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Speaker 6welcome to The Right Time, presented by PrizePix. My name is Beaumontie Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. It is Time Machine Tuesday. We are looking back on November 7th, 1991, which, at least for me, is one of those where, no, I know the exact date, because that is the date that Magic Johnson, out of nowhere, told the world that he was retiring because he had contracted HIV, which I don't know if younger people can understand the earth-shattering nature of this date. But this is one of those, the world was different before and after it happened. Joining us, formerly of the LA Times, now Northwestern University's own J.A. Adande. What's going on, man?
Speaker 7What's going on? And I was here on this campus. That was my senior year at Northwestern. On that date, November 7th, 1991. And it really was a where were you? And I can remember clearly, I was in the office at the Daily Northwestern. I was going through some facts, another very 1991 moment. I needed to double check on a fax that I would send it to Michigan. Northwestern football was playing at Michigan that Saturday, November 9th. And I had had that date circled. That's one reason that November 7th sticks with me. And so it was a Thursday. And this woman comes in who didn't work in the office. And she comes in and she says, J. Looking down. And I go, what? And then she said, J. And I still keep down. I'm looking at this. She says, no, look at me. Magic Johnson is retiring. He has AIDS. Obviously, that wasn't technically correct. But that was close enough. You're right. You know, and then I had access because I was in the newsroom back then. Basically, the only way you could get instant news. I happened to be in the newsroom and we had access to the Associated Press wires. And I looked it up and there it was, you know, with with the word. And yeah. Shattering, devastating. And it's funny getting ready this morning for this podcast. I was like, man, you know, we're revisiting a dark day. So it was kind of a cloud over me. But then I realized ultimately the story of this. It's an incredibly triumphant story. Right. Because, you know, it's about overcoming when it feels like you have a death sentence. And now it's 35 years later and Magic Johnson is still going strong.
Speaker 6And I tell people the greatest surprise in the world. You never could have told nobody in 1991 or 1992 or 1992. Then in 2026, Magic Johnson would be alive and
Speaker 7fat and thriving. And like so many people have come and gone in that interim. And the number of people that Magic has outlived and all the stuff that he's gone on to do. It's staggering. And I can kind of get into the before and after and how he's able to fulfill some of his dreams. But, yeah, where do you want to go with it?
Speaker 6Well, one thing I want to start with before we kind of like set up exactly who is Magic Johnson. You pointed out. You pointed out something there that I think is interesting to note is that in 1991, I think that we could divide news stories into kind of two types. Right. The type that you read about in the newspaper in the morning and the type that somebody had to call you about where like this has happened and it's immediately. Hey, did you see this? Because I heard it on the radio. I saw it on television or like someplace that you could just get news out of the ether and grab it because we weren't just constantly in and not just it's not just that we weren't inundated with news is that we didn't. As you say, have the ability to immediately access news all the time. This was a somebody called somewhere. You saw it. Somebody ran in and told you like this. This is maybe the biggest sports news. Like this is so much bigger than Michael Jordan retiring. And that was as shocking as one could imagine everything else. But this this took sports into the real world in a way that nobody actually could have forecast.
Speaker 7Right. The crossover. And it's funny because as shocking as it. Was as a sports story, it also changed the discussion and the dynamics of the AIDS and the HIV story.
Speaker 6Now, you know, let me say this because we're going to get back to that part. Right. You grew up in Los Angeles. You grew up as a Lakers fan. You were of the age where you could clearly remember before the before Magic Lakers, the after Magic Lakers. It's easy to forget. When Magic got to the Lakers in Los Angeles, the Lakers had won one championship since then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They'd won 12, I believe, is the number. Is it 11? Right. But it's it's 11. 11. Right. Yeah. But it's enough that Magic is a I can't like he comes in with Bird also. So it's like that combination. And they talk about them saving the NBA, saving the NBA might be a bit of an exaggeration. Completely changing it is not.
