Twice in my life, sports have made me cry.
The most recent was in January when Kobe Bryant died.
The first time was Nov. 7, 1991.
That’s when I was an eighth-grader at Newcomb Middle School in Long Beach, Calif., and arrived home from school to see my first hero was retiring and — in my mind — would not be with us much longer. That day, when Magic Johnson announced his retirement from the NBA after announcing he was HIV-positive, I broke out into tears for many reasons.
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One reason was that in the early 1990s, many of us did not know people could actually live long after testing HIV-positive.
Second, at that point in my life, I’d never been to an NBA game, and that was the only thing my father, who at the time was battling his own demons with addiction, had promised me he’d do: take me to see Magic play in person.
It was that caustic cocktail of hurt, disappointment, anger and rage that sent a 13-year-old me into a tailspin. It’s why the next day at school, I cried at my locker when someone made a joke about him. I was crushed. I was angry at my father. I was angry at HIV, or whatever it was in my mind. I was mad at the jokes people had already begun to make about my hero.
And on top of that, I would never see Magic play in person.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became a Magic Johnson superfan, but as a kid, I was willing to fight on the playground to defend his honor and good name. Maybe it’s when I saw him and the Lakers beat the Celtics for the title in 1985. Or maybe it was watching the baby sky hook to win a key playoff game in Boston in 1987. But as a kid in Southern California, there was no bigger star than Magic, and it felt like they never lost a game I watched. (I developed that theory when I didn’t watch the series-deciding game in the Lakers’ loss to Houston in 1986).
But my desire to see Magic play in person is why I’m a sports journalist. Remember, almost all of us started as fans of someone or some team or sport. For me, that was Magic Johnson. And there was no bigger fan than me.
My first connections to sports were the Lakers, Dodgers and Raiders. They were all in Los Angeles, and as a kid growing up in South Central L.A., they were my early escape. Howie Long was my favorite Raider. Fernando Valenzuela was my favorite Dodger. But neither of them was Magic. Magic was the ultimate leader and seemed to rally everyone around him, a trait that could benefit anyone in any aspect of life. Magic’s smile was transcendent. Everyone loved him. He was a winner.
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Magic was everything I wanted to be. I read every article I could about him. I learned about his family and upbringing. I even wanted to attend Michigan State.
My love for Magic and the team came at a time when Michael Jordan was ascending. Jordan’s Bulls had beaten the Lakers in the 1991 NBA Finals, and many of my peers were suddenly Bulls fans. In our pickup games on the playground, starting in the mid-’80s, some of my friends had begun to say they wanted to be like Mike.
Me? I wanted to be a floor general. I wanted to direct and organize, which is not exactly how elementary school kids played. In the third grade, my first pair of name-brand shoes that I remembered were the purple-and-gold Converse Weapons. I wore them with everything, practiced no-look passes in them with my Magic Johnson Spalding basketball. To me, he was the greatest player of all time.
I’d read about Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain and George Mikan. I saw Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play, watched the smooth moves of James Worthy and loved how Byron Scott emerged from Inglewood to become a Laker.
None of them, however, was Magic, who had an exuberance for life and the game I hoped to one day apply to my life and career. He was the best player ever, no matter what anyone said.
My friends could have Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Isiah Thomas or David Robinson. I’d take Magic, who wasn’t the athletic freak that Jordan was or as boisterous as Charles Barkley. I barely remember seeing Magic dunk in games, and I figured I’d never be a dunker. But I could figure out how to make people better in all aspects of life, and Magic gave me a blueprint for how to live, even if I never grew to be 6-foot-9.
And if someday I could ever get close enough to Magic, I would tell him all about that and how he made me want to be great. All I had to do was get to a game, a camp, somewhere Magic might be.
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But there was a significant barrier between me and meeting Magic in my youthful mind: money.
If I was eating free lunch at school, there was no way I could afford a ticket to a Lakers game. But I desperately wanted to see Magic and the Lakers in person or attend one of those fancy basketball camps. So, I had to figure out how to get into games and somehow, someway, one day meet the greatest player I’d ever seen.
That’s when I began to explore ways I could get into the Fabulous Forum. I loved writing and pictures. I saw the photographers sitting on the baseline. I loved reading the likes of Doug Krikorian and Jim Murray and saw how they talked to players all the time and told stories.
That’s when I knew I wanted to be a sports journalist. It was all part of my goal to meet my hero.
That’s why I cried so much on Nov. 7, 1991. That’s why I cried in the days after the announcement. I didn’t know where I’d find my inspiration again. I thought it was only a matter of time before my hero was gone.
Of course, Magic is still with us, nearly 30 years after that sad day in November.
Along the way, I still was Magic’s biggest fan. I rooted for him during his short, ill-fated stint as Lakers coach in 1994. I even watched his late-night show, “The Magic Hour,” as if he was going to be the new Johnny Carson. Magic said on “The Arsenio Hall Show” that he listened to Luther Vandross. Guess who started going through his mother’s collection of Vandross cassettes and listening? That’s right: me.
As my career has progressed, I’ve met many of the athletes I admired growing up. I met Shaquille O’Neal (peep my Twitter profile picture). The same goes for Bryant, Barkley, Deion Sanders and many others. I’ve met some more than once. (Vlade Divac’s autograph was the first I ever got as a kid, and I still have it.) I’ve even met my favorite rapper of all-time, Ice Cube. I met Snoop Dogg when I was a teenager and my favorite member of Wu-Tang, Ghostface Killah.
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In many ways, this career has given me everything I dreamed of growing up.
But still, I haven’t met Magic. But I did get to see him play in person in 1996 with his traveling team in an exhibition game during Summer League in Long Beach. To this day, I’ve told my friends Magic is the only celebrity I would still be a complete fanboy over, and that’s true. That’s why the couple of times I’ve seen Magic in person (the last time being during Summer League in 2018), I’ve been paralyzed and could only give a head nod as he walked by.
How do you tell someone they meant so much to your childhood and your career? Someone who gave you joy even at the most discouraging of times? Maybe one day I will.
And if I do, I promise not to cry.
(Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images)
