Not the one you think.
by Vincent Thomas / @vincecathomas
My first vivid sports memory involved the Lakers and they have remained my favorite team, in any sport, for the last 25 years of my life. The Showtime Lakers were my squad, so Magic was my dude. I have never rooted for an athlete with as much passion as I rooted for Magic. It was that young-kid, “nothing else matters,” berserk kinda passion. This makes me a bit biased when it comes to anything that has to do with Magic. But, as you grow up, hopefully you get more rational about hoops and this should especially be the case as a journalist covering basketball. What I’ve always thought was irrational, though, is how people (especially my generation) think there is not a valid argument for any player, other than Michael Jordan, as the “greatest of all-time.” Four men are in that discussion — MJ, Magic, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Russell. In SLAM’s March issue (the one with Brandon Jennings on the cover) I posited my rational, somewhat objective case for one of them. Here it is…
***
Magic Johnson is the greatest basketball player of all time. Wait! Before you scoff and flip to another story—or, even worse, cancel your SLAM subscription—based on an assertion that, I’m sure, some of you view as patently absurd, give me a second to explain.
Michael Jordan is, undeniably, the best basketball player to ever put on a pair of shorts and play organized basketball. No arguments here on that one, OK? But there is a difference between T
he Best and The Greatest. Did anyone ever play the game at higher and simultaneously more accomplished levels (better) than Jordan? No. Has there ever been a player who had a broader and more active impact on the game’s progression on and off the court (greater) than Jordan? To most of you, definitely not.
But screw you, I think Magic Johnson is the greatest athlete to play organized basketball. His impact, influence and excellence are more varied, broad and dynamic than all of the other greats, Jordan included. At the very least, his career presents an interesting argument.
Let that marinate for a while. We’ll get back to it. But before we do, we need to rewind.
It sounds weird anytime you hear Magic called “Earvin,” doesn’t it? Even though “Magic” is his nickname, it feels like we should put his birth name in quotes, like “Earvin” Magic Johnson. This stems from Fred Stabley Jr, a sportswriter for the Lansing State Journal. As a 15-year-old martian, on his way to leading Everett High School to the first of back-to-back state titles, Magic dropped a 36-16-15 gem that hypnotized Stabley into calling him “Magic.” Years later, during his rookie season in the NBA, Magic was describing what it was like when he got out on the break with the Lakers. When we’re rolling and the break is going,” he said. “I guess it looks like I am performing magic out there.” You ain’t lyin’.
Everything that took place in Magic’s formative life crested in the 1979 NCAA Championship game, when Magic led the Michigan State Spartans to the title game against Larry Bird and his mid-major Indiana State Sycamores. The Spartans won in front of a record-setting television audience. The hype and build-up for that game and the subsequent buzz set the foundation for the Final Four that we know now, the second biggest sporting event in the country after the NFL’s Super Bowl. As Seth Davis’ recent book so aptly coined it, that game was “When March Went Mad.”
Los Angeles was next to go mad. Magic took L.A. by storm. He was perfect for a city like Los Angeles that is defined by Hollywood, which values celebrity above all else.
“When he arrived in L.A., that’s when everything changed,” recalls Pat Riley, the guy who coached Magic to four of his five championships with the Lakers. “He was the flash point. He was a transformative figure in L.A. and remains one to this day. Back then…I mean, the Lakers organization had great players before—Wilt [Chamberlain], Jerry [West], Elgin [Baylor], Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar], but Magic transcended everybody. You could feel it. He was like the Pied Piper. He brought this incredible charisma and unorthodox talent. He changed the NBA and he changed basketball in L.A.”
