When the Game Was Ours - Larry Bird [114]
"How am I going to tell her?" Magic asked Rosen as they left Mellman's office.
The two men stopped at an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica to have dinner and map out the immediate future. Magic wondered aloud if he would have to retire. He agonized over what he would say to Cookie, who was at home, still unaware that anything was amiss. As the waiter took their order, he handed Johnson a note from the adjacent table. They were planning an AIDS fundraiser and were hoping Magic would be willing to speak at their event. Johnson spent the rest of dinner absent-mindedly turning over their business card in his hands.
On his way home from the restaurant, Magic called his wife to tell her he'd been sent home from Utah.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"I'll be home in a few minutes, and we'll talk all about it," he said calmly.
Cookie hung up the phone, her hand shaking.
"In my mind I was thinking, 'He's going to tell me he has AIDS,'" she said, "because that was my worst possible fear."
The moment Earvin "Magic" Johnson stepped into his house he knew his wife had already figured out his news was devastating.
"She knew me too well," he said.
He told her what Dr. Mellman had said and then fell into her arms. Cookie experienced a range of emotions: shock, fear, anger, disappointment, concern.
"At that time, any discussion of AIDS meant you were going to die," Cookie said. "I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. For a minute, I felt like I was going to pass out."
She sat down and held her husband, and then did what she always did when she was frightened or in trouble: she prayed.
"I wouldn't blame you if you left," said Magic through his tears.
"Are you crazy?" Cookie answered. "I am staying. God will get us through this."
Her faith did not completely overrule the terror of what lay in front of them. She fretted about her unborn child, about what the future held for her husband. The next morning Cookie went to visit her minister, the Reverend Rick Hunter, and he told her, "We will pray, and ask for a miracle."
Mellman drove to the Johnsons' home and took blood from Cookie and Magic. He retested the Lakers star's blood under the assumed name "Frank Kelly" in order to protect his privacy.
As the days droned on, Johnson's absence from the Lakers became more and more difficult to explain. Vitti, the trainer, who traveled with the team on the road and was a witness to Magic's cavalier lifestyle, guessed immediately what Johnson was facing. He was sworn to secrecy, which was the easy part. The more difficult task for the emotional Vitti was to prevent himself from breaking down every time he saw his friend.
The so-called flu that Magic was battling made no sense to a keen group of veteran reporters or a seasoned group of Lakers players. A week after Magic was summoned home from Salt Lake, Lakers coach Mike Dunleavy, who lived around the corner from Rosen, dropped by the agent's house unannounced.
"Lon," he said, "I need to know what the hell is going on."
"I can't tell you yet," Rosen answered, "but it's not good."
"I already know that," Dunleavy said. "Every time I ask Vitti about it he starts crying."
On Wednesday, November 6, Magic met with Dr. David Ho, an expert on HIV and AIDS who had been researching the disease since 1981. The second blood test confirmed the diagnosis. Ho recommended that Johnson stop playing basketball.
The doctor's reasons were sound. It was too early to determine how much Johnson's immune system had been compromised. There was no way of telling how Magic would react to AZT (zidovudine), the medication he planned to prescribe. At the time, AZT, which had demonstrated the ability to help prevent HIV from spreading, was the only FDA-approved drug available. Normally that painstaking approval process takes anywhere from seven to ten years, but the FDA pushed