It Was Easy When It Was Just Basketball. Then Came the Announcement--And the Questions. How the Last Four Years Have Changed Magic. : The Business of Being Magic Johnson

The question--when it comes at all--comes at right angles and in graceful arabesques of language, looping around the point like a noose. The question follows Magic Johnson around no matter where in the world he goes, like a shamus in a cheap suit of clothes, rarely getting close enough for him to hear, or far enough away for him to forget. The question is never, ever asked in polite company, at least not until Johnson has left the room. You look great, Magic! We’re pulling for you, Magic! When are you going to get sick, Magic? When are you going to die?

“I was never scared of dying, I guess because I didn’t know what it was,” Magic Johnson says. He considers the question for a moment, as if for the first time, and then seems satisfied with his answer. “My worst fear was to have to stop playing basketball,” he adds quietly. “That’s my worst fear in life .”

It has been nearly four years since Johnson announced, in a single breath, that he had “attained” the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and that he was retiring from the Lakers. In an America just awakening to the prevalence of AIDS among heterosexuals, the effect was the same as if he had simply started to dematerialize before our very eyes, the margins of his physical self seeming to become increasingly transparent as he stood wrapped in the embrace of CNN’s live satellite feed.

People wept openly as they watched the press conference on television. The collective sense of shock and grief that followed Johnson’s announcement was not unlike a death in the family, and though no flags were lowered to half-staff, in a very real way the nation mourned his passing. The difference, of course, was that Johnson remained very much alive.

“For about six months, I said to myself, ‘Is this guy going to be with us much longer?’ ” recalls Jerry West, who was there that day as the Lakers’ general manager. “I was shocked, and I felt horrible for him personally. But the way this whole thing has unfolded has been almost bizarre. And now, four years later, you see a guy who is in the best shape of his life and probably wishes he had never said he was going to stop playing.”

Johnson often spends as much as five hours a day working out, lifting weights before the morning rush at Gold’s Gym, doing stretching exercises and shooting drills at The Sports Club L.A., then playing at UCLA with a group of pros in the afternoon. He has added almost 20 pounds to his 6-foot, 9-inch frame since he retired, most of it a glistening breastplate of muscle. His chest has filled out from 42 to 46 inches, and though he still runs as if his feet hurt him, at age 36 he remains among the top basketball players on the planet.

This has aroused the rather peculiar suggestion that Johnson is interfering with the arc of his own story, constructing a monument to his denial of the inevitable outcome of his disease. “What happens when you see yourself as invincible,” asks one of Johnson’s friends, “and then one day you look in the mirror and you see your body ravaged?”

During his annual summer basketball camp for kids last July, Johnson was asked the question in one of its least disingenuous forms, by a boy about 14, the same age as Magic’s oldest son, Andre: How are you feeling?

He knows that most children worry about death, even if he did not. He has a 3-year-old son, Earvin III (known as E.J.), with his wife, Cookie, and recently they adopted a daughter they named Elisa, now 8 months old. As gently as he could, he seemed to be preparing the 450 kids in the gym for what is to come one day. “If it’s my time, then I’m going to go,” he says, grace notes rising on the warm air, until, at last, his voice begins to catch the rolling cadence of Martin in Memphis. “I’m not scared. I’m not worried. I’ve had a good life. Remember that. I’ve done things that people dream of, everything a man could want. So if God said, ‘Earvin, tomorrow you can’t wake up,’ nobody should feel sad for me. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. Nobody should cry if I go. Because Earvin Johnson lived.”

The medical prognosis is, in its way, equally murky. “Earvin is now four years out, and obviously he doesn’t fall into the group of people that dies within the first couple of years,” says Dr. Michael Mellman, the Los Angeles internist who gave Johnson the diagnosisin 1991. “So his virus is either less virulent, or he’s better able to fight it. Whether there will be a change in that over the next several years is something that’s not known. But, yeah, he’s not dead.”

Johnson has a way of making the way his life turned out seem completely logical, as if any other outcome would have been wrong. “What is there not to be happy and positive about?” he says. “I mean, I’m still here. Everybody thinks they’re going to be here for a long time, but every time I look up there’s somebody dying in a car accident, shot, heart attack, whatever. I think God chose me for a reason. He knew I could handle this, and He needed somebody that the people knew. So here I am.”

