One-on-One: The Untold Story of the Game That Made Magic

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is. I wanted him to feel human and not like an amoeba. Right after this ad. Uhm, I understand that you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a lot of choices, maybe Acer can help. Now I hear you think, how then? Well, for example, when you're paying for the things you love to be, you're going to be a bad thing. Want to know more about the insurance where a bad thing is possible? Go to asr.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. This is ASR for you and a bad thing. ASR does it. So, we can listen to your podcast now. I'm not. But you are here because, first off, I need to apologize to you because this took way too long to get on the show. It's been over a year. It has been. And there's a reason why we've been investigating this story for so long. I promise. But to just timestamp us as to like how this started for you. Yeah. There is a flyer. There is a flyer. With a date. and I was hoping you could read it and describe the thing that sent you down this rabbit hole in the first place. The thing that sent me down this rabbit hole is a black square on which is some neon-colored writing. It says Circo Loco on two lines and under it says New York Halloween, 26 October 2024. And on the lineup are some DJs, names below it. and me versus Rampa, a guy named Chris Stucey, Golfos, which is an act of two DJs, Pasa and Dennis Cruz, one named Map.Ake, and the very last name on it, at the bottom, in the center, is Ronnie Cycli, below which are the words Brooklyn Storehouse, which is a massive warehouse in Brooklyn. And so the idea that Ronnie Cycli caught your eye. Yes. What did you think when you saw his name? Why is Ronnie Cycli's name on this flyer? One of the thoughts that I would have, that I actually did have when I was in Miami, when I was in South Beach for work years ago, and I saw Ronnie Cycli's name myself on some equivalent advertisement was, oh, someone has ironically called their band Ronnie Cycli. Ronnie Cycli, yeah. I'm like, that's a great idea. It's a great pull. But in this case, as we learned, There is an entire generation of people out there who only learn as a secondary course of information that he played in the NBA. He finds Rice at the top, lobs it low for Saitley, makes the catch in the lane, puts it up, and he's got a foul. Saitley, offensive rebound. Excellent. A terrific power move for Saitley. In the overtop, Saitley, and he's fouled. Saitley again. Saitley fights his way into the basket. and the foul. He has been troublesome for... Yes, he is, in fact, the ninth overall pick of the 1988 NBA draft, a former All-American at Syracuse, a guy who played in the 90s and imprinted himself on my brain with the Miami Heat, first and foremost, as one of the first, like, really famous foreign players, big men, in the league. Running cycling bent all six feet, 11 and three quarters inches of his brain into a chair for his first Miami Heat press conference today and right away claimed he was thankful he wasn't picked earlier yesterday by phoenix when they picked tim perry i was i was you know i was one step closer to getting to miami and i was just so excited i looked back to my parents and uh and uh you know i just went like this to them just pray i know ronnie cycli because i was an adherent of the original nba gm and on On the original NBA Jam, 1993, the Miami Heat lineup included Ronnie Slykley, who was later also included on NBA Jam Tournament Edition. That's to lamb beer! Slykley! Kaboom! Right. I last saw Ronnie Slykley in earnest when I was using him to brutally foul Danny Manning in NBA Jam. and here he is atop a DJ booth, dropping a beat in a way that clearly is something to be reckoned with. This story on its own, by the way, that's an episode. It started that way. This started with just Ronnie Cycli is a DJ and not just a DJ, a successful one and by many objective measures, an absolutely solid one, if not a great one. We have the ability, we have the permission, the legal clearance to play DJ Ronnie Cycli. What song would you like to choose to introduce our audience to the kind of stuff that this guy gets into now? I think we're going to go with Lose Your Love. around and talk it over so many things that i want to say you know i like my girls a little bit I just want to use your love tonight. I want to lose your love tonight. Are you imagining the giant fog jets coming up? I should say that I f***ing love this. Honestly? Honestly? Slaps! If this happened at a wedding reception, I would freak the f*** out. Lose your mind. So, as you were saying, this is an episode unto itself. Yes. You're allowed to now reveal that after seeing this flyer in October of 2024, you did some more research and you saw something else. I did. We're about to listen to a speech. It is a YouTube clip of a fundraiser for the Magic Johnson Foundation