1BOOM, BABY
By March 1990, Jerry West had had a good long look at Magic Johnson, had witnessed it all up close, first the transformation Johnson had brought to the Los Angeles Lakers a decade earlier, and then all that followed: the championships, the MVP seasons and performances, the virtual onslaught of victory and success, the building-pumping celebrations at timeouts after every fast-break run, the high fives and hugs and general glee that shook both Los Angeles and the National Basketball Association out of the deep slumber and ennui that had settled over the American pro game like a blanket in the late 1970s.
All that Jerry West had witnessed unfolded in sharp contrast to his own Hall of Fame career that saw West and his Lakers teammates suffer through the agony of seven straight losses in the league’s championship series between 1962 and 1970 only to finally succeed on the eighth attempt, a seemingly joyless victory in 1972 that had been met by numbness and confusion and conflict in the locker room afterward.
With all the winning in the 1980s, Johnson had helped a bit to shoo away the pesky ghosts and demons that for far too long occupied the belfry of Jerry West’s personal torment. Johnson and West had quietly formed a partnership over the years, the executive’s agony balanced by Johnson’s great joy and success.
That contrast, in part, was the reason this writer had traveled that March of 1990 to interview West over two days in a hotel room in Dallas, where West had gone to scout college basketball talent in search of the next good player for the team.
By that time, West, the self-appointed guardian of the Lakers, was on his way to becoming what many considered the game’s top front office figure. West “could spot talent through the window of a moving train,” L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray would declare during the era.
West, indeed, was a manic genius and a nearly impossible perfectionist. He could see so many things in the furious action on the court and was known as an “active” general manager, the kind who never hesitated to address problems he saw with Lakers players. Just how “active” was West? One former Lakers head coach, Del Harris, explained in a 2004 interview that the team was never really his, but Jerry’s.
During the Showtime era, West the GM was both vigilant and instructive with so many players, but he revealed over that weekend in 1990 that over the years he had hardly ever said a word to Johnson about his play and even then only if he thought Johnson was becoming “predictable.”
The great Magic predictable? You might just as well have accused Marilyn Monroe of lacking her steamy charm.
At that moment in 1990, Magic Johnson was perhaps the sporting world’s most widely admired and successful star. Over the years, it seemed that just about everybody had come to love Magic. And that had included a high school junior in Wilmington, North Carolina, way back in 1980, by the name of Mike Jordan.
Yes, as a teen, the once and future king of basketball had had one true idol—Magic Johnson. Even then, Jordan’s competitive nature rendered him absolutely unsparing in his disdain for rivals and other players. Yet Jordan tried to mimic so many things he saw in Johnson’s play that for a time he even fancied himself a point guard, attempting in high school practice each day the no-look passes and brilliant fast-break play of his idol.
How great was the infatuation? Jordan gave himself the nickname “Magic Mike” and by his senior year in high school had a vanity plate by that same title for his very first car. Jordan drove all over his hometown proudly telling the world that he was Magic Mike. Yet when Jordan got to the University of North Carolina as a freshman the next fall, coach Dean Smith promptly advised him to lose the nickname.
There was only one Magic, Smith supposedly explained.
Jordan, of course, went on from there to become what fans worldwide would call “the God of basketball.”
At times over his career, Johnson himself had occupied a similar roost in the hierarchy of the sport. In fact, his accomplishments and infectious style of play defined the great Showtime era of Lakers basketball with a team that so often seemed to play beyond the reach of everybody else. As such, Johnson came to occupy a status as the game’s last great analog star, one who finished his playing career in the early 1990s only to watch the digital world rapidly overtake the game as well as its messaging and marketing, just in time to lift up that kid from Wilmington who once considered himself Magic Mike.
These circumstances help explain a belief among many serious students of the game as well as among many, many fans that Magic Johnson, along with Jordan and others, should be in the conversation as perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time.
“I never quite understood why he’s never been involved in the conversations for the greatest player ever, what he brought to the game,” remarked longtime NBA coach Alvin Gentry, a comment echoed many times over by numerous veteran observers of American pro basketball.
The argument goes that if Michael Jordan is indeed the so-called God of Basketball, at the very least, Johnson is the Other God, one who accomplished so much in addition to presiding over what many consider to be the greatest era in the history of the game, the 1980s.