When the Lakers lost the NBA championship to the Boston Celtics in 1984 because of several crucial mistakes for which Johnson was held accountable, he sequestered himself at home for the summer and rarely emerged until the following season had begun, replaying every misstep in his mind so that it could never happen again. In the matter of his own death, however, he has allowed himself scarcely a thought, and shed not a single tear. “You guys all cried for me,” he says. “I haven’t done that yet.”

If an unexamined life is not worth living, what value can be found in an unexamined death? For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, Johnson brings no sense of the foreboding of other doomed heroes. “It’s not that he has two different personas, one for the public and one in private,” says Johnson’s longtime agent, Lon Rosen. “That’s the way he is all the time.”

*

Earvin Johnson was already known as Magic on the playgrounds of Lansing, Mich., by the time he was old enough to drive a car, but he was nevertheless held in check by his formidable father, Earvin Johnson Sr., who often dragged the boy along to help collect the garbage and clean the offices of local businessmen. These men, with their shiny suits and neatly brocaded lives, were protected from ever performing such stoop labor themselves by the shallow moats of their state school educations.

When their offices were empty, Junior would sit at their desks and dream his subversive dreams. “All I ever wanted was to be in big business,” he says now. “I never wanted to be a jock, to fall into that category of a dumb ballplayer. Society thinks we’re all stupid. They know you can play, but they think that’s it. My whole goal was not to let that happen to me.”

Summoning phantom secretaries and barking out orders to imaginary subordinates, the teen-ager would stretch his long legs over the burled-wood veneers of their desktops and silently inventory the foot soldiers he would require in this empire of his own imagining. At the Beverly Hills offices of Magic Johnson Enterprises, he has finally built himself a mahogany-paneled redoubt, though a heavy load of personal appearances makes his visits there sporadic.

“In one way, basketball and business are the same,” Johnson says. “What they both come down to is whether people want to play with you. You can have the best game plan, but that guy may be sitting there with $500 million and say, ‘Well, I just don’t want you. I believe I’ll take him over there.’ And that’s one of them big ego crushers.”

Looking for an ego crusher of his own, Johnson took a meeting with Michael Ovitz, then head of the Creative Artists Agency. “He said, ‘I’m a direct guy, and I’m going to be direct with you,” Johnson recalls. “I don’t respect ballplayers off the court. I don’t think they’re serious, I don’t think they’re smart, and I don’t do business with them. So why should I take you on?’ And serious. Boom!” A great gust of laughter blows through Johnson at the recollection of this, buffeting his body from side to side. “And I just went, ‘Uh, uh, uh,’ ” he continues. “Nobody had ever come at me quite like that. He was schooling me right from the beginning.”

Not even Ovitz could teach him about swimming with the sharks (Johnson doesn’t know how to swim), but he did send him off with copies of The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Fortune--haiku for killers. The two continued to talk periodically, between deals or whenever one of them had heard a particularly good Zen koan, but when Magic bought a 5% stake in the Lakers for $10 million last year, it was clear his apprenticeship was over.

“My goal was to be a big businessman, so that I could show other African Americans that they could make it too,” Johnson says. “And instead of talking, I put my money where my mouth is. We have a lot of successful and powerful African Americans, but sometimes we spend money outside our own neighborhoods. And the only way we’re going to rebuild our neighborhoods is if we invest in them ourselves.”

The expanding universe of Magic Inc. already includes a bottling plant in Maryland, a T-shirt manufacturing operation in Gardena, and a sizable stake in the California Teachers Pension Plan $50-million real estate investment in inner-city areas. Magic’s Westland Plaza, a shopping mall located in the predominantly minority community of north Las Vegas, was scheduled to open this month. Magic Johnson Theatres opened its flagship multiplex in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles on June 30, with plans to open new theaters in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago and Detroit over the next several years.

Before he retired from the Lakers, Johnson’s closest brush with the business world took place on top of a desk, where he and a woman had sex while a board meeting went on just a few feet away. Johnson’s post-diagnosis memoir, “My Life,” devoted an entire chapter to these ardors, apparently stirred by a sense that America still wasn’t getting enough cautionary tale. Sleep with a thousand women, Magic seemed to be warning, and you too could contract the HIV virus.

