Magic Johnson: the NBA superstar who smashed HIV stigma – then built a huge fortune

On 7 November 1991, a press conference in Inglewood, California, brought America to a standstill. Against a black-draped backdrop, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and multicoloured tie, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, spoke calmly into a single microphone and told the world that he had been diagnosed with HIV.

Cameras flashed and reporters clamoured to ask questions, but Johnson, National Basketball Association (NBA) superstar and one of the world’s most revered athletes, appeared unfazed as he announced his immediate retirement. Had he grappled with his own mortality? When had he found out? How had he acquired the virus? What would he do next?

“I plan on going on living for a long time, bugging you guys like I always have,” he told reporters, his optimism surprising those who viewed his condition as a death sentence. “I guess now I get to enjoy some of the other sides of living.”

Today, sitting in his offices in California, in a brown executive chair, that famous, dimpled smile beaming down the camera over Zoom, Johnson finds it hard to fathom that this year marks three decades since his diagnosis. Now 61, he is one of those rare public figures who has redefined his purpose at different stages in life: first as an athlete, then as a public health advocate, and later as a successful businessman and philanthropist.

“As we talk today, right now, I’m thinking, ‘Wow’ – it’s been 30 years and I’m still here, healthy. Everything has gone right. There was one drug then, now we have 30-something drugs,” he says.

It was a seismic moment, not only in the history of basketball, but in the continuing war on HIV and Aids, as an athlete of Johnson’s stature vowed in public to raise awareness about the virus. And it has interesting parallels for today, when the world continues to battle another public health crisis.

Johnson has never watched a recording of that press conference. It was one of the hardest days of his life; he later disclosed he contracted HIV from unprotected sex. “I’m not a go-back person. I don’t live in the past,” he says. “I always live now and in the future. That’s who I am.”

But, as he remembers the period shortly after the diagnosis, he thinks of those he relied on. There was, of course, his wife, Cookie – the love of his life, whom he had met at college and had recently married. There were his teammates at the Los Angeles Lakers, who embraced him, and would go on to support him when he returned to play again, first as part of the 1992 Olympics “dream team” and then during another stint at the Lakers. The late actor Elizabeth Glaser, who herself contracted HIV after receiving a contaminated blood transfusion, encouraged his public advocacy. And the medical experts Dr David Ho and Dr Anthony Fauci assured him that he could go on to live a healthy life.

“Without those two,” he says. “I probably wouldn’t be here.

“At that time, when you got something like HIV, there were so many things I didn’t know, so they had to educate me about how the virus was going to act in my body, what I could expect. They calmed me down, because I was thinking I was going to die,” he says.

“They told me that the three-drug combination was going to save my life, and they were right.”

It was partly realising the public’s general ignorance about the virus that spurred him into a career of advocacy work. Johnson joined president George W Bush’s national Aids commission and then publicly quit after eight months, lambasting the president’s inaction.

It was sobering, says Johnson, to see Dr Fauci out front and centre again, during the Covid-19 pandemic. His public appearances always make Johnson smile, but his treatment by former president Donald Trump, who often outwardly shunned the country’s foremost infectious disease expert, was infuriating.

“A guy like myself swears by him,” he says. “But man, just to see him being disrespected and really just put over to the side ... I felt bad for him. He was put in a bad situation.”

For Johnson, seeing Fauci speak about a new epidemic while reflecting on the HIV crisis of the 1980s has been sobering – the racial disparities in American healthcare are stark. Just as Black Americans are disproportionately affected by HIV and Aids, so has Covid-19 killed at a racially disproportionate rate.

Johnson, who was vaccinated in public in April to help combat hesitancy over the jab, feels history repeating itself with a sense of personal sadness. “We’ve lost too many lives that we shouldn’t have lost with both Aids and Covid-19,” he says, but then he returns to that same sense of optimism. “I hope we can turn a corner.

“Are we where we’re supposed to be? No. We have a long way to go. Let’s just hope we get this one right, in the black and brown community, because we never really got HIV and Aids right.”

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Johnson grew up in the midwestern city of Lansing, the state capital of Michigan. As a boy, he practised basketball relentlessly, encouraged by his father, who worked grinding shifts at a local General Motors plant. He taught him the art of aggressive, fast-paced basketball, and how to read the game. At that time, in the 1970s, he idolised players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was playing for the Milwaukee Bucks, and Dave Bing, the Detroit Pistons’ point guard, who went on to become the city’s mayor in 2009. He dreamed of the NBA from a young age.

Aged 15, and with his talent being noticed locally, Johnson faced one of the first big crossroads in his life. Lansing, like most large cities in the midwest, was de facto segregated. He had always expected to go to his local high school on the city’s west side with its renowned basketball team. But instead, he was among Lansing’s first students to be bussed across the city to a majority white high school, Everett, on the south side.

Initially opposed to the idea, Johnson reflects on it now as one of the most important experiences of his life. “It taught me how to work alongside somebody who doesn’t look like me,” he says. “And what I would find out later is that is the way America is. That’s the country. Everything I’ve done in my lifetime after that involved whites. No matter where you turned, whether I was coached by one, whether they owned the team I played for, or the partnerships I was trying to create in business … everywhere you turned, it was somebody white in charge.”

