His revelation about his condition forced him to retire from Basketball at 32 and he was also faced with rumours of being gay or bisexual – rumours he dismissed immediately.Īfter two attempts to rejoin the NBA he left the game for good. Magic Johnson was convinced to become a public face of the condition by a friend and he has done so excellently for 25 years. The stress coursed through my veins like a poison, occupying practically every moment of my day.’ Or worse, that my baby would be sick and not make it. She writes: ‘Every morning I would wake up in a panic, worried that I too might be HIV positive and die. To deal with the stress he shifted into ‘warrior mode’ and buried himself in organization.Ĭookie said that she stopped thinking about the past and the future and she found that the only way to survive was to ‘breathe your way through this moment. Magic Johnson’s doctors had originally told him that he had three years to live. ‘We’re going to beat this together,’ she told him and ordered him to get on his knees and pray. An hour later he came back home.Ĭookie writes: ‘My husband walked toward me, took my hand into his and slowly marched me back into the den…the two of us sat at the foot of our huge chaise lounge and I held my breath’.Īccording to her, Magic Johnson told her that she could leave him if she wanted but she grabbed his hand and put it on her belly. She asked him: ‘What’s wrong, do you have AIDS or something?’ to which he didn’t reply. She thought he had suffered a career-ending injury, wanted a divorce or was leaving her. I can’t tell you over the phone’.Ĭookie writes that her husband’s hushed words ‘sent a chill creeping over my heart’. He said, ‘I have to talk to you, but I’m on my way to the doctor’s office right now. I’ll tell you what’s going on when I get home, Cookie. Talking about how she found out from Magic, she writes that he called her up and said, ‘I’m coming home early because I have to tell you something.’ She tightened her grip on the receiver and could feel herself becoming nervous. Magic had dated on-and-off for 12 years before they got married in 1991 and barely 45 days after their world has shaken. She says, ‘In just one moment our world, this perfect union we’d fought so hard and so long to have was obliterated.’ So he tracked down as many as he could and gave each a call which would turn their lives upside down.Ĭookie writes in the memoir that going through that herself was like being in her own ‘personal hell’ – one marked by ‘silence and darkness, numbness’. He could not remember how many women he had slept with. Her memoir reveals that on that night in 1991, the Los Angeles Lakers point guard ‘locked himself in a room and called the long list of women with whom he’d been intimate’. Magic flew in a hundred of the couple’s closest friends and family to mark their marriage milestone. The couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary last week. The couple, who have now been married for 25 years with 3 kids, stayed strong through those trying times when the illness was generally thought only to affect the gay community. Magic Johnson & Cookie Johnson in June 2016
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