Or die trying. Even during the go-go ‘80s, bobbing for nymphomaniacs had been the province of the few, rather than the many, and the author who forgot that in the media-saturated ‘90s did so at his peril. As Johnson made his rounds of the talk shows to publicize the book, he found himself drawn repeatedly into discussions of the quantum mechanics of the menage a six , a process that would soon enough begin to strip him of his AIDS martyrdom altogether.

To expose himself in this way seemed either heroic or heedless beyond measure. And if it was the latter, then the only plausible explanation for it was to overwhelm, with sheer numbers if necessary, any suggestion that Johnson had dabbled in bisexuality. A year into their marriage, he brought his wife onstage for an appearance with Oprah Winfrey, then began discussing revelations in the book, which Cookie hadn’t read. “I didn’t know all that,” Cookie says. “I knew he wasn’t being a choirboy out here, but I had no idea to what magnitude. When he said it the first time on TV in front of Oprah, that was the first time I’d heard it.”

Rumors that he is still sleeping with other women are among the questions that follow him at close range now, but Johnson dismisses them. “For people to actually think I would mess up my best friend to go out with some knucklehead. . . .” he says. “After all we’ve been through together, I would never mess with that.”

Mellman believes the questions of sexual preference and suggestions of satyriasis that attended Johnson’s announcement may have made a powerful statement to other athletes. “I don’t know of any other HIV-positive person who has even briefly played pro sports and admitted to it, and that’s a little surprising,” Mellman says. “If you calculate the number of professional athletes there are, and realize that in the United States about one in 200 people is HIV-positive, you would have expected other HIV-positive pro athletes to emerge. But none has. Either no one else in professional sports is HIV-positive, or everyone has learned a very important lesson: Don’t tell, or you could lose your career.”

When Johnson tried to regain his career by returning to the Lakers in 1992, following the emotional high of playing on the Dream Team at the Olympic Games in Barcelona, the comeback was derailed by Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo and several NBA players, who openly expressed their fears of playing against someone who was HIV-positive. Johnson quickly retired again, but in the absence of any testing policy, the purity of the league’s blood remains open to question. “I think the players are still having a good time,” Johnson says. “To what extent, I don’t know. But I don’t see it changing, because women won’t let it change. Women are aggressive, and then men are going to be aggressive too.”

For anyone who had been backstage during Showtime--the Lakers’ run of five world championships from 1980-88--there was a chilling irony in the selection of the Forum Club as the site of the press conference at which Johnson announced his retirement on Nov. 7, 1991. During the ‘80s, the Forum Club had served as a sort of sexual drive-through for the team’s players as they made their way out of the locker room. Just 19 when he was drafted by the Lakers, Johnson was not immune to the lure of these conveniences, and from time to time he passed through the golden arches with Dr. Jerry Buss, the team’s unabashedly hedonistic new owner.

A middle-aged Ph.D. in chemistry who had made a fortune in real estate speculation, Buss wore his business triumphs on his sleeve at Laker games--usually in the form of spectacularly cantilevered young women. Perhaps it was his penchant for 19-year-olds that attracted Buss to Magic, but in Johnson he found a willing protege. “Actually, Earvin and I never really socialized as much as the newspapers would have had it,” Buss says now. “We’re just very good friends.”

Unfettered by any but the moral constraints of Buss’ extremely loco parentis , Earvin gave way to Magic, who gave way to temptation at every turn. “Back then he was leading two lives,” says Cookie Johnson. “There was the Magic Man, out there with all the Hollywood stars, everyone at his feet. Even he was shocked to see the way celebrities were in awe of him. But when he came home to Michigan in the summer, he was still Earvin, the guy I knew. The Magic Man always had that smile on, was always in the know. I didn’t like him.”

Like others who had made their way to Hollywood, Johnson had lost himself completely in the role he was playing. Earvin had pledged himself to Cookie while the two were in college, but Magic was married to the game. “That was my wife,” he says.

If Johnson’s appetites at times were excessive, he had two hungry mouths to feed. Magic needed to be adored but refused to be loved, and so he settled for a parade of one-night stands. They rarely lasted even that long. Before women were allowed entry to his bedchamber, they were carefully instructed by the Magic Man that, following the evening’s exertions, they would be remanded to another jurisdiction, so that Cookie could retain her sovereignty and Earvin his purity. “I was the loneliest guy on the face of the earth,” Johnson says, as Earvin now. “I didn’t have anybody to share with who loved me for me. For Earvin, not for Magic.”