at the Staples Center in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Magic announcing that he had HIV. This clip starts with a question. How did the reception that you got from other players change as you continued your career? And then what do you think the reception would be today if there was an athlete in your situation? What was that question speaking to? The stigma around an HIV-positive diagnosis, there was so much misinformation and fear around how HIV was spread. The disease has already claimed more victims than Legionnaire's disease and toxic shock syndrome combined. More than 800 cases nationwide, 300-plus of those fatal. And every day, three more cases are identified. And yet, still, surprisingly few people are familiar with the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or the acronym by which it's frequently identified, AIDS. I mean, like, the absolute uncertainty and ignorance around this topic, which, of course, speaks to a greater public health issue in America and globally, that created a very difficult environment for Magic Johnson to be in the NBA. It's a sport dominated by straight men. We just all to say that when Magic Johnson replies, it's worth paying attention to what he immediately mentions. And I owe Ronnie Cycli a lot because he played one-on-one and opened up all the guys' eyes that when we played one-on-one, then guys said, oh, okay, nothing can happen to me by playing one-on-one against Magic. So thank you for that. And so my first reaction when I saw that clip was, I didn't know that this was a thing. And what did you know about it? Nothing. That clip of Magic talking about it comes, I think, like 53 minutes into that YouTube clip. And again, it's, you know, 15 seconds of video. That's it. I knew nothing. There is very little out there about this. And the fact is, Magic Johnson and Ronnie Cycli crossover in the NBA is very limited. So why Magic Johnson would be talking about Ronnie Cycli? Mystifying. when we started digging into this, it turns out that lots of people fundamentally are as ignorant as we are. That's correct. The number of places that you can even find a mention of this one-on-one game at all, I mean, first, yes, that clip you just played for us, but the second place is on page 253 of a book written by my old friend and colleague at Around the Horn, who thankfully knew more about this than either of us. My name is Jackie McMullin. I'm a retired sports journalist. But I think the reason we're speaking today is I wrote a book called When the Game Was Ours that chronicled the parallel lives of Larry Bird and Irvin Magic Johnson. And the thing to know about Jackie is that she is as plugged into this network as anybody can be. Especially in the 80s and the 90s when all of this was happening. And she has known Magic personally for so long that, yes, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird chose her to write this book with them. For our purposes, it's funny because Ronnie Cycli is only mentioned in a single paragraph of this book. Just one. And the part of the book where this happens is the part where there is a more famous Magic Johnson announcement on video. This is November 7th, 1991. And this clip, I think a lot of us have heard before. First of all, let me say good after late afternoon. Um, because of the HIV virus that I have attained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today. It was probably the worst day of my professional life because we were certain that Magic Johnson was going to die. I mean, that's what they were saying. Three years, Matt, you know. and work got out very quickly. They held the press conference where you've just never seen Magic look that way. So it was a very, very shocking announcement. I plan on going on, living for a long time, bugging you guys like I've always have. So you'll see me around. I plan on being with the Lakers in the league. Hopefully David will have me for a while. Of course, I was based in Boston at that time. I remember going to Larry Bird's locker to talk to him about it. And of course, they were so intertwined throughout their careers, it was just inevitable that that would happen. And I remember the look on Larry's face. He just, he told me afterwards, they had a game, I think it was a day later, and they were going to play Atlanta. And he told me many years later, it was the first time in his life he didn't feel like playing basketball. He just, it just didn't seem important anymore. When that announcement happened, God, it must've been seven. Yeah. And... I was six, yeah. The feeling was, Magic Johnson's going to die. He has HIV which will lead into AIDS This is something that you get and you die from It is fatal And also the way you get it it was a sexually transmitted disease or you could get it through a blood transfusion But again, the fear and uncertainty around it led to people believing that you could get it from a toilet