For others, such lofty status seems an odd place for a player who, by his own admission, never jumped all that high; who was considered to have a suspect jump shot; who by far prized winning over scoring or acrobatics, who came into the NBA with what many experts considered a weak left hand, a serious limitation for anyone attempting to survive as a point guard in the league, especially a tall person with an impossibly high dribble ripe for the plucking.
“I still had doubts about myself,” Johnson himself would confess, looking back on his early days as a rookie in 1979. “I wasn’t sure I could make it in this league.”
Which, in turn, helps explain why that March of 1990, long after he had seen it all, Jerry West revealed that he wasn’t convinced in 1979 that the Lakers should have taken Magic Johnson as the number one overall pick in the NBA draft.
Speaking for recorded interviews, West said Johnson’s great run of leadership and success would remind him of a conclusion about scouting talent: You could see what players could do on the floor, their physical capabilities, but you couldn’t always read their hearts.
“I thought he would be a very good player,” West admitted. “I had no idea he would get to the level that he did. No idea. But, see, you don’t know what’s inside of people. Physically, you can see what they can do on the court. The things you could see you loved. But you wondered where he was going to play in the NBA, how he would be able to do it.”
That comment then pretty much summed it up: Earvin “Magic” Johnson was defined as that unseen quality, that great mystery of human performance that made the business of talent scouting seem so uncertain.
West paused a moment in the interview, searching for an answer to his own question about Johnson’s greatness, then added, “Through hard work, he just willed himself to take his game to another level. I don’t think anyone knew he had that kind of greatness in him. The athletic ability is the easiest thing to see, but it does not constitute what a great basketball player is.”
Asked to expound on greatness, West observed that while there were a number of very good players at any given time in pro basketball, truly great players could be counted on one hand.
Looking back on the 1980s, West said, “Obviously Magic Johnson is one of them. Larry Bird.
“Obviously Michael Jordan,” West added, then let the thought trail off from there.
The tremendous challenge to being a truly great player is hard for the public to understand or even see, West finally offered. “It is a burden.”
As for the nature of Johnson’s particular greatness, West said, “It’s like a macho thing. Magic Johnson had a macho-ness that came out in him, a desire that ‘No one is gonna beat me.’”
Johnson would display that quality night after night over many seasons, that vast intangible factor, prima facie evidence that he possessed perhaps the biggest heart in the history of a game of very big hearts.
The Scene
In explaining himself in 1990, Jerry West struggled with several observations to explain what exactly allowed Johnson to find greatness before finally settling on this: “When he was born somebody did sprinkle a little extra dust on him.”
Perhaps, then, that was it, the answer to the mystery, one that decades later would still stand as the best possible conclusion. Extra magical dust at birth, a supernatural influence of the highest order, falling all around a special child.
The record shows that Johnson was delivered into the world on August 14, 1959, a Friday, in Lansing, Michigan, the fourth of seven children and the youngest of three boys in the family of Earvin Sr. and Christine Johnson.
Maybe the supernatural influence came that weekend from the electrical storm and slashing rain that saw a tremendous bolt of lightning strike a massive transformer, resulting in a booming explosion that startled residents of the city and left many without power.
Maybe little baby Earvin had gotten an extra charge from a bolt of that lightning.
Or maybe it was the news story on the front page of the Lansing State Journal that very morning, about the birth of a chicken with three hearts.
After all, the child would one day earn the nickname Magic, so it stood to reason that his formula might include a little voodoo or a taste of the occult.
Another thought is that the timing of his arrival presented another strong indication of his impending stardom. That very weekend of Johnson’s birth, school officials in Lansing were hosting an open house at a brand-new version of Everett High School with its fancy 1950s state-of-the-art basketball gymnasium, a gym that would someday bear his name.
Understandably, baby Earvin couldn’t make an appearance to christen the gym that weekend. It would take fifteen years and a series of unexpected events before he showed up to make the hardwood there one of the hallowed sites in the history of American basketball.
No, the events of that day pose just one of the many mysteries of his great life, observed Lon Rosen, his longtime friend and agent. “For example, why was he, the third male child in the family, given the name of Earvin Johnson, Jr.? That name usually goes to the oldest male.”
Perhaps Earvin Sr. and Christine sensed that this gangly newborn was going to be something special, although that seems unlikely because the Johnsons adamantly considered each of their seven children special.
Actually, if you had to settle on one single thing that drove the life of Magic Johnson to astounding success, it might well be the scene at the hospital that day of the exhausted young mother, Christine, holding close the swaddled child, with his father, Earvin Sr., sitting dutifully, quietly, happily at her bedside.