Speaker 7Right. And remember his his rookie year, the championship game, that famous game six or. Remember, as a rookie, I think he was twenty nineteen when he's drafted twenty by the time this happens, he goes for forty two, fifteen and seven filling in for Kareem Abdul Jabbar at center to lead the Lakers to a championship on the road. And I tried to treat on the anniversary of that because a rookie, a 20 year old rookie did that, you know, let's stop and think about the magnitude of that. But, yes, it transformed the Lakers ushers in the era of Showtime. And it's really it's the start of my sports fandom to serious sports fandom. I was kind of aware of sports. I'm nine years old at that time. And all I knew about the Lakers was that, you know, they had Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the guy who's in airplane and they would always lose in the playoffs. That's all I knew about them. And then Magic comes and they break through and they get to the finals. And the way he played, it made me a fan. Like my sports fandom basically goes back to that series and that night. And I was kind of casually aware. And then I just became a diehard, super huge Magic Johnson fan, you know, follow. Everything he did, subscribe to like Basketball Digest, tried to read as much as I could. And remember, you couldn't really watch. Home games weren't available. There weren't regional sports networks. Actually, one of the first ones was in L.A., Prime Ticket. So, like, you could only see him on like the CBS games and on the road. Right. And so you only saw Magic about at most like 40 times a year. And, yeah, he transforms the league with Bird and by 84. And so. So 1991, when this happens, it's also the transition of the league to Magic and from Magic and Bird to Michael Jordan. So he had just played in the finals, kind of a revamped version of him or a changed version where you're post Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He retired. Magic's getting older, so it's no longer showtime. Mike Dunleavy, the coach, Pat Riley's gone. Byron Scott, James Worthy, some of the holdovers from the 80s are still there. They somehow get to the finals. Portland was the number one seed that year. The Lakers upset them, get to the finals, lose to Michael Jordan. So it's the start of the Michael Jordan era. It's also the start of the NBA on NBC era. That's their first year with the contract. So you think of that that 90s NBA on NBC. So all these things are going on. Right. A very transformative kind of pivotal moment for the NBA. And then this bomb drops in
Speaker 6the middle of it. And I think Magic is such a star that the. The evidence of his uncommon stardom is directly in our face and we ignore it because we just take it for granted. We call that man Magic. And by the way, not because he asked us to. Right. Like it's not like he walked in like people called Deion Sanders prime. He came up with that. Right. Like he decided this is what it's going to be. No. Magic was so cold. All those people who actually know him, they all call him Irvin. Right. They all talk about Irvin, this Irvin, that. Magic is this whole other thing, like the idea that you are 17, 18 years old and somebody is like, yo, that dude is Magic. We're going to call him Magic. And it just goes. It's the greatest nickname in the history of sports because it fits. Right. It doesn't feel like a reach. It doesn't feel extra. It feels like it's on his goddamn birth certificate. And if you watch him play basketball, other Jordan is the only person to me that's in the same sphere of being a like the most entertaining basketball player. That there is to watch.
Speaker 7And in a completely different way than Michael Jordan, too. Right. Like very ground based. You know, Michael Jordan amazed you with the acrobatics. Magic didn't have a great vertical leap, had a few dunks here and there, but he wasn't wowing you. He wasn't Dr. J. You know, you had Dr. J before Michael Jordan. Magic. So, first of all, the nickname came in high school. A sports writer, Fred Stabley Jr. in East Lansing, Michigan, comes up with the nickname. And as you said, it's perfect. It's funny. So I have here's how big a Magic fan I have. I have every Magic Johnson Sports Illustrated cover framed hanging in my house. One amazing thing is about here's something about his stardom. And for the younger people, Sports Illustrated, there's really no equivalent to what the cover Sports Illustrated for a while. You know, being on Sports Center on ESPN was and now there's really nothing that is the same as the cover Sports Illustrated. I would say it was the most coveted real estate in sports. He's been on the cover since 1970. He ate the start of his sophomore year. He's on the cover in a tux, you know, dunking a ball. He's been on the cover in five different decades, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s and into the 2010s. As as a co-owner of the Dodgers, he's on the cover with Matt Kemp, who was a Dodger at the time. So he's on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He's, you know, seven up commercials, a lot of commercials, you know, occasional TV or movie appearance here. You know, really? The star has that magnetic smile, right? So that was the persona. And that was one of the things that that struck people, even as he's making the announcement that he has HIV and he has to retire from the Lakers. He's still smiling. That was Mike Downey's column in the L.A. Times was he was just so shook. All they could type was he was smiling. He was smiling. He couldn't believe it. One final thing about magic. Two things, actually. One, go look up. There's a video on YouTube called. The Magic Man. And it's 15 minutes of highlights. All you need to know is the first seven and a half minutes. He doesn't take a shot. He has seven and a half minutes of highlights of him rebounding, passing, leading the fast break. And it's some of the best basketball highlights you'll ever seen. And then kind of the back half. It is him making these amazing game winning shots. But seven and a half minutes of highlights. Half the damn thing is him passing. That's how amazing a passer he was.
Speaker 6It was the cover of Sports Illustrated and it was page 43. Now. The other thing that I will say about the magic of magic as basketball player and as star. A big part of why magic is so famous is that he is on the other end of Larry Bird in the greatest promotional tool basketball has ever had. A little racial warfare, though, like it wasn't really it wasn't quite warfare. It was more like racial fisticuffs, right? Like like racial racial pugilism, perhaps. But that's what everybody loves. But think about how famous and beloved magic became while being. The foil to the white man right now, of course, when you had the tragic Johnson thing in 84, that became people's opportunity to jump on him. But it's not a lot of dudes that wind up on the other side of the white dude and aren't the villain in the way of it, because it wasn't possible. He won. He had to win surly as Larry Bird over by the time it was over. Like he was that undeniable and magnetic of force and an absolute winner. Like it was it was everything. And I feel like I tell the story a lot that when I first started. Doing high noon with Pablo and as a magic was the GM of the Lakers and Pablo was hard on magic in a way where I was kind of like, hey, I don't really feel like you understand who it is that we talk about here. Like I didn't think that he I didn't feel like he talked about the way he talked about magic in the way I talked about magic indicated that we were two people who were coming at this from very different perspectives. Magic pulled up to the seaport one day. Next thing I know, I look at Pablo literally jump on a couch so that he could. Shake magic's hand. I got a picture of it and everything is magic pulled up. Magic had a bio on everybody. Magic knew I was I lived in North Carolina. You know, I've been in Miami. He knew how long I had gotten to been in New York. He knew Pablo went to Harvard. He knew the whole thing. Like magic. One of those dudes that when magic showed up, everybody's happy that magic is around.