He is less comfortable with Magic these days, using the name like a prop cigar in his business dealings, then putting it back in the box it came from when he is offstage. Magic is still a formidable force in his life, but it is the widely held belief of his friends that it was Magic who gave Earvin the disease. Earvin Johnson is surprisingly conservative, and like many reformers, he has become something of an abolitionist, preaching abstinence to the unchaste.

He got his first lesson in the politics of AIDS when he announced on the now-defunct “Arsenio Hall Show” the day after his retirement press conference that he was “far from being a homosexual.” The line drew thunderous applause from the studio audience and a chorus of condemnation from the gay community. And though he learned, without repudiating homosexuality, to function as a spokesman for what was thought of as a “gay plague,” it is clear that he is still uneasy with the lingering questions about his own infection.

“I’m not a political person,” Johnson says. “But I know that when Jesse Helms tries to cut the funding for HIV and AIDS research because he thinks it’s wrong for men to be together, he doesn’t realize that 75% of all the cases are heterosexual. And they’re not doing anything unnormal, or ‘unnormal sexual acts,’ like he said.” (According to the Centers for Disease Control, 10.3% of all news AIDS cases in 1994 developed through heterosexual contact.)

Does that mean Johnson, at least on some level, agrees with Helms that gay sex is abnormal? “I know what’s right and wrong,” he says. “I understand what the ‘90s are all about. Reality is reality, and neither you, nor I, nor anybody else, is going to stop gays from being gay. They’re out. There’s no more closet, so I understand. Am I going to say that I approve of it? Or that I like it? It doesn’t matter. It happens. So there it is.”

Johnson promised to become a “spokesman for the virus” when he announced his HIV status, and the day after his press conference, he joined the National Commission on AIDS. But 11 months later, following a dispute with the George Bush Administration over its lack of commitment to funding for research and education, Johnson resigned from the panel. He did an educational video for children that was well received, but his voice was rarely heard in the public discourse about AIDS after that. In a world where Silence equals Death, Johnson’s sudden quiet made his previous activism seem like a red ribbon that he had temporarily pinned to his lapel.

“He certainly has backed off from the frequency and the intensity with which he was getting up in front of large groups of people and talking about being HIV-positive,” Mellman says. “‘But it would be very hard to be HIV-positive and to daily have to discuss that. Everyone who has a chronic illness wants to shed the mantle of that illness, and maybe that’s what he’s doing. I think he makes a very powerful statement simply by existing at this point.”

Johnson disputes the notion that he has been marginalized to the point of living symbolism. “I jumped into it full force, real fast,” he acknowledges. “And I’m still in it full force, but I’m in it in a different way. I’m just one person. But no person, not one, has done more for HIV and AIDS than I have. I’m not talking about just announcing. There’s nobody out there doing more than I am, but it’s still never enough.”

He coached the final 16 games of the regular season for the Lakers two seasons ago, then resigned from that too. “People say he gave up when he quit coaching, but that’s bull,” says Rosen. “He didn’t want to be a coach. Jerry Buss was after him for a year and a half to be the coach. The Atlanta Hawks offered him a huge deal to be their coach, and he didn’t want to do it. The day after the first game against the Milwaukee Bucks, he called me into his office, shut the door and said, ‘I don’t care what you have to do. I’m not coaching another game.’ It wasn’t fun for him, so why do it?”

Magic had been miserable for the first year of his retirement, and was determined not to waste any more of the time that had been given him. “That’s probably been the most difficult time of my life, that period,” he says. “It was like a divorce. I didn’t know what to do at first because I was used to having my time regimented, so I did a lot of sitting around the house for that first year.”

Even after he started a barnstorming basketball team two years ago, made up of retired pros who played against Olympic-caliber international teams (current record 45-0), Johnson could not satisfy his basketball jones. This spring he announced that he wanted to play for the U.S. Olympic team in Atlanta next year, and that was followed by a three-month flirtation with the Lakers over the possibility of yet another comeback. For a while it appeared he might also be NBA-positive. “They think I can’t get basketball out of my system,” Johnson said.

