vital to the majority of Americans than an aging actor, Johnson’s appeal in the black community should help break down the resistance to AIDS education that many professionals report from that quarter. “All the posters and pamphlets were about white gay males,” says the Rev. Carl Bean, founder and CEO of the Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles. “Now [the movement] has someone who is macho, successful, wealthy, a celebrity, married. This knocks the myths right out of the water.” Few schools got through the day after Johnson’s announcement without somehow addressing the issue of AIDS and safe sex. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin-Patrick Ewing’s alma mater, in Massachusetts–staff members made themselves available for counseling and planned programs that will run into this week. “Adolescents have this sense of invulnerability,” says Lynn Schoeff, program director of the school’s Teen Health Center. Seeing that a hero such as Johnson is not immune, she says, “is driving home a point to these kids.” Doctors and counselors at AIDS facilities have been working overtime, trying to keep up with a sudden demand for information. Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic reports that appointments for AIDS tests were up 300 percent in the wake of Johnson’s announcement, and the Dimock Community Health Center in Roxbury, Mass., is giving out two or three times the usual number of condoms. “I think every man in New York City who’s ever had unprotected sex is calling about testing,” says Joseph O’Connell, the director of a private AIDS facility in New York.
Obviously there is something more than an appreciation of one man’s basketball skills at work. Part of Magic’s appeal no doubt is that he has the courage of his convictions, which in his case means remaining relentlessly upbeat. He joshed easily with Arsenio Hall about his wife wanting to hit him “upside his head” when he offered to leave her, he tried to calm down friends and Laker teammates who were shaken by the news–and he promised to go to next summer’s Barcelona Olympics anyway, as a coach for the American team. “I’m not fearing it, I’m not down, I’m here saying I got it,” he said last Friday on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Occasionally his eyes welled but no tears ran down his cheeks. To date, says one spokesman for the Lakers, Johnson himself remains the only member of the organization not to cry openly over the tragic news. Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan, recounting the Thursday afternoon call in which Magic told him about the HIV condition and urged him to “live on,” said, as his own eyes reddened, “Frankly, I wasn’t as calm as he was.”
Control, of course, was always part of Magic’s game plan. On the court, Johnson became the acknowledged master at moving his teammates around the floor, a hollerer, a finger pointer and a passer of split-second precision. At 6 feet, 9 inches, he holds the NBA record in assists: according to one inspired headline writer, A POINT GUARD AS BIG AS THE RITZ. Magic is “the only player,” Julius Erving once said, “who can take only three shots and still dominate a game.” It is no coincidence that since he and Larry Bird turned pro in 1979, the NBA has moved from the brink of bankruptcy to the beginning of a new, international era. Now the certainties are few: he ends up with three Most Valuable Player awards, five world championships–and a reputation, oddly enough, as something other than a basketball star. “You think his legacy is going to be one of a player,” said an emotional Lakers coach Mike Dunleavy. “But really now it’s going to be as a crusader for a cause.”
The gist of Johnson’s initial message has been that if I got it, everyone must worry about the AIDS virus. No reputable researcher would argue with such a position. Yet Johnson quickly discovered that a nation still coming to grips with the very definition of AIDS wanted to know how he had contracted HIV, something that he at first seemed disinclined to discuss. His press-conference reference to safe sex, combined with a dearth of references to IV drug use, were taken as an indirect answer to many people’s Big Question. Pressed the next day, albeit gingerly, by his pal Arsenio, Johnson said, “I’m far from being homosexual. You know that, everybody else who’s close to me understands that.” In an article in last Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, Pamela McGee, who knows Magic and played on the women’s basketball team at USC, wrote an article describing him as a friend but also as a womanizer who has had numerous one-night stands with “what he calls ‘freaks’ across America.” Johnson revealed his HIV infection, she speculates, “to warn the thousands of women he slept with.” It ultimately fell, however, to a corporate public-relations person affiliated with the Lakers to announce that Magic had encountered HIV in a heterosexual relationship. That method of transmission accounts for only 2.2 percent of AIDS infections. Many people, though, insisted that the only thing that matters is what happens next to Magic Johnson.
One of the most chilling aspects of the affair is that nothing visible has happened yet. Johnson complained of flulike symptoms, fatigue and weight loss in the days prior to his diagnosis, but his doctor, Michael Mellman, said those things were coincidental to his HIV status. As the speculation and debate about Johnson’s condition intensified, however, AIDS specialists pointed out that such symptoms frequently appear at the onset of HIV. A case of shingles that kept Johnson out of several games in 1985 could also have marked the onset of the pre-AIDS virus; if so, Johnson may be much further into the symptomless “incubation period” than he at first imagined. The reason he advised Johnson to retire, Mellman said, is not that Magic is suddenly incapable of playing pro basketball; there was simply no compelling reason to submit to the rigors of the road and constant competition at a time when Johnson needed to maintain his current level of strength. At the press conference and on the Arsenio show, Johnson looked bright-eyed and square-jawed. So, of course, did Lou Gehrig in that famous 1939 newsreel showing his retirement from the Yankees. Gehrig, who was afflicted with a creeping form of spinal paralysis, said, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Magic told Arsenio that “If I die tomorrow, I’ve had the greatest life anybody could ever imagine.”