Speaker 7But, you know, the great politicians like Bill Clinton. And I'm just thinking about their their capability of winning you over. They make you feel important. No one could make you feel. More important than Magic Johnson. He had that ability. You experienced it. Pablo experienced it, right? He'd walk in the room and make you feel like you're the most important thing. So my buddy and I went to Magic's basketball camp. We got to know him a little bit. We'd go to the games at the forum and strategically, I'd sneak down courtside during the layup lines and he would catch my eye and come over, you know, and say hi to me. And, you know, all the celebrities around the forum and he would come over and say hi to me and then I'd be walking back up to my seats up at the top of the forum. And people looking like, who is that guy? But like he knew how empowering it was to you just by him saying hi, what it would do for me. That that's kind of the personality. The other thing you mentioned, Bo, was winner. And ultimately, that's why he goes down. That's why he's so beloved. And I think that's why he was so accepted, was that he won. Bo, he never played consecutive seasons in the NBA without going to the NBA finals. He goes eight out of the 10 NBA finals in the 1980s. Magic Johnson is there. So, you know. At a time when the NBA wasn't as big as it would be, you know, toward the end of his career, you know, he's there every June and sometimes even in May when the finals would be. He was always there. Wins five championships, goes to three other finals in the 80s. This guy was a winner.
Speaker 6And the Lakers are, I contend, the only unifying thing that wildly segregated city has to offer. Like if you ever read Mike Davis' City of Quartz, which is a fascinating look at L.A., you realize, of course, L.A. would have gang. Because everything in L.A. is a gang. Every group in L.A. is a gang. Whether it be a gang that's delineated by your industry, by your ethnicity, by where you came from in your migration there. And the geography, right?
Speaker 7Yes. Like L.A. is so defined by the geography of it.
Speaker 6Yes, all of it, right? The Lakers are the unifying thing, right? Because, I mean, the Clippers are there, but come on. You know what I mean? Like the Lakers are the unifying thing, which is why Magic later became embodied by Kobe Bryant later. The biggest star or like the endorsement. The most enduring star of the Lakers that feels like belongs to the Lakers is going to be the most popular man in Los Angeles. And that's basically what Magic Johnson got to be.
Speaker 7But he's the one that made it that way. You know, I don't think Jerry West was the guy like Magic was. Kareem certainly wasn't. Kobe would not have been if Magic hadn't made the Lakers what they became.
Speaker 6Yeah, and I guess part of that, too, is Jerry Bust figuring out, oh, we got a way to sell this as a Hollywood situation.
Speaker 7Exactly. I mean, they come in at the same time together. And just. They're perfect union.
Speaker 6Yep. And that'll also, if we're being honest, you get laid a lot under those circumstances, which becomes a part of the story. Right. And, you know, we get to that. But I think first important to set up, especially for younger people. And I think you would have the age difference you and I have. It's very helpful for you to be here. Not just me, because you can give a better handle in real time of the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and what it was socially. Right. Like, it's not just simply the idea. It's the idea that there is a plague of sorts that's killing people. They're specifically killing gay men. It's the largest part of the discussion. And buddy, America, we we have come a long way in the way that we talk about a lot of things. But talking about gay people is at the top of the list in the way the AIDS epidemic was handled and like very responsible. I don't say responsible, but people that we would think of as being dignified folks basically coming out and saying this is God cursing these people and they deserve it.
