[June 6th marks the NBA’s 75th birthday, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of basketball figures and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]
On genuine low
and high points for the legendary Lakers star, and what they both exemplify.
I’ve written
before, in
this post as well as in the chapter on AIDS epidemic histories and
literature in my
fourth book, that Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement of his
HIV-positive status marked a pivotal turning point in public conversations
about the disease. I certainly believe that’s the case (and am of course not
alone in arguing the point), but at the same time it’d be important not to
let a desire to consider the historical big picture lead us to skip too quickly
past what the moment meant for Johnson and his family. Even if we leave aside
the moment’s personal (such as Johnson’s subsequent confessions
of serial infidelity) and professional (his immediate, although not permanent, departure
from
the NBA) ramifications for Johnson, his wife Cookie, and their young
family, in 1991 HIV and AIDS were still (and understandably, given the statistics)
perceived as death sentences. While Johnson has been able to battle the disease
quite successfully (it seems) for the three decades since his announcement,
that subsequent history shouldn’t cloud our perspective on what his diagnosis
and situation meant, for him and everyone around him, in 1991. It was as
painful and frightening a moment as any faced by an American athlete or
celebrity in the era.
While Johnson’s
battle against that HIV diagnosis has continued for these 30 subsequent years,
his moves forward from that moment and toward another career high point began
much more rapidly than that. In 1994, less than three years after his
announcement, Johnson and his Johnson
Development Corporation announced their plan for Magic Johnson Theatres, a
line of movie theaters that would open in and provide entertainment options, as
well as jobs and revitalization, for urban communities. The first such theater,
the Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15, opened
in South Central Los Angeles in 1995; a second, the AMC
Magic Johnson Harlem 9, opened in New York in 2000, and more followed in
Cleveland, Atlanta, and other cities. While Johnson’s achievements will always
be defined first by his basketball stardom and successes, it’s fair to say that
on the court he was one of a number of great players, present and past (if a
unique one to be sure)—whereas his theaters represent a more distinctive and
singular vision and achievement, within their communities and in American
business overall. Although many of the theaters have changed ownership in the
decades since, they established
a new model for both locations and styles of movie theaters (and other
urban developments)—and in any case, as with Johnson’s HIV announcement,
subsequent events shouldn’t elide what this moment in Johnson’s life and career
meant at the time.
So for Johnson,
these two moments and stories reflect contrasting yet nearly concurrent low and
high points, a particularly striking spectrum in a life that’s been
consistently mercurial. If we take a step back and examine them in relationship
to the African American community, however, I would argue that they together
represent a period of extreme social and cultural shifts on both destructive and
productive levels. Johnson’s theaters offer one illustration among
many—alongside films like Boyz in the Hood (1991), New Jack City (1991), and Menace 2 Society (1993) and the explosion
in popularity of gangsta rap, among other examples—of how African American
urban communities were becoming central to American popular culture in the
1990s. Yet at the same time, such communities were facing significant new
threats, from the war on drugs and the rise
of mass incarceration to, yes, the AIDS epidemic; while the disease was
largely associated with gay communities at the time of Johnson’s announcement,
by the end of the 90s it would be just as fully linked to impoverished, and
often African
American, inner city communities. While Johnson’s personal battle with HIV
certainly differs from that communal epidemic, the presence in his life and
career of both that battle and an economic and cultural transformation of urban
spaces reflects a similar spectrum of danger and possibility for the African
American community in this same period.
Next bball story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other bball stories, histories, or contexts you’d share?
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