One of the most influential players in the history of professional basketball is ready to walk — make that dribble — down memory lane. On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, Magic Johnson, sometimes on the verge of tears, reminisces about his last conversation with his mentor, L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss, in a hospital room hours before his 2013 death. He recalls telling the world that he was HIV positive at a press conference in 1991, and stepping away from his towering career as a Laker. And he talks about building his company, Magic Johnson Enterprises, which is estimated to be worth $1 billion. He holds in his palm an empire of businesses that includes part-ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers and an infrastructure firm that’s renovating LaGuardia Airport.
Johnson discusses all of these moments and more in the four-part docuseries “They Call Me Magic,” which premieres on Apple TV Plus on April 22. Oddly, it’s not the only Magic project in the marketplace right now. There’s also “Winning Time,” HBO’s series about the Showtime era of the Lakers, the team’s golden age, which coincided with his tenure. Johnson, who says he has no interest in watching “Winning Time,” is baffled that neither HBO nor the show’s creative executives sought participation from him or his teammates.
“First of all, you can’t do a story about the Lakers without the Lakers,” says Johnson, 62. “The real Lakers. You gotta have the guys. There’s no way to duplicate Showtime. I don’t care who you get.” Now Johnson is revved up. “So let’s go through it like this,” he says, leaning forward and scooting to the edge of his seat on a private hotel patio.
“Showtime started on the court — just unbelievable,” Johnson says. “We changed basketball!” There was a time before his arrival in the NBA when the primetime networks debated whether to air games at all because they were so scarcely watched. But that wasn’t the case with his Lakers: “Fast-breaking entertainment” is how he describes their game. “Every time out, Paula Abdul and them beautiful Laker Girls came out on that floor. First time ever. Dancing girls! And they turnt it out. All the latest music, and all the latest dances. You can’t duplicate that. We entertain you. Show you moves that you’ve only seen in the nightclub. Then you move up to the Forum Club.”
Only the lucky few would get past the velvet rope. Johnson grins, thinking about the VIP lounge tucked inside the Lakers’ arena, filled with “the best, sexiest, hottest people in Los Angeles,” he says. “Because it’s a club in a club, right? All the celebrities, all the beautiful people move up to the Forum Club. Every team that came in town: ‘Please, Magic!’ In the third quarter. ‘We gotta get in the Forum Club.’ I said, ‘We still playing the game!’”
Moments from Johnson’s glory days are interspersed throughout “They Call Me Magic.” Some of the archival material — such as the coin flip that gave the Lakers the first pick in the 1979 NBA draft (over the Chicago Bulls); they chose a 19-year-old college student from Lansing, Mich., named Earvin “Magic” Johnson — he’d never seen before. And he never would have had he not agreed to be interviewed for Michael Jordan’s docuseries “The Last Dance.”
The success of that 2020 sports retrospective from ESPN Films and Netflix — which premiered during the early stay-at-home days of the pandemic and inspired obsessive viewership — had networks and streamers all over town knocking on Johnson’s door. “Everybody called,” he says. “Everybody put in a bid. And then NBC got serious. And Apple said, ‘No way.’ I love their approach, because they waited. They came in and said, ‘This is over.’”
In person, Johnson is imposing. At 6-foot-9, his stature only reinforces the perception that he’s larger than life. At SXSW, where the first episode of “They Call Me Magic” premiered on March 12, he took the stage in an olive-green suit and crisp white sneakers, engaging the crowd with a charisma that few politicians could match. He’s a workaholic who gets his start at 4 a.m., hits the gym for two hours and rolls into the office by 6. During our conversation, he lights up at the mention of the Dodgers having just signed former Atlanta Braves first baseman Freddie Freeman to a six-year, $162 million deal. “We always look to win,” he says. “We care about our fans, and Dodger Stadium is going to be rocking all season long.”
Johnson is a vivid storyteller, and it helps that his spectacular life has allowed him to cross paths with so many famous people. He recalls how as a young athlete he traveled with the Jackson 5 on three of their tours. “Michael Jackson, he was such a perfectionist,” Johnson says. “You know, see him look in a mirror for two hours, working on his moves without his brothers.” Johnson urged Jackson to return the favor by coming to a Lakers game, and he reluctantly agreed even though he didn’t think the fans would let him watch in peace. “He was right,” Johnson says. “He sat down; people went crazy. They were running from upstairs, the sides. We had to stop the game to get him out.”
After Johnson joined the Lakers as a point guard, he led the team to five NBA championships and quickly became the highest-paid player in sports — in 1981, he signed an eye-popping 25-year contract for $25 million. And he leveraged his fame as a basketball superstar to become a mogul. Johnson says he lives in Hollywood — he resides in Beverly Hills with his wife, Cookie — but that he’s never wanted to “become Hollywood.” Nevertheless, he counts movie stars such as Samuel L. Jackson as his friends, has produced a handful of films, hosted a short-lived late-night talk show in 1998 and has established a model, followed by everyone from Shaquille O’Neal to LeBron James, for acquiring power in sports and then translating that to entertainment and business.
“Bear in mind, we did not represent athletes,” says Michael Ovitz, who co-founded CAA and signed Johnson in 1988. “Taking on Earvin was unique to us. To put this in perspective for you, Magic Johnson was probably the single most popular being in Los Angeles.” They devised a strategy for Johnson that went beyond endorsements. “The goal was to get him equity in businesses.” Some of Johnson’s early ventures included buying a controlling interest in PepsiCo.’s Washington, D.C., bottling operation in 1990 and partnering with Howard Schultz to launch Urban Coffee Opportunities in 1998, making Johnson the owner of 125 Starbucks stores in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
“They Call Me Magic” draws from an A-list roster of talking heads who recall Johnson’s professional and personal heights: former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci (who led the National Institutes of Health’s efforts against HIV during a time when contracting the virus was considered a death sentence), NBA competitors Jordan and Larry Bird, Snoop Dogg and Spike Lee. Also interviewed are Cookie; his children, Andre, EJ and Elisa; and his parents, Christine and Earvin Sr. And while Johnson didn’t ask for creative control of the series, he did have a hand in selecting director Rick Famuyiwa, whose 2002 rom-com “Brown Sugar” he executive produced.
Famuyiwa, a “religious” Lakers fan, looked to Johnson’s 1992 memoir “My Life” while preparing to shoot “They Call Me Magic.” “It’s definitely a different voice,” he says of the 30-something Johnson preserved in the book. “The voice you hear now is of someone who’s looking back and taking full stock of their life, versus that first autobiography, which was really immediate, a person who wasn’t sure if that was going to be the end of it.”
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush recruited Johnson for a seat on the National Commission on AIDS. “Some people told me, Earvin, it’s not what you think it is,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what they were talking about. Until I saw it. In Boston.” Just months after joining the commission, Johnson traveled to Boston to visit a “beautiful” and “brand-spanking-new” HIV and AIDS hospice. But as he remembers it, the building was almost empty of patients due to the layers of bureaucracy involved.
Source: https://variety.com/2022/tv/features/magic-johnson-lakers-they-call-me-magic-1235224091/