The current L.A. is an unabashed Lakers town, the only city with multiple pro sports teams where basketball reigns supreme; it’d be this way if they had an NFL team, too. But it wasn’t always like this. Kareem’s Lakers were a boring, early round-exiting snore-fest that a town caffeinated on celebrity wasn’t enthused about. Magic changed that for good. At Magic’s peak, he was probably the celeb of all celebs in a city and state full of celebs. (As Richard Hoffer put it in his 1990 Sports Illustrated profile: “This town is comically blasé about celebrity. There’s just too much of it for people to take it seriously…But, here comes Magic, and Le Dome’s patrons, all true Angelenos, glance up and see six feet nine inches of maximun celebrity ambling their way. There is a time to be blasé (almost always) and a time to be slack-jawed (now!). They give him a standing ovation.”) In fact, after Magic turned the Lakers into “Showtime”—and he took his kilowatt smile and no-look passes to all the Western Conference cities two and three times a year—he altered basketball’s popularity West of the Mississippi, in general. The reason why you always see annoying purple and gold fans cheering the Lakers in their opponent’s arena is because, back in the ‘80s, Magic-induced Laker mania spread across the country. Even if Portland and Seattle already had die-hard fans, Showtime brought in casual fans who morphed into die-hard fans.
Magic’s first, and truly signature pro performance (and maybe the signature performance of his whole career) was the final game of his rookie season, with the Lakers, up 3-2, staring down the Philadelphia 76ers for the 1980 NBA title. One problem. Magic and his Lakers were at the Spectrum in Philly, but Kareem was back in L.A., nursing a gimpy left ankle. The thinking was that the Captain-less Lakers would give it a valiant go in Game 6, inevitably lose and hope that Kareem would be ready for Game 7. Except, we all know what happened. The 20-year-old Magic jumped center against the 7-1 Caldwell Jones and outclassed the Sixers for the rest of the game as the Lakers won their rings.
Kareem summed it up well: “It reminded me of the kind of game Oscar Robertson used to play in college…when he used to do it all. Just one man playing against boys. Except that Earvin was just one boy playing against men.”
His 42-point, 15-rebound, 7-assist, 3-steal performance in that decisive game, as a rookie, playing five positions (Magic called it “C-F-G Rover”), was not only the greatest Playoff performance of all time, but the dawning of a new age in the NBA. To watch someone his size post up, drain jumpers, run the fast break, throw Houdini passes, block shots, bang with the big boys for boards and so thoroughly dominate practically every square inch of the court was modern basketball’s Big Bang. Chris Webber wouldn’t have dreamed of running a break, at his size, before Magic. There would have been no point-forward Scottie Pippen without Magic. Kevin Durant is 6-10 with shooting guard skills. There’s no Kevin Durant without Magic. Before the unimaginative minds of the Cleveland Cavaliers organization turned LeBron into a small forward, he was a new model do-everything-phenom who owed more to Magic Johnson than any other predecessor. And this revolution of pro basketball all started, in earnest, with this game, when Magic’s hyper-versatility was on grand display, dominating the decisive game of a championship series.
That ’80 championship was Magic’s fourth title (including his two state titles in high school and his NCAA Championship) in five years. This wasn’t lost on Paul Westhead, the Lakers coach at the time, who quipped, “Magic thinks every season goes like that—you play some games, win the title and get named MVP.”
What’s interesting about Magic’s pro career, though, is that it started out in “peak-and-valley” mode.
Magic injured his left knee early in his second season and came back about five weeks before the Playoffs were to begin. The Lakers kept rolling during his injury—with Kareem, Jamaal Wilkes and Norm Nixon, it wasn’t like L.A. was a team full of scrubs—but without the buzz. When Magic returned, the cameras started flashing again and it was a huge media story. However, the squad was a bickering mess and got bounced in the first round by Houston.
Aside from all of this, Magic was beginning to feud with Westhead about how the offense should be run. Magic was so used to having the ball in his hands and orchestrating everything that sharing those duties with Nixon (especially while running the fast break) killed him. After a heated exchange early in the ’81-82 season, Magic told reporters he wanted to be traded. Westhead was fired instead. Magic was now a “coach killer.” Magic, perhaps the most beloved of all the NBA greats at the time, was booed at arenas for weeks after this.
