Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan are two of the main reasons that the NBA is as big as it is today. The league was struggling in the 80s but the emergence of Magic and his rivalry with Larry Bird drew in viewers before Michael Jordan took over as the main man throughout the 90s. Together, the stars made the game truly global and brought an incredible amount of revenue to the NBA by extension.
While the two became quite close later in life, Jordan wasn’t always interested in having a friendship with the man that had gone before him. Magic was the biggest name in basketball when Jordan came in, he had the MVPs, Finals MVPs, and titles to his name but MJ would go on to eclipse all of that. Even before the success though, Jordan garnered a lot of attention, something that supposedly made Magic jealous.
(via The Ringer)
“Two days after the All-Star Game, he torched Isiah and his Pistons for 49 points. And, for the next few years, he resisted Magic’s Cheshire cat grin, choosing to engage in perfunctory hand shakes as opposed to bear hugs or high fives. Truth was, he didn’t trust Magic, and resisted developing a friendship with him.
“‘Well, I understood it to be jealousy. And you know, I think a lot of it came from—Magic Johnson should have been Michael Jordan before Michael Jordan. He had the smile, he had everything, he had the marketability. He had championships.'”
Jordan’s agent David Falk, once explained that the stars that came before Jordan would freeze him out on the court. There seemed to be a belief that all the attention MJ got before he won was a bit undeserved.
“Everyone knows they froze him out,” Falk tells me. “They froze him out because they were jealous. They said, ‘Who’s this rookie who hasn’t done anything–you know, has something that we don’t have?’”
This didn’t last for too long, both the MJs would go on to enjoy a lovely friendship and they are still friends now that they have been off the court for a few decades. Magic and Michael enjoyed some fun competitive interactions during the 1992 Dream Team run and MJ himself was reportedly very distraught upon learning about Johnson’s HIV diagnosis when it was first announced.
In The Last Dance, Johnson suggested that some of his fondest memories were with Michael Jordan, trying to play and beat him in card games on the bus and things like that (via si.com).
“Man, I had some of my fondest memories just hanging out with Michael,” Johnson said in the documentary. “We played cards every night against each other. And if I had the upper hand, he wanted to play another hour. [And] another hour.”
These two players arguably shaped the NBA more than anyone else that played in the league. Very few players have been able to enjoy the sort of sustained success and excellent rapport they did during their peak years in the NBA. Their story of friendship is an excellent example of the fact that even with a rocky start, any two people can connect and become friends.