One of the first things the nurses and staff had noticed about the mother was the smile, the dimples. Christine Porter Johnson had been gifted with a genuine and profound sweetness long steeped in abiding faith, the kind that calmed people in her presence and just about always summoned the better angels of their nature.
She loved to put people at ease, to project her genuine sense of caring, to allow the emotion of her religious devotion to flow with its quiet force. Neither did it hurt that she enjoyed a good laugh and a warm embrace. She had learned from a young age that life was dear and you had to hold on to it. After all, she had been hugged many times in her life by her own mother.
If there was something else that the staff noticed about Christine Johnson it was probably her regularity. She had pumped out son Quincy first in 1956, followed by baby Larry in 1957, then daughter Lily Pearl in 1958.
And then, right on cue, was this baby, Earvin Jr., in ’59.
It was the kind of output that had been prized by farm families for centuries, only Christine Johnson was no longer working the North Carolina soil where her family before her had toiled away in futility for decades.
At seventeen, she had watched her beloved mother, Mary, waste away with kidney disease until she finally passed at age forty-seven in late 1953, leaving Christine to raise her two younger siblings, circumstances that, as Christine would reveal later, led to her becoming a teenaged mother herself, just as her mother before her had done. It was so typical of the subsistence farm life, where so many women died young, either from childbirth or lack of medical care, circumstances that often doomed their daughters to become mothers too soon.
Christine’s mother, Mary Della Jenkins Porter, had lived a hard, short life as the wife of a sharecropper and tenant farmer. Yet her struggles against privation and poverty seemed in many ways to matter little because she met them with a faith and love of spiritual worship that she instilled in Christine and the rest of her large family, the kind of faith that had been passed down to her through the generations of a family that faced little but unrelenting misery decade after decade after decade, lives devoid of anything that resembled the sort of victory Christine’s baby Earvin would come to know.
Indeed, if there is any fact or theme that emerges from the study of Magic Johnson’s life and legacy, it is an indomitable spirit that stretches across the generations of his family all the way back to his great-great-great-grandfathers born in the 1830s in North Carolina in the times of slavery, a collective will that reveals Johnson’s story and that of his family to be one of the human spirit, a sustaining strength that allowed them to endure heartbreak and failure and calamity, sometimes of an epic nature.
The untimely passing of Christine’s own dear mother in 1953 had been one of those moments.
It wasn’t too long afterward that the tall, quiet soldier came into Christine’s life, when her cousin, who was stationed at a North Caro- lina army base, brought one of his buddies home one weekend.
Christine was soon intrigued by this shy stranger from Mississippi, a young man named Earvin Johnson. She would later confide that something about him made her feel sorry for him.
It seemed only a matter of months before he was out of the army and she had packed up and said goodbye to the farm life to head north with him to Lansing, Michigan, where he had the promise of a job in an auto plant. Soon it would seem like she had boarded a time machine that had whisked her away from the tenant farm life and into another universe, one with flush toilets and running water. It wasn’t long after that, she once recalled, that she was headed into her own crash course in motherhood.
Now, on this Friday in August 1959, her husband sat beside her in the hospital room, his joy tempered only by his thoughts of how he was going to feed his beautiful young family. After all, he had fathered three other children before he met and married Christine, and those children would remain a part of his life, often coming from their lives in the South to stay with the Johnson family in their cramped Michigan home.
With all that was to unfold in the coming years Earvin Sr. would come to be known in the Lansing community as a man of few words, offering a silence that many considered off-putting, creating at times a sense that he was ill at ease or even perhaps possessed of contempt.
To his family, however, he was a man of a steady but low-key joy and humor, a father willing to work two jobs while starting a trash-hauling business on the side to provide for his children.
“Once you’ve met Earvin Sr., you don’t know if you’ve met him,” a family friend would later explain to Inside Sports magazine.
“He’s an old-school, southern guy, born in Mississippi,” explained Greg Eaton, a Lansing businessman and family friend, in a 2020 interview. “He came here as a young man. I think he got here when he was around twenty. I was in high school when they came, that was 1955. Then, in ’58, I worked in the Fisher Body plant with him. Hardworking guy. He got hired and never left there. In ’55, General Motors, Oldsmobile … you could come here, walk across the street and get a job. Jobs were that available then.
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