Magic: The Life of Earvin 'Magic' Johnson

Raul Barrigon

Staff Writer

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 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.

Earvin 'Magic' Johnson drives to the basket to make a layup shot over Blair Rassmussen of the Denver Nuggets during their NBA Pacific Division basketball game on 21st November 1990 at The Forum arena in Inglewood. The Lakers won the game 141 - 121. (Photo by Stephen Dunn/Allsport/Getty Images)

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.

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