ShareThisIt was a slow Thursday.
Twenty years ago, on that Nov. 7, not much was happening in sports. Jack Morris had pitched the Twins to the World Series the week before. As a local sportscaster in Upstate New York, the big local story was the hockey team, but the AHL's Binghamton Rangers didn't play until the next night.
I was literally sitting in a chair with my feet up on the desk watching CNN when a news bulletin appears. Lou Waters telling us Magic Johnson is HIV positive.
What did he just say?
Normally a newsroom explodes with energy when a story drops from the sky. This time, however, for a few minutes about two-dozen WBNG-TV staffers raced from all corners of the building to just watch and listen as the reports came in.
He's going to retire. A news conference has been set for 6 p.m. (our station carried most of it live). Then right before the moment when a local station tries to figure out how to put a hometown angle on the biggest story in the world, we all looked at one another with shocked faces, which were screaming the words that no one could bare to say out loud.
"Oh my God, Magic Johnson is going to die of AIDS."
Yet 20 years later, here he is, alive and well. A grandfather. A very successful businessman. How in the world has he done it?
A fatal disease that even today has no known cure. Yet Earvin "Magic" Johnson is still thriving, dare we say winning, at the ultimate game. Life.
No one could have predicted that.
The best information from federal health officials in 1991 said that, statistically, Magic wouldn't live to see the 21st century.
Tennis legend Arthur Ashe contracted AIDS via a blood transfusion in 1988 and died in 1993. He was rich, famous, popular and connected, yet all the best doctors and medicine could only give him five years.
How could Magic believe "I'm going to beat it," as he said at the end of his remarkable retirement press conference?
Many NBA players not only didn't believe it, they thought you could become HIV positive just by playing basketball on the same court as Magic. During a short-lived comeback in 1992, his Lakers teammates shied away from contact in practice and many opponents didn't want him on the floor at all.
When Magic suffered a cut in a preseason game, the sport, despite doctors' assurances, freaked out.
Magic Johnson may have been loved by fans, but just like most everyone else with HIV, he, too, was being ostracized by peers. In an interview earlier this year, Magic said the next few years were hard and his health began to suffer.
His big break, if you can contract HIV and have some good fortune, was meeting up with Dr. David Ho in 1994. Ho would help pioneer a "cocktail" that slowed the HIV virus to the point where it would not become full-blown AIDS.
Magic received this cocktail a full 18 months before it was released to the general public. What once was a boatload of pills has been reduced to just a few pills a day. The key, says Ho, is to take them at the same time every day.
In 1997, right around the time as his good friend Arsenio Hall believed, "he was going to get thin and die," Magic returned to the Lakers for 32 games. In the five-plus years since his announcement, fear had been replaced with HIV education and widespread acceptance.
What other athlete, through the strength of his personality, will and smile, could have accomplished this?
Others, like U.S. Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis, have lived with HIV longer (since 1988), but Magic changed how we looked at AIDS.
You could argue that his is the most successful post-playing career in sports history.
Earvin Johnson is now 52 years old, runs five miles a day and works 60-hour weeks.
Thinking back to 20 years ago, there is but one easy conclusion. No person has ever been given a more fitting nickname.
Magic.
(David Moulton is a sports radio talk show host and writes for the Naples Daily News in Florida.)
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