The silver lining is that the Lakers inserted Riley as coach. Soon, Magic and his teammates made up. That sounds weird, doesn’t it? I mean, this is Magic we’re talking about, a guy up there with Bill Russell as the greatest teammate ever. It took him two years to get there, but from ’82 on, you couldn’t find a better, more influential, more motivational, more inspiring, more caring teammate in the League. Because Kareem was such an introvert and Magic was such a people person, it didn’t take long for him to assume the reins and become (here comes another superlative) one of, if not the, greatest leader in NBA history.
Present-day Lakers general manager and former Magic teammate Mitch Kupchak says his favorite Magic Johnson story is a minor one, but it’s indicative of who Magic was as a teammate.
“On my second or third day in L.A.,” recalls Kupchak, “we were in Palm Springs and had just finished practice. So Magic comes up to me and says, Mitch, why don’t you drive back to L.A. with me? He probably just sensed that I was having a tough time and thought, Hey, I wanna spend some time with Mitch. He asked me how things were going, if there was anything he could do better. And I say, Well, Earvin, I don’t know when you’re going to pass me the ball because, well, you’re not looking at me. He told me, It may not look like I see you, but I see you. So, if you’re open, be ready. And from that point on, I didn’t have any problems.”
Kupchak says that story sticks with him because Magic instinctively sensed that his new teammate was having trouble and took initiative to seek him out and do everything he could to make things better. That’s the kind of guy Magic was. The Lakers won another title that season. Magic averaged 17 points, 11 boards, 9 assists and 3 steals in the Playoffs and won his second Finals MVP.
The 1984 Finals were the first of Magic’s three epic, League-popularity altering battles with Bird for all the chips. Even though Magic averaged 18 and 15 for the seven-game series, he said, “We made five mistakes that cost us the series and I contributed to three of them.” These were mega-costly, potentially career-plummeting bungles in L.A.’s Game 2, 4 and 7 losses: he dribbled the clock down at the end of Game 2 until L.A. couldn’t get a shot off; he threw a pass away at the end of regulation in Game 4 and then missed two crucial free throws; in the huge Game 7, Magic went 5-14 and had 7 turnovers, including getting stripped twice in the final 90 seconds. Imagine this happening to Kobe or LeBron? It was so bad that Kevin McHale took to calling him “Tragic” Johnson the next season.
From that point on, though, Magic’s career arc turned ascendant and transcendent.
He finished second (to Bird) for the ’85 MVP, then went and averaged 18-15-7 on the way to L.A.’s third title in six years. But this title was different — they beat Boston. Vindication. He capped a League MVP with a Finals MVP in ’87, which featured his iconic “junior-junior sky hook” over the outstretched arms of McHale and Robert Parish — AT Boston Garden. The Championship in ’88 made L.A. the first squad to repeat since the Russell/Auerbach Celtics of the ’60s. He was League MVP in ’87, ’89 and ’90. Making All-NBA first teams and starting in the annual All-Star Game was yearly stuff for the greatest and most decorated player of the ’80s. By the time he met Jordan in the 1991 Finals, the NBA had gone from a League that was too black and too coked-up to have their Finals aired on live TV to, at the time, America’s hottest league and a sport encroaching on soccer as the world’s favorite. Magic, as the game’s most popular star, was most responsible.
At the close of the ‘80s, SI featured Magic on a cover with Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky as “Masters of the ‘80s.” The issue featured a Rick Reilly essay extolling the three gods. In it, Magic dropped this quote: “I don’t want to be a businessman, I want to be the best businessman.” So, while he was still playing, he went out and got Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz to help chart a path through what was new terrain for an athlete. “The architecture for the business career that we created,” Ovitz said at the time, “was to put him in a position where he would be doing a lot fewer endorsements but developing a closer relationship in a continuing business. Many athletes have multiple-endorsement deals, but that’s not what we were interested in.”
