The Virus
Here at No Mas we're very interested in those sporting events that intersect with the world at large, times when the cloistered microcosm of athletes and their deeds provides a prism unto a wider sociocultural moment.
If ever there was such a time, it was on this day 16 years ago when Magic Johnson first told the world that he was HIV positive and retiring from basketball. It's a moment that remains indelibly imprinted on the memory of anyone who lived through it, one of those news-story shocks that hits you like a shot to the gut, that feels so personal that it might as well have happened to someone you intimately know rather than a media figure you've only watched on television.
Watching this press conference in retrospect, I'm simply amazed at Magic's calm and ease at the podium. It's this kind of presence of mind and faith in himself and fate that clearly was part of what made him such a wondrous athlete in the first place. Magic's courage and down-to-earth openness in facing his diagnosis inaugurated a new phase in the American public's awareness of HIV and AIDS, and for that he has been deservedly commended.
I can't help but imagine, however, how the gay community must have felt about Johnson's revelation and its perceived effect on mass culture's relationship to the virus. The larger-than-life aspect of sport never seemed so fraught with contradiction. Its power to influence our lives and opinions is unquestionable, but why do we grant it such power? In other words, why, after a decade of helplessness and death, an entire generation of sudden disappearances, why was an already genocidal epidemic suddenly more vivid and tragic when it found its way into the blood of a beloved heterosexual athlete?
If ever there was such a time, it was on this day 16 years ago when Magic Johnson first told the world that he was HIV positive and retiring from basketball. It's a moment that remains indelibly imprinted on the memory of anyone who lived through it, one of those news-story shocks that hits you like a shot to the gut, that feels so personal that it might as well have happened to someone you intimately know rather than a media figure you've only watched on television.
Watching this press conference in retrospect, I'm simply amazed at Magic's calm and ease at the podium. It's this kind of presence of mind and faith in himself and fate that clearly was part of what made him such a wondrous athlete in the first place. Magic's courage and down-to-earth openness in facing his diagnosis inaugurated a new phase in the American public's awareness of HIV and AIDS, and for that he has been deservedly commended.
I can't help but imagine, however, how the gay community must have felt about Johnson's revelation and its perceived effect on mass culture's relationship to the virus. The larger-than-life aspect of sport never seemed so fraught with contradiction. Its power to influence our lives and opinions is unquestionable, but why do we grant it such power? In other words, why, after a decade of helplessness and death, an entire generation of sudden disappearances, why was an already genocidal epidemic suddenly more vivid and tragic when it found its way into the blood of a beloved heterosexual athlete?
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