What Johnson did for Abdul Jabbar, he did for the Lakers and, ultimately, for the entire NBA. Competitively, his Lakers and Bird's Celtics were a matchup for the ages, and one that providentially took place in two large television markets. Moreover, before anyone else did, he saw the genius in the NBA's attempt to… Read more

It is a vast story now, sliding inexorably toward the epic. When Johnson announced on November 7, 1991, that he had contracted the human immunodeficiency virus, the apparent cause of AIDS, he first let Magic do the talking. It was an up performance. He even spoke vaguely of beating the disease, which is plainly… Read more

No, the people will line up, all decorous and stolid, Christmas carols ringing out of the walls behind them. The signing will be at a suburban bookstore, just up the block from an eightplex movie house that is not a theater, not by a damn sight. "I'm just glad to be home," he will tell the local press, who love him.… Read more

The good life was a perquisite of his new station. At first, liberated L.A. amazed him. "I mean, you had women with no panties. Women with women," he recalls. However, he soon lost whatever inhibitions he had brought with him, or (more likely) he simply parked them with Earvin and let Magic be Magic. The Lakers became… Read more

"If you're truthful with yourself, you can sleep good," he says. "You don't have to worry about anything or any skeletons in [the] closet. I'm not worried about any of that stuff. I've never been a worrier, you know? If something's going to happen, it's going to happen, you know? I keep praying at night, then… Read more

"When it was time for them to go . . . because I'm a man, I couldn't sleep with any of them. I couldn't sleep with nobody but Cookie. So I said, you know, 'You got to go,' because I was, like, I didn't trust them, you know? So they was, like, 'Oh, you kicking me out?' I said, 'Yeah, you know I told you that before.'… Read more

His professional success, however, was immediate and remarkable. It is now beyond cliché to say that Johnson (along with Bird) helped resuscitate professional basketball, which nearly drowned in the late 1970s, due to public apathy and a spate of nasty drug scandals. When Johnson entered the game, in 1979, he was a… Read more

It is a vast story now, sliding inexorably toward the epic. When Johnson announced on November 7, 1991, that he had contracted the human immunodeficiency virus, the apparent cause of AIDS, he first let Magic do the talking. It was an up performance. He even spoke vaguely of beating the disease, which is plainly… Read more

It could not go on, this bow-tight interplay between two incompatible personas. Earvin could not function credibly as a kind of free-floating alibi for Magic's lifestyle, and Magic was not willing to submit to Earvin's control. The knowledge that the other existed made each of them insecure. In basketball, for… Read more