Magic wasn’t cool with just pitching products. Magic wanted to own stuff. What you have now is Magic Enterprises, which includes Magic’s partnerships with companies like Starbucks and Lowe’s. The man is worth over $700 million. Jordan is the greatest sports pitchman of them all, but it is Magic’s ownership/partnership paradigm that heavily influenced filthy-rich athletes like LeBron and Tiger to try and follow—and the lower-tier guys trying to hustle a few hundred Gs or a couple million into a fortune all indirectly travel this path that Magic forged, too.
Everything was going great for Magic before he had to abruptly retire in ’91 because he had tested positive for HIV. When Magic made his announcement in the fall of ’91, the world stopped. At the time, there was a frightened paranoia that surrounded HIV and AIDS; those who contracted the disease were treated like lepers. Even Magic was ostracized by his peers, some afraid to play against or with him, others questioning his sexuality. Plus, it was viewed as a death sentence. Over the subsequent years, Magic has helped lead a nation that treated the disease as taboo to a relative state of awareness. It wasn’t just watching him hug players before and after winning the MVP at the ’92 All-Star Game, or seeing him still thrive physically in the ’92 Barcelona Olympics, bringing Showtime to the Dream Team. It was watching him continue to live a healthy life.
I met Magic for the first time during the 2009 Finals. I was lucky enough to be in his VIP section at an Orlando lounge and he was gracious enough to engage me. After a brief conversation, I gave him a pound and a hug and not once did I think, “I’m embracing a man with HIV.” No one does. That is what I call social progress.
From the time that Magic played his first game with the Michigan State Spartans in ’77, through his final, post-comeback dribble with the Los Angeles Lakers in ’96, Magic was either solely or significantly responsible for a host of things: bringing the Final Four to the forefront of America’s collective sports conscious with his ’79 NCAA Finals game against Larry Bird’s Indiana State; making America’s largest state and second-largest metropolitan area a Lakers state/city and coaxing the NBA out of a sort of geographic niche through his virtuosity and celebrity; he, along with Bird, were the two major players for the first half of the NBA’s Golden Age; he inspired every future generation of players taller than 6-8 to be versatile ballplayers, which makes him the player most responsible for the modern game we see today; his bout with HIV and his subsequent activist work for AIDS/HIV makes him one of the most socially important celebrities on the American landscape of the past 30 years; he set a model for athletes as businessmen and not just pitchmen.
In my book, that makes him the “greatest” ballplayer ever. Maybe not the “best.” But the “greatest.”
Vincent Thomas is a columnist and feature writer for SLAM, a contributing commentator for ESPN and writes the weekly “From The Floor” column for NBA.com. You can email him your feedback at vincethomas79@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @vincecathomas.
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I love Jordan. I love Oscar. I love Russell. I love Wilt. The greats. But Magic made me love the game like no other. His game is majestic. Watching his highlights and old games shows you that he injected flash, sizzle, and JOY into the game. Great article on my favourite player of all time.
The same cat pushing rental furniture and predatory debit cards?
The same cat leading the fight for gentrification and low paying jobs?
Magic was nice, no doubt. I always Mike was a better scorer, equal rebounder and a much better defender.
Ok, cool argument. Purely subjective, but cool.
You don’t feel that Wilt Chamberlain falls into the category as an ‘argument’ for best ever?
Is there a five-championship minimum to be in this category? (that wasn’t a sarcastic statement, I’d understand if you keep Wilt out for only having two rings)
But people like RedRum, again in my opinion, are the scum of the earth.
I have mentioned before that I believe there is an argument for Magic and ONLY Magic to be better than Jordan (sorry… Russell was vastly overrated cause of the team he had, dude was only an above average offensive player… Kareem was legendary but only won with the best and second best PGs of all time) and I get scoffed at. “How DARE you suggest that anyone is better than Jordan? -JUST DROP-”
Why can’t we bring up this opinion? Jordan was NOT head over heels above everyone else. ESPN decided this before anyone else did. To think there is not even a argument for any of these other greats, like Magic, Kareem, Chamberlain, Bird, Oscar, Kobe, Russell… it’s maddening. And the people who usually tell people ‘STOP TRYING, MJ IS G.O.A.T.’ are usually the people who bring up their opinion every twenty seconds.