The state-mandated integration of education brought its own tensions: playground fights and bullying. Tensions were also felt on the basketball court: Johnson recalls, in his 1992 autobiography, My Life, that some of his white teammates were initially reluctant to even pass him the ball. But sport also became a vessel to bring students together. And Johnson’s unique talent (it was while he was at high school that a local newspaper reporter coined his nickname), eventually brought the team a state championship in his final year.

His most virulent experiences with racism during childhood, however, came on trips down south to visit his grandparents in Mississippi. Johnson’s father didn’t fly, so the family would drive 900 miles (1,450km) on a two-day trip. He remembers in detail how his parents would pack food for the entire drive and eat on the side of the road rather than risk entering an unknown restaurant. His father would send his children in groups of three to use the bathroom at truck stops “to watch each other’s backs”.

Even after he joined the NBA, Johnson remembers entering a Mississippi diner on a family trip and being approached by a white server.

“We sit down and this guy says: ‘Boy, what you want?’” he recalls. “I was about to say something back, and my father grabbed me. He said to me: ‘Earvin, you’ve got to remember you’re in the south and that’s how they’re used to talking to Blacks.’ It was a real eye-opener.”

The Trump presidency made even more stark the entrenched legacy of racism and white supremacy all over the country, including in Michigan, where Johnson’s parents still live. Lansing itself has become a hotbed of extremist militia activity and Johnson watched in horror as armed conservative groups stormed into the state Capitol in April last year, protesting against Covid-19 lockdown laws. It was preceded by the 6 January insurrection in Washington DC, after which the FBI charged a number of militiamen with plotting to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

As the Lansing protests unfolded last year Johnson found himself sending messages to his parents and siblings to make sure they were OK: “To stay away and stay safe.”

“I think what it did was make people quiet about who they were going to actually vote for,” he says. “Even today, as we’re talking about it right now, I still can’t believe all the events that happened within a year. It’s just … it’s not America.”

It’s certainly not the America that Magic Johnson came to embody during his heyday with the LA Lakers throughout the 80s.

This was the “Showtime” era when the Lakers reignited the NBA with a brand of fast-paced, flamboyant ball play that won them five championships. At the centre was Johnson, the tallest point guard in NBA history (2.06 metres; 6ft 9ins), whose adaptability, court vision and creativity fundamentally transformed the position.

He lights up describing the buzz of it. The trick shots, the no-look passing, the celebrity fans and the Playboy bunnies. “Everybody who was somebody during the 80s had to be at the Forum for a Lakers game, because it was the place to be,” he says. “It was everything rolled into one. That’s what made Showtime.”

But his professional career was also defined by a bitter rivalry with the Boston Celtics’ star player Larry Bird, who had been his competitor since college. The two contested back-to-back NBA finals in 1984 and 1985, their differing personas – Bird, the insular, precision shotmaker and Johnson the flamboyant superstar – making the rivalry all the more intense.

Racial dynamics also played a part in the way some viewed their opposition (Bird is white). “It was right in front of our faces, you couldn’t miss it,” Johnson says, laughing. When the Lakers would travel to Boston, Johnson recalls, some Black residents of the city would approach him and say they were backing the Lakers over their local team. “We can’t be cheering for Boston, those white guys,” he recalls them saying.

Yet despite the rivalry, Johnson and Bird eventually became close friends, so the story goes, after Bird’s mother cooked Johnson lunch during the filming of a 1985 Converse shoe advert starring them both. Bird was one of the first NBA players Johnson called to inform him of his HIV diagnosis.

So, are they still in touch? “We don’t have to stay in touch with each other, that’s not what we do,” he says, describing a friendship forged in unique circumstances. “We see each other at events. Larry is a quiet guy and wants a quiet life. And I’m this guy who is completely the opposite. But we have this incredible relationship that when we see each other you’d think we’d been talking every day.”

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During his 1991 press conference Johnson also made clear that his aspirations in business meant he simply had to go on living. He wanted to own his own NBA franchise and had harboured a desire to make and create wealth from a young age.

His career in business did not begin in earnest until his second retirement in the mid-90s. He started comparatively small, with a minor investment in the LA Lakers that has since ballooned into a large investment portfolio, centred around sport teams in Los Angeles.

He now holds stakes in the LA Dodgers baseball team, the women’s basketball team LA Sparks and the Major League Soccer club Los Angeles FC.

Johnson was instrumental in bringing LeBron James to the Lakers in 2018, and part of his pitch to James was that James would be able to use the city as a base to further his business interests, which now include his own media company and investments in sports clubs, including Liverpool Football Club.

Rumours swirl that Johnson’s wealth now exceeds $1bn. He is bashful, however, when I ask about this and says only: “I’m happy I’ve got a great life and that my kids are going to be fine.”

Related: Magic Johnson: 20 years on from an All-Star game that changed basketball

He is less coy, though, when describing the reason he sought wealth, and was not content with the riches of his earnings as a player.

“We, as Black people, had never really understood generational wealth and passing that wealth on,” he says. “We’re finally starting to understand that.

“It empowers our community … now these kids dream that they can become not only a basketball player or a football player, but they can become a businessman. So that’s what’s important, that we have power and that we have a seat at the table.”