“By the time he retired, he was just worn out,” Cookie says. “I remember during the playoffs, he used to turn white from practicing and playing so much, hardly eating and not sleeping. I asked him, ‘Do you remember all that stuff? That’s what you really want to do?’ Earvin’s very smart, but I felt that if he had started playing again, maybe people wouldn’t take him seriously as a businessman anymore. And he stopped at the top, so where else was there to go but down? I would hate to see him get out there and not be able to do it, and leave with his head down. It’s not that I don’t think he could have, but if he couldn’t, I think he would have almost killed himself trying.”

In June he decided to return to the NBA for at least a season, perhaps two, but made up his mind to wait until after the opening of the Magic Johnson Theatres, his new 60,000-square-foot, $7.5-million movie complex adjacent to the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall, to inform the Lakers.

Johnson already had investments in businesses that grossed more than $60 million a year, but the movie theaters were the first business that he built literally from the ground up. “I’ve seen it at every stage,” he says. “Dirt, unpaved, paved, here come some poles. I would come late at night sometimes and just sit. I didn’t want anybody to see me, so I sat in my car, and I would just stare at it and shake my head. I couldn’t believe it.”

The idea of building state-of-the-art movie houses in minority areas had been tried by other theater operators, but never profitably. “I think the obstacles that people face are how to deal with the community,” says Larry Ruisi, president of Sony Retail Entertainment, the chain that Johnson enlisted as an equal partner.

“The community” is a polite euphemism for what white folks used to call “the ghetto,” and you hear it a lot at Magic Theatres. “If not for me, the community would not accept it,” Johnson says flatly of the project. The building sits squarely on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, west of Baldwin Hills, a middle-class black enclave. Johnson says it would have been corporate suicide to put Magic Theatres in the heart of Watts, and points out the blackened storefronts not far away, grim reminders of the riots that swept through following the verdict in the Rodney King trial.

Sony left it up to Magic to head off problems with the gangs that he says are “right outside the door” of the glittering complex. “That’s part of his responsibility,” Ruisi says. “We don’t have the uh, uh, expertise. What do we know about that situation? I live in a suburb in Westchester, what do I know about South-Central L.A.?” The same, of course, could be said of Johnson, who lives in a three-story, 13,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Benedict Canyon. “I’m from the neighborhood,” Johnson says. “I go to church there, I get my hair cut there.”

In its first four weeks of operation, Magic’s was among the top five highest-grossing theaters in the Sony chain. Its success has attracted more shoppers to the mall, which could eventually bring new development and badly needed jobs to an area still idling on the drawing boards of Rebuild L.A. “Sometimes we need physical things that we can see,” Johnson says. “Everybody tells us the dream is out there, the American Dream, but we can’t see it. All these schools I go talk to, I tell them it’s out there for us, and they say where? Show us. There’s no example. Well, now there’s an example, sitting right at their front door.”

The night the theaters opened, Johnson saw the dream, too, a vision of his life after basketball. “He got really emotional about it,” Cookie Johnson says. “And I think for the first time he could see his future going that way.” Old people who had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives edged up to him, trying to find words to express their gratitude. Some simply embraced him and walked away, touching a place in him that basketball had never reached. “It was the happiest day of my life,” he says. “I was going back to the NBA until then, but when all those people kept coming up and hugging me, thanking me, that sealed it. I’m not ever going back.”

*

When they first received the diagnosis of his disease, Johnson and his wife feared that people would shun them, that they would become social lepers, a new caste of untouchables. That it hasn’t happened may have more to do with an ongoing cultural denial of the disease, and the way in which the corrosive wasting effect of AIDS forces those who are blighted to go underground.

“He looks great, he feels great, and whatever was happening seems to be stopped in its tracks,” Buss says of Johnson. “I have a lot of trouble believing that the future for him is dismal. Quite honestly, I think he’s just going to beat it.” Buss acknowledges that this assessment flies in the face of all the accumulated conventional wisdom about AIDS. “Maybe if you lead a certain kind of life, it goes for 25 years, certainly for a very long period of time,” he persists. “Who’s to say?” Lakers Coach Del Harris keeps a stack of articles photocopied from British newspapers in a desk drawer. In headline after headline, the stories suggest that there is no connection between HIV and AIDS, that it is a hoax perpetrated by the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

“If this is correct,” Harris says, studying passages phosphorescent with yellow marker, “then he’s probably laid out for nothing. I think it’s possible. One of these articles says the real cause of death is AZT, the supposed cure.”