Speaker 7Yeah, it was a gay disease. And that's why you can specifically point to November 7th, 1991 as a shift in the cultural conversation that we're having well it was acceptable to joke about gays and aids go watch the eddie murphy i forget which one is this one of the eddie murphy specials or the concert videos that he did and like the first 10 20 minutes are him making gay jokes and aids jokes and this was mainstream it was acceptable in the mainstream to joke about this why because it was a them disease right this wasn't something that we collectively had to worry about that was for them and as long as it's for them then we can joke about it ha ha ha it's so funny and it's interesting even even november 8th there's a moment that kind of showed so a aids was something that the mainstream america didn't have to worry about until this moment and then b you know it was just so acceptable to joke it it was a punch line being gay was a punch line and it was completely acceptable at that time and there's this kind of awkward moment when you go back and look so on november 8th the day after the announcement magic johnson goes on the arsenio hall show as one was want to do back then it's a different cultural time listen to the tribe quest references to arsenio to kind of capture that moment um but so you know this was this was the the eye opening that you didn't just have to be gay to get this disease it was something that could be transmitted um to heterosexuals and through heterosexuals and through heterosexuals through heterosexual sex and so magic gets on there and he says well you know you know it says something like you know you know i'm the farthest thing from from being gay you know that and the crowd like erupts in applause you know who's like yeah he's not gay you know hey man looking back
Speaker 6it's cringeworthy look man i tell people all the time about the johnny gill unsung where they made sure the last block was guys being like i don't know what they was talking about every time i saw johnny it was women everywhere right that was that was the whole thing ending of that was hey hey hey let's go ahead and let's let's let's get that out of here right now the thing though about aids i think also important note here basically if you got it you were going to die like it was a like the idea at that time was that it was an absolute death sentence as you had it and you had people like ryan white is the name that jumps out where they were kind of some called celebs that you know that were that was surrounding it but we were not that far along in terms of the medical research and what it was that people had come up with and how they were dealing with this so and it was nearly impossible as you kind of mentioned to get government to get a president to get anybody to acknowledge the aids epidemic as being something important because it was seen as something that was afflicting gay people and therefore nobody wanted to seem like they were the person that was on the side of gay people and this was a remember the 1980s are entirely republican rule at that point nobody two two
Speaker 7administrations of reagan and then george bush follows right nobody
Speaker 6was willing to come out there and be the person to be like and i was saying to be fair i don't think the democrats are too excited about it either but to come out there and be like hey we have a problem we have you know a significant portion of our society is being affected we don't know what's going on we need to figure it out as long as it just kept coming up in the sample as being gay people they were kind of like yeah all right man you know well good luck to you guys maybe maybe you might want to think about changing how you do things because then if it was we had not come that far in terms of testing so it was coming up for people in blood transfusion so you get a case like most notably
Speaker 7arthur ash right right so
Speaker 6you get somebody who dies without engaging in any of what people consider to be the vices that were getting people there in the first place and so all of this is happening as you just said the lakers magic dragged those lakers to the finals in 91 by the way like that was they had no business being no it was it was magic and dudes that was it right a young
Speaker 7blooded debots who wound up it but you know he was a rookie and he was kind of groundbreaking in his own so he was the first foreign-born player who hadn't played in america at all prior to coming to the nba to start an nba finals game in that 91 finals too like a small little asterisk to that finals
Speaker 6right so we get through there and then that press conference comes and magic is standing there and he just says i how do you come up with the phrasing of it right like no matter who you are he stood there with no notes it was nothing on a card or anything he was just like uh i
Speaker 7can put it verbatim because of the hiv virus that i've obtained i'm retiring from the lakers today yes yes
Speaker 6because there's an element also in that that was part of the interesting of magic is he's much better with verbs than he used to be right like my mama used to talk about that when he would do those games my mother's a very proper word magic in his those verbs verbs was whooping magic's ass boy magic said the magic said he throwed the ball down the court that one time new words was kicking the verse was kicking magic's ass and i was like oh my god i'm not gonna do that again i'm not gonna do that again i'm not magic magic had to come up with the words it's not like there was anybody there's it it's also such a different era even though magic certainly had a team of people around him anything else there's no way in the world in 2020 says magic comes out there by himself and just comes up with the words for this off the top of his head but in that he'd always been the guy and he stood there and he looked the world in the eye and he said this and you could hear it in the room like what
Speaker 7and and again if the story had been out on the wire so i think you know everyone pretty much knew what they were there for and you know david stern wouldn't be there just for any other announcement the commissioner of the nba is right up there at the podium with them or at the dais and yeah it was still stunning to hear the words come out of his mouth and you're almost hoping that he's going to get up there and deny it or something and say this isn't true you know and he gets up there and like yep you know um i've got hiv and but we didn't we didn't know the terminology right i'll never forget in the chicago tribune again i was living here in chicago and i was like oh my god i'm not gonna do that again i'm not gonna do that here at the time of chicago um you know they had a a sidebar you know said the virus not the disease you know hiv was the virus that led to aids but again even including the person that first told me about it you know we just jumped right away to he's got aids and then in our minds we jumped to he's gonna die yeah and the the fortuitous thing about this was it was right at the forefront at the cusp and of course he had the celebrity and the means and the wealth to be have access to the very latest and best technology and the best technology and the very latest technology and the and the top doctors working on this and so it was just as they were discovering ways to counter it and so you know you you'd like to hope that it increased funding it certainly increased awareness well there was a special on nickelodeon where they had magic johnson and a bunch of kids and one thing was really sad there was a young girl up there who said you know she was hiv positive and she was scared and you know magic had to like comfort her like on on tv and um but you know they're talking about safe sex you know they're they're answering questions they're giving facts so we learned a lot and we got a lot of facts and then you know i think one thing that helped was his attempt to come back and um including playing in in the all-star game that year so he announces his retirement yeah he's still on the ballot let me get
Speaker 6you there coming up next we're going to get to that because the all-star game the comeback the olympics all of these things we always talk about what happened right before the next year is maybe the most interesting part of this
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Speaker 6are back with Jay Adande. Off mic, you had talked about something involving magic that I had not thought about. I was mentioning that the doc, the 30 for 30, that Nelson George did about magic making the announcement. The most interesting thing about it to me was that magic had the ego to say, I am the right, I'm the right person to have this. I got this. Yeah, God chose me to be the person to do this. And you mentioned a Jim Murray column that I was unaware of. And Jim Murray, for those of you who don't know, was a columnist for the LA Times, considered by many to be like the greatest sports columnist ever.