Kthxbye.
Wilt Chamberlain is the best scorer and rebounder the league has ever seen. He was an athletic beast, but if he wasn’t skilled he wouldn’t have been able to average 50 points PER GAME for an ENTIRE SEASON. Its easy to step back and say “but he was taller than everyone else he played against!” but so was SHAWN BRADLEY, and so was MANUTE BOL.
You can transcend stats and league records by playing in a primitive era, and be considered a lesser player than the modern greats (though I disagree), but you CANNOT be considered a lesser player if you absolutely SHATTER THE NBA RECORDS the way Wilt Chamberlain did. He didn’t just transcend statistics, he demolished them. No other player has come close to performing statistically the way Wilt Chamberlain did. Stats can be misleading, bent, twisted, skewed, whatever, but NOT when they are THAT incredible. You don’t score 100 points in a game by luck. You don’t grab 25 rebounds a game by luck. You don’t amass 78 TRIPLE DOUBLES by fluke–that’s more than a lot of the greatest guards have gotten.
Wilt Chamberlain just might be the best basketball player in the history of the game. Whether you elect to admit it or not. Like he said, people don’t like to root for Goliath.
Guess what, the next season he averaged 8.6 assists per game. A CENTER, still scoring 24 ppg and grabbing 24 boards per game, averaging 8.6 assists per game. That is incredible. Combining his skills in scoring, passing, and rebounding, Wilt is probably the best all-around player to ever play the game.
He was also guarded fiercely. Many Boston celtics players were told to practically bunch him. Tomjonovich said he’d kick off Chamberlain’s back to get rebounds until Chamberlain threw him to the ground. Chamberlain once showed BITE MARKS after a college game, and was practically thinking of skipping the NBA (a reason he chose the Harlem Globe Trotters).
Now this was Chamberlain talking out of his ass, but I do remember a Chamberlain quote… when asked if he could score 50 in today’s game (this was an interview in the late 80s)… Chamberlain said he could average 70. The league had so many talented players, that he said triple teaming him would be impossible and he’d wreck anyone one-on-one. I didn’t exactly believe him, but his logic certainly can’t be brushed aside.
That’s the question. I’m not giving any answers. That’s just the question.
In my mind, the best goes Jordan, Magic, Chamberlain, Jabbar, Bird, Russell, Hakeem, Oscar, Duncan, Bryant.
The greatest? Read this article and decide yourself.
Now, as far as Wilt and this supposed triple teaming he received, maybe from Boston he did but it doesn’t matter. All these little shrimps around him don’t matter. I’m 6’3″ and if I’ve got a bunch of 5’9″ guys around me, I’m going to keep my arms up and shoot over them. He was just so much bigger and stronger than everybody. I’m not saying he wasn’t great and shouldn’t be in the discussion but he had a major physical advantage. You know damn well that put in that same enviornment Shaq would have done as much damage.
The only thing Shaq has over Wilt is strength, and to what degree is extremely questionable. Wilt was TWICE as fast (he was a track star), could leap well beyond what Shaq was capable of (he would dunk on twelve foot rims with ease at halftime shows in Kansas) and had the ability to pass out of triple teams, which meant teams had to be more selective of their triple teamings.
Shaq would have obliterated the comp back in those days the same way he obliterated competition in these days. But no way would he reach Wilt’s numbers. Gilmore, Bellamy, and Thurmond enjoyed all the physical advantages that Chamberlain did and didn’t dominate in any type of way that Wilt did.
Hell, dude was keeping pace with a 23-year-old Kareem at 33. That should tell you something.
Was it the 70s? The 80s? the 90s? When did the playing level in the league suddenly cap?
But do you have any idea how many assists he’d get in today’s game, where statisticians credit assists far more liberally? He’d be getting 14-15 a game… he’d likely outdo even the great Stockton.
