I was home and having cereal when the phone rang at 3:03 in the afternoon. I was in the process of what is called a "follow" story in the newspaper business. It is the opposite of the "lead" story, which precedes an event. A "follow" story ... well, it's obvious. This was the day after the Washington Bullets, the team I covered for a living at the time, had gotten smoked in Orlando by the pre-Shaq and Penny Magic. This took some doing, for the guys doing the smoking were Terry Catledge and Greg Kite and Scott Skiles and Dennis Scott.

	Magic has survived -- and thrived since the big announcement.

But the Bullets stunk. Stunk on ice.

So the job of the beat writer is to get up early, catch a morning flight back home, follow up on the game, make sure nothing significant happened on the team's off day, write your story for the next day's paper. I had done all of that by 3:03 in the afternoon, Nov. 7, 1991, but doing all that doesn't leave you much time for meals, which is why cereal would have to do.

So I'm eating when the phone rang. It was one of my housemates, Steve, who also worked at The Washington Post. He was a copy editor and had an early shift at the office. Steve was from New Hampshire. Big Celtics fan. Quiet. Very quiet.

"Ah, there's a story on the wire," he began. "It says Magic Johnson's having a press conference this afternoon." He paused.

"It says he has AIDS."

It is at this point that drama dictates you're supposed to drop the spoon onto the floor. I don't remember if I did that, because I don't remember anything until I was sitting in front of my terminal at the Post, trying to figure out how the hell to write something coherent about Earvin Johnson when I only had one thing on my mind. The same thing the Commish was thinking.

"I think we all had the mental image of this great physical specimen withering away and dying," David Stern acknowledged last week.

"I thought he was going to die," said his former teammate, Byron Scott.

Larry Drew, who had just left the Lakers and was contemplating whether to finish his career in Europe, was in Los Angeles when he got the news. "All I could do was cry," recalled Drew, now an assistant coach with the now Washington Wizards.

It is important to remember that at the time, Magic Johnson was a bigger star than Michael Jordan, the biggest star the NBA had. Jordan had a ton of commercials, and his Bulls had just won their first championship. But Magic's Lakers already had five, and there weren't many people in the building that thought they didn't have at least a couple more in store. Showtime, not the defensive grunge of the Pistons or the Doberman style of the Bulls, was the definitive NBA style. And Magic was the conductor. Magic had panache. Magic was hip. He was the buddy of Arsenio -- who, at the time, was just as hip. (Really.)

And Magic was going to die.

Everyone came into the newsroom that day. Columnists, reporters. What a fog we were in. That whole week, when the Lakers said Magic had the flu, I remember thinking, how long does a guy have the flu, anyway? And I thought something was probably more wrong than the Lakers were saying, but I didn't have time to really think about it, because I was covering a team -- a bad team, but it was my job, and I couldn't think about the Lakers or what was wrong with Earvin. That afternoon, Nov. 7, we all were thinking the same thing. How horrible this would be. AIDS meant death. Who would get the gruesome assignment of watching Magic waste away in some hospital, noting his dropping weight day by day? Who would sit vigil with his new wife, Cookie? Who would write the obituary?

Two days later, I wrote what I thought would be the pre-obit, an appreciation. At the end, I pointed out that only his friends and those that knew him best referred to him as Earvin, or Buck, or Junior. He was Magic to the outside world. I ended the piece with the refrain, "I hope that someday, I can call him Earvin."

Ten years later, Magic Johnson most assuredly has not died. He has not gotten sicker. He has, by just about all available accounts gotten bigger, thicker, healthier. He is not just living with what we now know is HIV, not AIDS, but is thriving. He has overcome the objections of fellow Dream Teamers like Karl Malone, fellow players like Mark Price, fellow fellows all over the world. It is the confluence of state-of-the-art medicine, hard work, good genes and plain luck, and it is a tribute to his incredible ability to change the page that when we think of Earvin Johnson these days, the first thing we don't think about is when he's going to die, but what he's going to buy or build next.

	“	That afternoon, Nov. 7, we all were thinking the same thing. How horrible this would be. AIDS meant death, almost instant death. Who would get the gruesome assignment of watching Magic waste away in some hospital, noting his dropping weight day by day? Who would sit vigil on his new wife, Cookie? Who would write the obituary? ”
		— Aldridge

"First of all, to see him broad as a house and beaming, and devoted a substantial portion of his life to the business of giving back to the community as well as his wife and family, it's very meaningful for all of us," Stern said. "And I really do think that Magic, because of who he was in terms of his public adulation, was very much able to change the nature of debate on AIDS in this country. He gave it a different face, and shortly before Magic, this was a country that was telling little kids who were hemophiliacs that they couldn't go to school to be with other children. And I think that Magic and actually the entire course of the education that went through us by virtue of Karl's remarks and Karl's I think being open to learning and change, as well as Magic coming back and playing, had a good deal to do with sort of the debate changing with respect to HIV and AIDS."

God, so much has changed. Magic did a lot of it himself. He started with that All-Star game in Orlando in February 1992, knocking down the opposition one player at a time. He bumped with Dennis Rodman and tossed in a hook. He ran past Reggie Lewis for a layin. And then, in the last minute, Michael Jordan cleared out the floor against him, and it was one-on-one. And the next time down, it was Isiah Thomas clearing out the floor, and it was one-on-one. It was joyous, it was basketball. And when he threw in a 30-foot hook with 14 seconds left -- to this day, there are still 14 seconds left in the 1992 All-Star Game -- the place exploded, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Then he went to Portland and Monte Carlo and Barcelona for the Olympics, and he got the biggest cheers by far, from fans and opponents alike. "Majeek! Majeek!" they screamed, and they took his picture over and over, and he smiled that smile.

