It is only practice, of course. But swish. Top of the key. And swish again. Right corner. It’s terribly disorienting. Swish. It’s only been six weeks since M ‘c revealed his illness but the rumors have flown every which way, freezing out the truth, which is: he has no symptoms and is on AZT without side effects; his wife and unborn child are unaffected; he has been placed on the president’s commission on AIDS and he’s signed a book contract for a reported $5 million; he plans to keep his spot on the U.S. Olympic team and wistfully longs to be included in the NBA All-Star Game lineup. Also, though, some of his instant eulogies are in rewrite.
The initial shock canonization of Magic as the anthropomorphic Saint Hero-it’s amazing how much we celebrate candor unless it’s running for public office-has been quickly followed by Serious Second Thoughts. Yeah, sure, some role model he, this hedonistisn’t Magic “exactly the worst example?” asked columnist Bob Lipsyte in an open-book test in The New York Times. “Slut” is what Martina Navratilova said society would label him if he were a she.
So Magic answers: _I_yes.i On network TV. Before the press, assembled. And alone with a man with a notepad, sitting in judgment. _I_I am wrong. It was my fault.i He sighs. “You always thought you were a person who set a good example. Then, all of a sudden–boom. But I understand. Hey, it’s me. And I did it. So, I pray more, and I ask God to give me more strength because I see he’s got a mission for me, to help make society aware and to make society care.”
It’s terribly refreshing to hear an American sinner going public and using God as a resource, rather than as a crutch or a co-signer. But, then, as ever, Magic is the same blithe spirit, laughing and orchestrating, pausing only to educate-“Hey, I know my stats,” he crows, citing the dreadful rise in the number of people who have AIDS-or to put those around him at ease. He will not countenance sourpusses and worrywarts in his presence. As a consequence, everybody who doesn’t say he must be bisexual says he must be in denial.
An old pal, the announcer Ahmad Rashad, demurs. “This has always been him. He tells me there’s two of him, the Magic everybody sees, and Earvin. Only I’ve never seen Earvin, and neither has anybody else I know.” Magic cackles at that analysis, his smile lighting up any smile that smiles back. “But see,” he says, “Ahmad’s never there when I’m home alone. What’s all this denial? I’ve always been the same when things go wrong. One time, right after I moved into my house and I wasn’t used to the garage, I ripped up a whole side of my new Rolls. I called my agent up and I was laughing at what I did. And he said, ‘Magic, what’s the matter with you? You just smashed up your Rolls.’ And I said, ‘Well, what can I do? It’s done, and I can’t do anything’.” A pause-and his great, thoughtful hands find themselves to clasp since there is no basketball around for them to grab. “Of course, this time it’s different. This time I can die.”
But not once, lying in bed, not once looking in the mirror, not once has he broken down. He’s only cried the one time, when he saw the people he always refers to as “the fellas” crying over him. The fellas are the Lakers. “But I’ve walked a lot by myself. When my wife and I were in Hawaii, after this all came out last month, I’d leave her for a while and walk all over. And I drive around a lot by myself now. You know when you do that sometimes and you look up, and all of a sudden you’re home and you don’t know how you got there? That’s been happening a lot to me these days.”
But in these peripatetic meditations, he swears: no anger, no blame, no why-me? No one else has heard any, either. Yet, so what? He was always a freak-6 feet 9, playing like Cousy, the class clown who leads, the star who is borne no envy. If his demeanor now in the first blush of mortality is unnatural, so is it consistent. We can’t deny that.
Armed with his new stats, the message Magic is delivering is something of a work in progress, as he adjusts to the criticism of the libertine bachelor life he admits to before his marriage to Cookie Kelly in September. Along with appeals for the safe sex he didn’t practice, he now calls for abstinence (“God’s way”) for young people and more discretion from adults-safety in fewer numbers. Nowhere could that ministry be better applied than with his own NBA peers, for if Magic was demonstrably promiscuous, he was hardly alone in enjoying the league’s seamy sportin’ life.
While it is certainly no revelation that athletes play around on the road, the NBA is the runaway champ in this satiric department-and that’s not even counting the indefatigable Wilt Chamberlain. “The NBA’s five times worse than any other sport,” says one agent. Even Charles Grantham, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association acknowledges a situation which could scar the NBA’s wonderfully crafted public image. “This and the drug area present two of the most obvious problems that both us and the league must deal with,” Grantham says.
After games, dozens of groupies congregate outside locker rooms or back at the hotels, attracting more male hangers-on, who are trolling to snare the players’ leftovers. Some of the stage-door Janes may be starry eyed: “In the black community, the athlete is still seen as the knight in shining armor,” Pamela McGee, a friend of Johnson’s and a former All-American basketball player, told The Washington Post. Others are simply looking for a payday. A couple of years ago one hustler from L.A. had three paternity suits filed against three different players at the same time before some agents happened to start comparing notes. But then, paternity suits are so common that the millionaire player-scum-rock-stars dismiss them as little more than nocturnal turnovers.
Since many of the same women are sleeping with NBA players, it is understandable, as Magic ruefully acknowledges, that some players want desperately to believe that he is bisexual. The rumors must be true. He must be bisexual. Please. Because a 1988 insurance exam has recently been retrieved, showing that Johnson was not HIVpositive at that time, the woman who passed on the virus to him evidently was a liaison of recent vintage and may well be standing outside some locker room tonight.
The players, Magic says, “are listening and listening good,” and so, too, obviously, are a lot of other folks. AIDS tests among heterosexuals are suddenly in demand-they increased 60 percent in New York City and black churches, which have been inclined to play ostrich about AIDS until now, have even begun to take up special offerings since Magic’s announcement.
Of course, it is precisely that sort of response that both infuriates and wounds many gays-that America, from the White House on down, will clasp an infected straight star athlete to its breast, while casting off sick homosexuals. That’s not just glib imagery, either. Strangers literally embrace Magic on the street and remind him not to forget to take his medicine. “That’s the thing that’s amazed me the most, " he says. Nevertheless, while it is certainly human nature for gays to be hurt and resentful at this mean double standard, it is also the cold, pragmatic truth that Magic Johnson can be their poster child for AIDS. At the same time that we are often unmoved by the most horrific stats, we will fixate our hearts on the one little boy who fell down the well.
Says Malcolm Boyd, a gay who is an Episcopal priest and author in Los Angeles: “My friends who are hurt must understand that America is a celebrity country, and everything is in the celebrity mode. Why, I must know 12 people who’ve assured me, proudly, that they were at Rock Hudson’s deathbed. Magic has handled it all so well, and it’s touched us all. Of course we must embrace him. Look, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we refer to it as preMagic AIDS and post-Magic AIDS.”
Magic held out those talkative hands of his, and he was surely Earvin for this moment. “What the gays couldn’t do, maybe I can,” he said. “But they can teach me. They can help me. We’re all in this together.”
In just those few weeks he’s grown up, from a hero into a man. It’s very becoming.