Speaker 7My inspiration for why I wanted to do this, right? Right. Columns. Cause I wanted to be like Jim Murray and just an incredible way with words and his reaction. His, his first column off the announcement was age. You picked the wrong opponent here. You've gotten yourself into this is magic Johnson. We're talking about. And I was like, what? This isn't a basketball game. This is a deadly virus. And guess what? 35 years later, Jim Murray was right. Yes. You know, one of the things magic Johnson did was outlive Jim Murray died by the end of the decade, you know, but Jim Murray went, you know, one of his last, like, you know, really impact. I mean, that was the story of the day, the year, maybe the decade. Right. And guess what? He got it right because this was the person. A again, as I mentioned earlier, the fact that, you know, he had the means to get the best service and services, but he did have the mentality. If anyone had the right mindset to take this on, it was magic Johnson because he believed that he could do anything. Never thought he was going to lose. Never, ever, ever did he ever believe he was going to lose. And as a Laker fan growing up, when you had magic on your team, you didn't think you were going to lose. You thought somehow, some way he was going to find a way in the game because he did it time and time again.
Speaker 6Jim Murray said that magic was tough on break. You don't know. You don't know what you got yourself into. And he was right. Like that doc and talking about magic sitting in the bathroom with the phone, the phone with the cord and going through the back black book. Cause he said, and calling them all and being like, Hey, so, and he
Speaker 7said, the hardest part was he had to face his, he had just gotten married, you know, his, his college girlfriend cookie who, you know, he'd kind of put off all that time. And she talks about it in that apple series is you get a lot of cookie and her friends, and there's like a four part apple TV series on magic. And, um, so, you know, we get her perspective on that, but he, he said at the time, like, you know, the hardest thing he had to do was tell her they had just gotten married finally that summer. Yeah. How do you do that? She was pregnant.
Speaker 6Yeah. Yeah. So I'm about to do this press conference, right? No, no, no. Stay over there. Stay right there. Please, please don't get any closer that, that, that I was watching this commercial. It's for, I forget what the name of the service is, but it's this woman and she's like, I got to make the hardest phone call I've ever had to make. I've got to call my husband and tell him that my daughter, I, I lost our daughter's college money. Cause I get, cause I got caught on a scam and I'm like, why do you have to talk to him on the phone? He's your husband. Oh, okay. I got you. You've opted to do this over the telephone because you think that this will make things a bit easier. Yeah. Got it. I'm magic. Shit. I'm not, I'm not only am I calling you on the phone, I'm not telling you where I am.
Speaker 7He told the story that you know, he, he gave her the options. Like, Hey, if you want out, you can. And he says, she smacked me in the head so hard. I'm, I'm thinking like, is the timing is that when she's
Speaker 6the audacity to say, I gave her the option of getting out as if this was your choice magic. Although magic's like, I mean, keep it real. It was, but no, this happens. And also we can't forget this is a, the dream team announcements have happened already by then. Um, but the all-star game comes. And that also leads us to a very interesting character in this story, which is Isaiah Thomas, who, you know, had a lot to do with the way the league handled this. Isaiah had a brother who was gay and it was, excuse me. Well, he also was gay, but he had AIDS and it was the diet of them and like how we, how they were going to handle all that and dealing with the all-star game. And, you know, Isaiah, the way that they had carried on in the finals in years before kissing at midcourt and everything like this like isaiah became the person that's like hey you stand by your people under these times and circumstances and he was that guy and it led to that all-star game and magic was killing it in that all-star game boy looking back on it they was probably letting him score a little bit but he also was your friendly
Speaker 7reminder right well well two things one so paper ballots for the all-star game back then right in the arena versus paper right he got voted in tim hardaway rightfully should have had that spot he when magic you know kept staying atop the voting this is why when people say oh they need to get rid of voting the fans get wrong i'm like no because the fans without the fans we don't have magic in an all-star game and we don't have the greatest moment in nba all-star history like nothing else comes close to magic playing in that game and you're right most of them were probably but he said a key moment was was um dennis rodman um he robin checks in matt i was like let's go you know i'm bumping you you're like i ain't afraid and so magic said that was like a key thing actually did a whole episode on on how roni cycli playing against magic um kind of helped bring him back in it just before a game one time out at the forum um but but rodman in front of everybody watching the all-star game um you know bumps him embodies him and it's like all right we're gonna play real basketball so then magic um you know he has that storybook moment at the end he comes down isaiah's garden and michael george they're trying to like deny him the ball magic gets the ball and he hits a three-pointer at the end you know just to you know sign everything off and put a nice bow on that that incredible moment that he had and that was kind of step one of like you know living your dreams and then i think that also helps him you know come back and play on the dream team that summer right in 92 like we hey we got through it nobody got aids or hiv from playing against him in the all-star game and so magic is able to go on and uh and play on the