Johnson does not openly acknowledge a belief in miracle cures and takes regular doses of the drug AZT. “I don’t really worry,” he says. “I don’t even think about it. Everybody else thinks about it for me. I just go live. Everything’s great. The virus is sleeping, my T-cells are going great. It’s keeping a good attitude, eating right, taking care of yourself, no stress--that’s how I’m going to beat it.”

“He doesn’t get down about this,” Rosen says. “He knows it’s a terrible disease, he knows that people die from it, but he doesn’t expect to die from it. He expects to be a survivor. That’s how he’s living his life. He’s not living it as someone who has a death sentence on his head.”

His doctor hopes that some medication will be developed that will allow patients with HIV and AIDS to maintain themselves for decades, as they might with high blood pressure. “I don’t believe that in my lifetime we’re going to cure this virus,” Mellman says. “We always see this kind of reverse publicity in something that’s not curable. And this is not a curable disorder. It’s a frightening, frightening situation, beyond anyone’s comprehension. But the evidence that the virus causes the disease is irrefutable.”

Despite his current robust health, Johnson’s illness could become AIDS at any time. It is not uncommon for the disease to take 10 years from the time of infection to produce symptoms. “We have absolutely no idea how long he has had this,” Mellman says. “And except for the very, very end, people aren’t terribly ill.”

After being given the diagnosis of his condition, Magic attempted to maintain his customary glow of confidence, but, in fact, he and his wife were devastated by the news. “When we found out, it was almost like we gave up,” Cookie recalls. For one of the few times in his life, Magic was almost paralyzed with uncertainty about what to do. “Everything is running through your mind at one time,” he says. “What’s going to happen? When is it going to happen? How will I know when it turns to AIDS?”

Desperate for answers, they contacted Elizabeth Glaser, who had contracted AIDS during a blood transfusion and passed it on to her daughter Ariel, who died in 1988, and to her son Jake, who is now 10 years old. Nine months before Glaser gained national recognition for her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Earvin and Cookie paid a visit to her home in Santa Monica.

“I have to admit, when I went in there I was scared to death,” Cookie says. “I didn’t know what I was going to see. Was I going to see death? Is this what Earvin was going to look like? But she was so full of energy, so happy. She gave us the fight we needed.”

“I had all these questions,” Magic says. “ ‘What should I do? What can you do?’ She said, ‘Earvin, everything’s going to be all right. I’ve been fighting this for 10 years. You’re going to be a big help, and you don’t even know it right now. You’re probably going to save my son’s life. There’s going to be some medicine because of you, something he can have that’s going to prolong his life.’ She was so powerful, nothing could stop her. She wasn’t scared of dying.”

Elizabeth Glaser died last December. She is one of more than 270,800 people who have perished from complications of AIDS in this country from the time the disease was discovered in 1981, two years after Magic Johnson was drafted by the Lakers, to the end of last year. “He never talked to me about Elizabeth’s death,” Cookie Johnson says. “We’ve never really discussed it.”

With his basketball career, Earvin Johnson built a monument, but as he confronted his own mortality, it was difficult to see whether the sarcophagus was half empty or half full. “A guy once asked me, ‘What do you think you were put on this earth for?’ ” Johnson says. “And my answer was, ‘To play basketball.’ He said, ‘No, it’s bigger than that.’ So I said, ‘OK, you tell me.’ He said, ‘You were put on this earth to make people feel good.’ I was taken aback because I had never heard anybody say that. It didn’t affect me then, but when I got home and was thinking about it, I thought maybe he was right. Because my whole life, all I’ve cared about doing is making people happy.”

Now, with the theaters, he has placed a headstone where all the world can see it, and in lovely bright lights he has written an epitaph. “This is one of those moments that I can make people happy,” he says. ‘This theater will be here long after I’m gone. African Americans have never had the opportunity to leave things. If you look around, whites, Jewish people, they always leave their heirs something. But not us.”

A smile spreads slowly across his beautiful young face. “This is an opportunity for me to leave my children something,” he says. “This is what I leave for me. It’s something people can look at and say, ‘That’s what he was all about. He was about more than a ball and a uniform and a pair of sneakers.’ I knew I was about more than that, but now the people will know.”