Until the emergence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson was one of the best and most prominent basketball players in the NBA, but on November 7, 1991, he announced his retirement amid an announcement that put his health and private life at stake: he was an HIV carrier. At the age of 32, he shocked the world with a story that rocked the history of American sport: one of the best players in history was surprisingly withdrawn because he was suffering from a recent illness was no more than 10 years old and had already taken over 14,000 people.
At the time, HIV was poorly known as “gay disease,” but among the prejudices that hurt his name, there was also another pain in his life: his wife learned that the virus caused him by having sex with someone else. The press conference was in Inglewood, California and there, along with league commissioner David Stern, Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, announced with some peace-mindedness that he was carrying a deadly disease. This fact is remembered today as “The Announcement”. The disease never became AIDS and on 14 August, accompanied by his children and his wife Cookie, who remained by his side, the former basketball player celebrated his 61 years, something that not all the infected achieve.