Speaker 6dream team and it's also important to note that a lot of you are hearing this and thinking well of course you can't get it like that we ain't really know that then people the level of education again because this was a gay disease in the minds of most people it wasn't really getting to the bottom of how any of this worked like these these were all necessary steps that you wound up with and he goes and plays in the all-star plays in the olympics and then he decides to come back to the nba and that doesn't go quite
Speaker 7as well people were not
Speaker 6prepared for that that was that was that was a step farther and hey man don't tell nobody i said this okay about anything ever it's very important okay don't tell anybody all right i kind of feel like carl malone got a bit of a bad rap on this because he said what everyone was said what everybody else was that he had the courage i hate to use the word courage but i do think that to a degree there was something to that there's something being willing to be the ignorant oaf in the situation is sometimes somebody like we've all been in places where we don't want to be the one that admit that that says that i don't know to do know the thing right and there was an understanding in large part in polite company that what he was saying was the wrong thing to say now i think it helped that carl malone's a guy that didn't want to hang out with none of the people anyway but for those who don't know carl malone was the person that's like nah i don't know i don't feel good about this i feel like i might catch this i need somebody to tell me what's going on here and i feel like across the board it allowed the term virtue signaling comes into play and a great way to signal your virtue was to talk about virtue and to talk about what an ignorant oaf carl malone was but the it's not his i don't think it's fair to blame him for being the ignorant oaf as much as we were an ignorant oafish society at the time and he was the one willing to say
Speaker 7it and i i'm you know you you have the worst case scenario thoughts flash through your mind so magic would still go to the games after he was retired and so when i would go to laker games that 91 92 year or the next year you know like i'd see i'd wait for him after the game and catch up and you know say hi give him a hug and he would say i remember one time you know we shook hands and and you know and then later you know like i'm like did i like you know if i like touch my mouth if i had like a open cut or something anywhere and like i'd been around magic like and you know and i introduced you know potentially anything into my system because you know the fear was it was transmitted through you know bodily fluids or something but you know you learn you get past it obviously i'm still here too you know nothing happened to me you know and i remember there was an article i think it was when he was getting ready to play in the all-star game and they were talking to doctors how safe is the game and one doctor broke it down basically magic would have to have sex with one of the players on the court in order to transmit the disease or the virus to them like you're not going to get it you know rubbing up against somebody and you're sweating and they're sweating you know and then but you know one of the legacies of this is you know the infectious disease rules that we have in sports now where they will stop the game if somebody's bleeding they'll stop the game you can't come back into the game until the flow of blood is stopped and then one of the other things picture that did in magic's comeback so they're playing an exhibition game he gets a cut gary vd the trainer for the lakers treats it you know vd is obviously medically aware so he's not wearing any gloves and he's treating you know this this cut and and like the reaction to that including carl malone reaction um so now there's a rule that you know the trainers have to wear gloves if there's blood and they're tending to somebody that's bleeding and again the flow of blood has to be stopped and if you're bleeding on the jersey you have to change jerseys all of this dates back to 1992 and magic johnson's attempt to come back and it is performance
Speaker 6because as you just said the thing that they're trying to make sure it doesn't happen is not created by that like the nfl was like look if we did this you couldn't play no games right like now we have a cats out hockey because we bleed all the time anyway tripping on that right it's just it became a nest and look like for example i think a lot of what they do at the airport is performative but i think it's a necessary performance that makes people feel like they're not gonna blow the plane up okay and whatever
Speaker 7it takes right all right do they take
Speaker 6my shoes off walk through it's gonna take me an extra five minutes all right man as long as everybody
Speaker 7feels good so but that's what happens when this played out so publicly yes right i mean this was such a private you know and think of all the hippa and you know and i don't want to talk and that's personal and you know no one wants to talk about you know that's like you go back to that november 7th thing the fact that magic took the most personal thing and just went up in front of the world and talked about it and then again continue to talk about it george bush appointed him to a commission that was supposed to be you know looking at aids and hiv and magic wound up quitting because he didn't think they were really serious and committed enough um you know he's he's promoted various treatments and drugs over the years and and again especially early on he was very active and outspoken i think there was a little pushback you know among the the gay community and then later you know like some of the the the aids workers and and and kind of health care things that like okay he kind of you know put it to the side eventually so kind of eventually like magic was kept going on he was like all right i'm gonna get back to being magic you know just in terms of like i'm gonna live my life but you know and i think i think we undersell because well how often do you look at magic and think now trust me for like two or three years every time i saw magic that's like oh my god he's got hiv you know and then talk about normalizing this might have been the greatest case of normalizing that we've ever seen normalizing seeing someone with hiv continuing to live their life just as before yeah you know and not only living their life thriving yeah i think