Supporters and friends, perhaps partly to convince themselves, went out of their way to emphasize that Johnson has in no way departed the scene. “We do not want to eulogize him,” said former Lakers coach Pat Riley, who led his current team, the Knicks, and the Orlando Magic, in a prayer before Thursday’s game. “His career is over in basketball, but his life still goes on,” said Johnson’s good friend Detroit Pistons star Isiah Thomas. “He woke up this morning. The sun came out. He ate breakfast. He’s going to have lunch, dinner. He’s going to go to sleep again tonight.” Michael Jordan also suggested that Magic was now influencing the AIDS movement just as he once had influenced the game of basketball. “He taught a lot of us how to be versatile, not to be limited to play one position.”
Now Johnson is trying to teach the world what it means to be HIV-positive. “I plan on going on living for a long time,” he said. “You don’t have to run from me. You can give me my hugs, my high fives, my kisses.” At least one prominent AIDS researcher, Dr. Michael Gottlieb of Los Angeles, says he was “encouraged by his poise and by his comments that he was going to come out swinging.” So was 14-year-old Jeremy Darden, who plays basketball at the Brookhaven Boys and Girls Club in Atlanta. “He is still my role model.”
Yet the more common reaction to Johnson’s diagnosis–sadness–seems justified: he has gone from a national title at Michigan State in 1979 to 12 glorious seasons with the Lakers to a state of utter uncertainty. Even his wife, college sweetheart Cookie, and their unborn child, may yet prove to be infected. “It’s messed up,” says Rebecca Rodriguez, 14, of Park East High School in upper Manhattan. Many teen-agers, who’ve grown up hearing about safe sex, are very disappointed by the news, says Pearl Allen, a teacher at Madison Park High School in Roxbury, Mass. “They thought,” she says, “that he was too smart for that.”
No one knows how long Johnson has before his illness progresses to full-blown AIDS. Many HIV patients live comfortably for 10 years or longer, but doctors are still at a loss to say how fast AIDS will appear in any one individual (story, page 63). Nor is there any scientific basis for believing that Johnson’s athletic conditioning will help prolong his life. “Unfortunately, because the virus attacks a very specific kind of cell, he may take care of himself and still find his immune system collapsing under him,” says Dr. Art Ulene, a medical consultant to TV station KABC in L.A. Johnson’s best bet, it seems, is to ward off the onset of serious symptoms for as long as possible, probably with the help of drugs such as AZT and DDL, and hope that medical science finds a way of transforming AIDS into a treatable, chronic disorder in the interim.
That’s not as farfetched as it was just a few days ago, before Magic told his story of learning he had HIV from a routine insurance-company blood test. It’s logical to believe that the hot-line inquiries and classroom discussions will eventually translate into increased donations to AIDS-related causes from the private sector and increased pressure on the Bush administration to spend more money on education and research. That pleases people who have been part of the movement and who had sensed that AIDS was slipping from the public consciousness even as it became more of a factor in heterosexual life. Likewise, Johnson says all of the companies-including Pepsico, Converse, Spalding, and Target Stores–for which he serves as a spokesman–have assured him that they are delighted to continue their relationship with him.
What’s puzzling is the source of the joy that seems to be welling up in Johnson, even as he gives up the game that he loves, and waits in the AIDS anteroom. On the night after his historic announcement, he and his wife and four other couples sat around in his living room; Cookie dragged out old photo albums and they spent the evening joking and laughing. Then they ordered out for barbecued chicken and ate it off paper plates. The only thing Magic did out of the ordinary was not turn on the radio or TV. It was a good day, but it was not a good news day.
SOURCE: CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL *NUMBERS DO NOT EQUAL 100 DUE TO ROUNDING
WHO HAS AIDS? There have been nearly 196,000 cases of AIDS in America. Nearly 65 percent have been fatal.
Homosexual/bisexual males 58.6% Undetermined 3.7% Hemophiliacs .8% Transfusions 2.2% Heterosexuals 5.7% Heterosexual intravenous drug users 22.4% Male homosexual/bisexual intravenous drug users 6.5%
A SHOOTING STAR NBA MOST VALUABLE PLAYER, 1987,1989,1990 NAMED TO ALL-NBA FIRST TEAM, 1983-1991 PLAYOFF MVP, 1980,1982,1987 ALL-STAR GAME MVP, 1990 MEMBER OF NBA CHAMPIONSHIP TEAMS, 1980, 1982,1985,1987,1988 ALL-TIME ASSISTS LEADER (9,921) LED NBA IN ASSISTS, 1983, 1984,1986,1987 LED NBA IN STEALS, 1981 AND 1982 LED NBA IN FREE-THROW PERCENTAGE, 1989 HOLDS ALL-TIME NBA PLAYOFF RECORD FOR MOST ASSISTS SHARES NBA PLAYOFF-GAME RECORD FOR MOST ASSISTS (24), AND MOST ASSISTS IN ONE HALF (15) HOLDS NBA CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES-GAME RECORDS FOR MOST ASSISTS (21), MOST ASSISTS IN ONE HALF (14) AND SHARES RECORD FOR MOST ASSISTS IN ONE QUARTER (8) HOLDS NBA ALL-STAR GAME RECORDS FOR CAREER ASSISTS AND ASSISTS IN ONE GAME (22) MEMBER OF NCAA CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM, 1979 SOURCE: THE SPORTING NEWS OFFICIAL NBA REGISTER