And he didn't die. Yeah, he came back a few times, once as a coach and twice as a player, and that was probably two times two many, combined. He didn't fit as a coach, when he threw Vlade Divac's cell phone against the wall in frustration after it went off in the locker room. And he didn't fit in as a player with the Lakers of Van Exel and the like, and it ended badly. So he became a part-time barnstorming player and a full-time businessman, and a damn good one.

And so much hasn't changed. According to the Centers for Disease Control's HIV Prevention Strategic Plan Through 2005, two-thirds of all women and 42 percent of all men with AIDS in 1999 were African-American. Currently, only 70 percent of those who are infected with HIV know they are infected. Only half of those infected in the United States are linked to treatments and care. The disease is running rampant through Africa, with no end in sight, and after years of slowing the increase of new infections in the United States, the numbers are going back up.

Are NBA players more careful in their sexual behaviors? Are any of us? It's obviously a question with no empirical evidence available. Ask Charles Barkley, as I did last week, and he says that NBA players are being stereotyped and scapegoated.

"Bad parenting," he says. "Bad, bad parenting. Raise your own damn kids."

Byron Scott, now the Nets' head coach, thinks that there was a brief respite from unsafe sex after Johnson's announcement -- but that now, things are perilously close to back to normal. Stern, of course, has a different view.

"I think that there's a lot more attention being paid than there ever was," Stern said. "And I also think that -- I think that Magic's entire history here demonstrates a positive role in a potentially tragic situation that a sports league and all sports can play in public education. ... I can't tell you exactly how the players have changed in all aspects of their practices but I can tell you that along with America, we're much less fearful on the subject of AIDS and more knowledgeable about how it can and cannot be transmitted. ... Like so many other things, we have to either go to or return to a time of individual responsibility and you know, there are none so unfortunate as those who will not learn. But that can only be their issue. We are not in the business of snooping in that respect, but you do the best you can. You lay the information out there. You reinforce it. You reinforce it some more. And then people have to be responsible for the way in which they behave and conduct themselves."

Since Nov. 7, 1991, no NBA player has announced a positive HIV test. Does that mean there are no HIV-positive NBA players in the league? It's hard to believe that. More likely, like Magic, there is an HIV-positive person with access to cutting edge drugs, top-shelf weight training and a world-class body to start with. And he's playing. And no one is getting sick from banging bodies with him, no one is catching the disease from trading sweat from him.

He is living. As is Johnson.

Saw him last in Indianapolis in July, at the Indiana Black Expo. He was receiving the Entrepreneur of the Year Award, for opening up Starbucks Coffee shops in black communities around the country, and Magic Johnson Theatres in black communities around the country, and TGI Fridays in black communities around the country, for being a one-man works program. I sat next to him. He sat next to Jalen Rose, who was also getting an award from the Black Expo. And he spent the entire hour telling Rose that he needed to get to know the power brokers in the city, from the governor on down, because when Magic Johnson called people like the governor of a state, it wasn't to loan his name to some photo op, it was to discuss business.

There was a truly delightful young woman there, in her teens, who was also living with HIV, and who'd been living with it as long as Johnson. She got a standing ovation when she was done talking, and it was because she's found a way to thrive, not just survive.

Then it was my time to announce the guest of honor.

I am so proud to say I called him Earvin.

I'll leave the obit to somebody else.

MJ's Potential Gamble
While I had the Commish in the chair, I had to ask him about the story in the Hartford Courant that depicted a high-stakes night of gambling at the Mohegan Sun with Michael Jordan, Antoine Walker and Richard Hamilton following the Wizards' final preseason game with the Celtics. The story claimed -- and I must say claimed, because the reporting is of the someone-told-someone-who-told-someone variety -- that Jordan was down $500,000 at one point, but rallied during the night and finished $800,000 ahead. I asked him if the story was of concern to him, given Jordan's history and the unending capacity for some to find fault with the perfectly legal act of gambling in a casino -- as long as the person gambling is Jordan.

"No," Stern said.

None whatsoever?

"No."

Why not?

"Because, just as we don't go into lecturing players beyond educating them, the notion that we should tell a player that he can or cannot be in a casino and gamble is long gone," he said. "As long as there's no betting on sports involved, particularly (the) NBA, our players are free to do what they want to do. They're adults and it's a question of individual accountability and individual responsibility."

So I asked him if generally, as long as there isn't a sports book at a casino, he wouldn't have a problem with any NBA players gambling?

"I'm not (saying) that we even tell players they can't go into a sports book, a place that has a sports book, but we don't -- our players aren't allowed to bet (on NBA games) -- but we don't say you can't gamble," Stern said. "And frankly, on the subject of gambling, years ago I lost my ability to get excited about it when I saw the governors of states of the United States telling us that we should bet the grocery money on the lottery to help education or senior citizen housing or whatever. It's just one big hypocritical mess as we rush as states so we can push gambling on our citizens so we can not have to increase their taxes. So I'm cool on that subject because I think any other approach would be totally hypocritical."

OK, last question: The amount of money allegedly involved doesn't concern you?

"I guess it depends on how much you have," Stern said, laughing. "And I'm not going to count anyone's money at this point. What you or I might think was a large bet might seem small to someone else and I think that if people want to go someplace and gamble -- to help the population, help the economy, however it's now targeted -- the fact that somebody gets a 3rd person account from a security guard who heard it from someone who might be there ... I think you're just helping to make the point."

Keep an Eye on