Speaker 6the tricky thing though was that magic had access especially in those times to things that other people didn't and so if i'm not mistaken there was also a bit of concern that magic is creating a situation that allows some people to actually underestimate the magnitude of the situation because you see magic is doing okay when it's a lot of people still out here like really fighting um and really struggling but there's also the cynical part of it as we talked about this a little before it became very important that magic was heterosexual and the idea that this was a gay disease had been such a hold up to getting people to do something about it and magic provided a straight face because it's not like there hadn't been famous gay people like rock hudson had already died of aids up until this point um you know what
Speaker 7and and bob hope went on tv and made a joke
Speaker 6about it yes yes like that's that's what the people don't know rock hudson was like the heartthrob of the movies back in the day like i'm trying to think of like what would be the analogous person to say if that person were to
Speaker 7die of aids like leo dicaprio maybe something like that right yeah because that's the thing
Speaker 6about it like you don't have a lot of high profile like i'm trying to think of the last high profile person to die of aids you know like it just it like you but you had it happen and it was known gay people and so that wasn't a thing magic now all of a sudden you get money in here now magic's everywhere now people are down to listen and i'm curious about this part for you because you were in college i was in seventh grade and so that is a formative day for me because the idea of safe sex that's when the term really pops up is there
Speaker 7i'm laughing bo because trust me nobody got any that
Speaker 8weekend it was it was
Speaker 7a shutdown it was covid level shutdown like nope shop is closed and you know here i was i mean you were lucky in that you know you were young enough and again by the time you were kind of came of age like you know we had much better you know treatment and things and the kind of the fear went away and a little bit dangerously so but um like you know i'm like i'm a senior in college yeah and chilling effect doesn't even begin to describe the impact this had like nope like we it's funny because we you know it's we're coming off reagan conservative like things it's true we're coming off reagan conservative like things we're coming off reagan When I was in school, It wasn't like it was before or after. Right. And then this was like the final, you know, the curtains dropping on that. Like, no, like it took a long time for things to get back to normal. But, you know, the important thing was kind of culturally, nationally and around the world as as the treatments got better. You know, I go back to the thing that that George W. Bush, I think, doesn't get enough credit for was like he really was proactive in helping with with, you know, AIDS and HIV treatment in Africa. But, you know, the medicine and the technology became so great in advance that, you know, we don't think of it as a threat. It was like this cloud hanging over all of us. You know, it felt and again, magic made it seem like it wasn't just a threat for them. It was a threat to all of us. Now you could die from having sex. Yeah. I mean, think about the implications of that. That's the way we thought back then. You could have sex with the quote unquote wrong person and you could die.
Speaker 6Well, I mean, as if it'll feel like your shit's on fire wouldn't have been enough. Right. No, no, no, no, no. But for seventh grade, like now you're learning about all the things anyway. And on top of this. With the rap music, right. Sometimes misogyny leads to good things, and one of them is, you know, these trifling heifers might give you AIDS. Therefore, you might want to strap up, which, by the way, that you might want to strap up part is the only is the one that had like the more lasting effect. But like I think about people who are ice
Speaker 7cube, right, because I don't play sex without. Yeah. That's a great message. Yeah. Like there's a
Speaker 6whole there's a whole run of safe sex talk there. And I think it is entirely about you can't trust them. You never know what they might be out here doing. Look what look what just happened to magic. Right. Like you never know. But I do think like I talk to people who are my age. And of course, there's only last for so long. But with some people. But that really is a formative thing. Like the idea of, hey, condoms, take them with you everywhere. Da da da. Because prior to that, like, what's his name? David Crosby talks about the 60s as being in between the advent of the pill and the discovery of HIV, which is just seen as like the greatest time for sexual liberation. So once HIV and that becomes a thing now, it's like, OK, there's a whole nother discussion that we're having about this. Right. Like pregnancy is not worst case scenario anymore.
Speaker 7And I remember remember both the infamous Where's Daddy covers. Yeah. It's illustrated where, you know, they looked at all. All these, you know, kind of deadbeat dads in professional sports. You know, the cover was this little black kid staring up at the camera and the headline was Where's Daddy? And but I remember one of the things I was disappointed in. It was like, none of y'all listen to magic. Y'all out here having sex without condoms. Like that was kind of to me the undercurrent of that story, because this is maybe three or four years after magic's announcement. And I'm like, you guys are still out here having sex without condoms. Yeah. You know, like in addition to this, there's potential that you could get HIV or AIDS.
