WASHINGTON -- It's 17 years and counting, but the story hits as hard as their feelings toward each other.
In a new book chronicling the careers of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Magic says that in the wake of his being diagnosed HIV positive in 1991, his onetime dear friend, Isiah Thomas, questioned his sexuality, which is one of the many reasons Thomas wasn't wanted on the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.
Thomas, talking to SI.com, which had obtained an advance copy of the book "When the Game Was Ours," said, "I'm really hurt and I really feel taken advantage of all these years. I'm totally blindsided by this. Every time I've seen Magic he has been friendly with me. We would go out to dinner in New York. I didn't know he felt this way."
What we've got here is a basketball cold case, a revisiting of probably the most awkward episode of consequence in American basketball history, involving some of the most famous men who ever played the game, the most significant team ever assembled and some pretty deep wounds that have never healed.
Thomas, the best small guard to ever play, wasn't selected to be on that team, which was controversial enough at the time but seems completely heinous now in the light of history. And while Thomas' exclusion was widely blamed on a longtime feud with Michael Jordan, Magic says in the book, "Isiah killed his own chances when it came to the Olympics. Nobody on that team wanted to play with him. Michael didn't want to play with him. Scottie wanted no part of him. Bird wasn't pushing for him. Karl Malone didn't want him. Who was saying, 'We need this guy?' Nobody."
All of that is undeniably true. I covered the Dream Team, the first team of professional basketball players to compete in the Olympics, from the time it began training camp in San Diego throughout its historic gold medal run in Barcelona in 1992. And while it wasn't discussed on the record, it was no secret that most of the players on the that team, which also included Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullin and the only college player, Christian Laettner, didn't want to spend the summer with Thomas, the ring leader of the widely resented, two-time NBA champion Bad Boy Pistons.
Thomas was left off the team even though his own coach, Chuck Daly, coached the Dream Team.
This isn't exactly breaking new ground. But hearing Magic talk of it openly all these years later, and of the breakup of their friendship in the years preceding, has clearly hit a still-raw nerve in Thomas, who told SI.com, "I wish he would have had the courage to say this stuff to me face to face, as opposed to writing it in some damn book to sell and he can make money off it."
With lesser players, dredging up such an old issue probably would be treated with a shrug and "Who cares?" But Bird, Magic, Thomas and Jordan ushered in the era of college basketball we now know as March Madness and the Golden Era of the professional game, which truth be told, hasn't been as good since they retired in the 1990s. The history of basketball cannot be written without much attention being devoted to Magic and Thomas.
They were so close in the early 1980s that Magic reserved a wing of his Bel Air mansion for Thomas' visits. Magic, when the Lakers left town for road trips, would drop off his own car at the hotel where the Pistons would stay in Los Angeles for Thomas to use. They famously kissed on the cheek before some games.
But a confrontational NBA Finals series between the Lakers and Pistons in 1988, in which the two got into it a bit, set the friendship back. And in November 1991, after Magic announced he was HIV positive, rumors flew that Thomas wondered about Magic's lifestyle in Los Angeles. Thomas reminded SI.com that his own brother was HIV positive and several years ago died of AIDS, and that he was not homophobic.
This all happened just as the Dream Team was being announced, in the summer and fall of 1991. Throw into the mix a controversy several years earlier where Thomas supposedly agreed with Dennis Rodman that if Bird was black he'd be seen as "just another player" and Thomas was looked at by some great players, including Magic, as someone who couldn't be trusted.
The book's co-author, Jackie MacMullan, says that Magic was rather sad as he spoke of his feelings for the first time for public consumption. Several people have at times talked of trying to get Magic and Thomas together to just sit and talk out what they'd clearly never addressed with each other. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm one of them. I've written about Magic since our days in college in the late 1970s but have become friends with him through our work for ABC/ESPN and, frankly, have come to admire him even more in his second life as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. With all that he's accomplished, the episode with Thomas has always saddened him. Is it possible Thomas didn't know how Magic felt all these years?
Absolutely. Magic is the most cordial public figure imaginable but he's as proud as he is approachable and it's no surprise that he and Thomas, just as proud and much more protective, said a lot to each other but never talked about what happened. I've zero doubt that both feel very deeply every word they've conveyed, Magic in this book with Bird and Thomas to SI.com.
Thomas, over almost all those years, has come off as the villain, some of it his own doing and some of it due to his unpopularity in most media circles. Some of that has been unfair; I wrote apologetically nearly eight years ago in The Washington Post about columns critical of Thomas I wish I could temper.
But that doesn't change the most hurtful part of all this for Thomas.
He wasn't on the Dream Team and should have been. Was Thomas, as irritating to them as he was a great player, responsible for the way some of the others felt? Yes. Should he have been on the team? Yes.
Sadly, the person in that era who routinely facilitated relationships was Magic Johnson. And with Magic, hurt as he now says he was in the book, unwilling to orchestrate it, there was nobody who could connect Thomas to the group.
As great as that team's global and historical impact is, Thomas' absence is now a glaring omission, and the Magic-Thomas sidebar is something that is still causing an awful lot of pain to two of the most important figures in basketball's history. That it couldn't be resolved then and apparently cannot be reconciled now is an ending neither of them should accept.
Comments