But no one in the 60s got close to matching Wilt Chamberlain– think about that. The second closest was Rick Barry’s 35.6 points per game, which was a ludicrous feet even at the time… and it still was almost 15 points less a GAME! And Chamberlain was doing it at a 50% clip when most people were shooting around 45%! Imagine that!
So yeah, Chamberlain wouldn’t obliterate the record books if he played in Mike’s day. But I bet he woulda beat Mike for the scoring title every year like clockwork.
enigmatic and spectacular player on the court. G.O.A.T.
Dude did all that and banged 25000 babes. From all over the world. (Makes u look at gramma kinda funny huh?)
MJ is considered the GOAT cause David Stern is a marketing genius.
I watched Magics career and Jordans. Magic was more fun to watch tho I may be biased Im a knicks fan so I hate Jordan. Im Just sayin.
I also still don’t get your point with Chamberlain. Exactly how many points do you think Shaq would score back in the day? I say somewhere between 37-42. Chamberlain was faster, more mobile, could jump higher, pass out of double teams better, and had superior range. These are all aspects that probably helped him get 50 freakin’ points a game. I just don’t think Shaq had that in him. Regardless of his physical superiority, he would be trapped and people are going to be slapping the ball from his hands, and fouls were far less likely back in that day.
Shaq broke a backboard with a dunk. Chamberlain broke someone’s FOOT with a dunk. Just think about that for a second.
This guy would average between 27-29 points every year, get you TEN rebounds (so much for lack of athleticism?), throw 6-8 assists every game, grab 1.5-2 steals a game, add a block for good measure, all while doing it on 50/40/90
That’s unreal. That’s like Lebron’s stats with Nash’s shooting.
How can you say Bird was overrated?
I mean, throw out all the stats… dude was a great rebounder, deadly in the post, fantastic shooter, underrated slasher (people just imagine Larry Bird shooting jumpers all day… dude took it to the whole so many times!), amazing passer (those no-look touch passes were as nice as some of Magic’s best!) and still played some damn good help defense. If you have to point out he was an average-at-best defender, then you’re reaching.
Wilt was a great player because he used his size coupled with his athleticism, basketball IQ, and SKILLS.
Don’t give me that height bull. Maybe in Mikan’s day, but for Wilt there were PLENTY of other great centers to play against. Russell, Unseld, Reed, these aren’t freaking midgets, nor are they freaking scrubs. They are hall-of-famers.
Also, Wilt blocked Kareem’s sky hook… Twice (if I’m not mistaken). Get out of here with that height argument. He had HOPS.
Also, I believe Kareem claimed that Wilt’s block on Kareem’s skyhooks were goaltends that weren’t called, haha
However, we all know Shaq soon abandoned what athleticism and skills he had when he went to LA, and his best post-move was the offensive foul.
Oh, and he RAN LIKE THIS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paex9-VxPbA
1. G.O.A.T = Still has to be Mike.
2. Centers? = I know popular vote is with Wilt (and I can’t disrespect that) but Russel WON. If leadership was quantified into that equation the same way we seem to bring it in as an x-factor for Mike… Russel has to get that same benefit.
Magic the greatest but not the best.
I say he is the best player of all time and he is the greatest player of all time.
Basketball is a team sport. I think some where in the 90s people forgot that.
Magic is the best team mate and team player you got. He makes avg player look great and let players like AC Green have a allstar game(i love AC Green and is a big fan but he is not a Allstar).
Would Jordon win Magic in 1 against 1 yebb i think so, but basketball is 5 against 5 and i they would have the same team mates, Magic would get his to play better and they would win the game.
MAGIC MVP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rto2_oYVs0I&feature=related
You make no sense. You say Magic is the greatest but not the best, but then you say he is the best and greatest. And who gives a shit if its a team game. Basketball is about winning and Jordan won 6. And it’s not like Magic rode Luc Longley to his rings.
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