Speaker 6But unprotected sex is a drug and not everybody can do a little bit of it. That is what we've learned. Like when you when you when you see them cats turn up and putting up putting up them big numbers, putting up them triple doubles. You just realize, man, hey, man, some cats, some people just can't say no. You know, and just like you, as you said, magic, magic had that effect on me. Right. I've I've I've been I guess it started off with the magic part. But I say I've been running this contraceptive project for a very long time. It's been it's been remarkable. I'm completely successful. But you mentioned something earlier. We both talked about this is the idea of like HIV is a gay disease and magic kind of took away that perception. But it is very interesting to me that magic removed that perception and they really kindly only needed him to do that for a little while. And I say that because I don't know if you watch television and if you watch anything that involves true crime or murder, maybe run into commercials. um for the hiv drugs and if all i knew about hiv was from watching them commercials it looks like a gay disease to me it's always a couple of dudes holding hands looking at the sunset right magic magic in a lot of ways i think was the man for the time right and the perfect symbol that was necessary for a level of progress and then society in a lot of ways caught up such that you did not need there to be a straight face to get people to be concerned about the disease anymore well part
Speaker 7of it was that you know and this kind of gets back to misogyny like women are at greater risk from getting it from a man than a man would be from unprotected sex with a woman right and and still the greatest threat to a man you know unprotected anal sex is is the greatest risk to a man yes right so um you know it's so the nature of those commercials is that they're not going to be able to get people to be concerned about the disease right and and still the greatest threat to a man you know unprotected anal sex is is the greatest right like this is still the the greatest risk of passing this disease is is unprotected sex with men but women are at risk too and and i think they should kind of emphasize that more yes right and and and you know it a lot of this contraception or you know it's not just contraceptive safe sex i guess um should be aimed at women because they they have more to gain they're more at risk yes you know from having unprotected sex well
Speaker 6then the vehicle to drive that message is just a dollop of homophobia that gets dropped in there right
Speaker 7nobody's ever like
Speaker 6he could be on intravenous drugs no no no no no no no he could
Speaker 7be on the download that's
Speaker 6that's that one that's the one that makes the tv shows that's the one right that they talk about on the morning radio is that one right there nobody's like yo you checking for tracks no no no that's not what they're going for um as we wrap this up you mentioned this about magic and i said before we thought he might be dead in a year we certainly didn't expect that 35 years later the magic would still be alive but as you said not just alive thriving this is this has been quite the american success story so
Speaker 7one of the things so i i i had spent some time with magic that summer he came to washington dc i was intern at the post i wrote around with him and i had all this material for a big story and um my boss george solomon said and save it i'd written like two stories already and i had like i got this big feature he said and save it for the daily northwestern as he told me so actually i commandeered our feature our midweek feature section that we did our magazine within the newspaper and so i just dropped it all and that story ran on november 6th 1991 but in the story he talked about um you know he was already starting to think about life post you know career and uh you know he he had obviously big business aspirations but one of the things he wanted to do was to uh host a talk show you know and you know obviously he was thinking about the dream team magic was really the one recruiting larry bird was kind of like i don't know michael jordan was kind of like i don't know magic was like no guys we got to do this he really wanted this right that was the one thing missing he had not wanted to do this one an olympic gold medal so he was a driving force behind that and so one of the things when you know he made the announcement the next day i was thinking oh my god he's not going to get to play in the olympics he's not going to get to do this and do that so obviously he gets the gold medal with the olympics he has the talk show didn't go so well but he has a talk show it did lead to one moment the the premiere of his talk show the magic hour winnie houston comes out and sings if it's magic acapella and that is an incredible moment in television the show overall you know it's an incredible moment in television and it's an incredible moment in television and it didn't work but just for that moment alone but i was just happy that he got to do something that he dreamed of and that's why i say looking forward it's such a great story of like this was not the end of any of everything that he talked about in that article with me and the kind of the future that he envisioned for himself all came true despite having what we thought at the time was you know the worst possible news so you know if there's gonna be a takeaway from this like don't be deterred um from anything don't don't let anything stop because he certainly didn't let you know this stop him this diagnosis uh stop him from achieving everything he wanted and then some and then next thing you know i was at a thing you know there was like a 20 year they celebrated the 20 year anniversary of the announcement um you know and all laker teammates were there and jerry buss and jerry west were all there they had it at staples center and so it became it's it's we never imagined bo that that date november 7th would be something to celebrate rather than you know we would mourn uh and and have sad thoughts about that so that's that's the incredible triumph of that and and hopefully the takeaway from this story all right j.a adande my man i appreciate you man and uh and you know speaking of if it's magic and stevie you know i love your episode uh with spencer talking about the 50 year anniversary of uh songs in the key of life and i was fortunate enough to catch it in paris and one great thing about this boat like so my algorithm has been filled with stevie wonder content on instagram ever since and it's just such a joyous hate free section of the internet so let's celebrate stevie and just kind of the joy and the wonder and the community that he creates through his genius and his music yeah
Speaker 6man i appreciate you brother and ladies and gentlemen thanks so much for joining us here on the right time we do this four days a week ryan brumley had everything behind the scenes thank you sir hit the voicemail line three two three five nine six seven seven six seven remember follow the right time subscribe like rate us review us five stars you only give us four stars i'm inclined to believe you are a hater and we'll talk to you guys in a couple of days Take it easy.
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