seat. Toilet seat covers were a whole thing in the early 90s. Suddenly they started appearing everywhere, which obviously is fundamentally untrue. But nobody really understood. How did this happen? How did this happen? People were just saying magic had AIDS, by the way. It wasn't even like a distinction. Right. There was no distinction. It was what I, when I was explaining it to somebody recently, I said, do you remember the moment when Tom Hanks announced that he had COVID? Multiply that by a thousand. Yes. And that was the cultural impact of that moment. And the people who were fearful, not just because this virus now existed, but because they were being blamed for it. Correct. Gay men all across America. A mystery disease known as the gay plague has become an epidemic unprecedented in the history of American medicine. Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer. Because it existed within that community, it just was not acknowledged until Magic Johnson. Magic Johnson was the start of so many things that touched the predominant pop culture that had to do with HIV and AIDS. There are all these things that spiderwebbed out of that moment. But prior to that moment, it was so contained to such a specific and relatively to most Americans, obscure context. And the context for who Magic Johnson was for people who don't remember him in his prime. This is a guy that you would invite into your living room and you would love to have him as your best buddy. A teddy bear of a man. And so that degree of popularity, by the way, leads to a very awkward and unprecedented dynamic because the All-Star voting had already begun for the 92 All-Star game. Correct. But Magic Johnson is effectively, in everyone's understanding, dying. and therefore not playing basketball anymore. Done with the NBA. And yet, he ends up leading the voting. Which brings us to this conversation that Jackie told us about that happened between Magic Johnson and the commissioner of the NBA, the late David Stern, that took a turn that I think a lot of the league was not ready for. I always say this. I think the most underrated moment of Commissioner David Stern's career was this moment, Pablo. Because the minute he learned of this diagnosis, he did what David Stern always did. He learned more about it than anybody else. And when Irvin called him and said, what if I play in the All-Star game? Stern immediately says, yes, because he's done his homework. He understands that all these ways that people think HIV can be transmitted are not. really true. It's not sweat to sweat. It's an infinitesimal chance of that happening. And so he's going to make sure this occurs. Now, immediately, NBA owners are saying, we're not signing off on this. We're not putting our star players out there at risk. We're not doing it. And Stern said to them privately, this was all privately. Listen, I'm just going to tell you, you better be ready for a discrimination suit. Because I'm going to encourage them to file a discrimination suit if you say no to this. And so be ready for that. Are you ready for HIV mandatory testing in the NBA? Are you convinced that Irvin Magic Johnson is the only person that's HIV positive in the NBA? And David Stern says, because I'm not. Which is, by the way, a pretty f***ing radical thing for the commissioner of the NBA to suggest about this league of very straight men. Shout out David Stern. I don't think a lot of people know that. And the NBA, the other players, yeah, they didn't love this idea. They were not crazy about this, no. Needless to say. And so I just want to play, for instance, as an example of this mentality. A bit of testimony from noted public intellectual. Carl Malone. If I get in a collision with a guy, it don't have to be Magic. It can be Joe Smoe. But the fact of the matter is, if you got the AIDS virus, it'd be hard for me to play as hard as I'm capable of playing. And if people can't respect my decision, that's tough. The question that Magic Johnson has to ask himself is, so if I'm going to play in this all-star game, but I'm not playing in basketball games, how do I not embarrass myself? You're trying to stay in shape. You're practicing. And the problem is, Magic Johnson, one of the most beloved athletes in the known universe, the guy at the center of the biggest news cycle in America, can't find anybody to play basketball with him. Right. They literally don't want to touch him. No, they don't. So he is showing up before Lakers games at the Forum, shooting around on his own. It's sad. It is. It is like a poetically sad image. And this brings us to the day in question, January 5th, 1992, the Heat's in town. And they're playing the Lakers. And just as he's been, Magic Johnson is shooting around on the court with nobody else on it before the Lakers take to the court and start shooting around and practicing for the game and warming up. So even Jackie, who knows about this, was not there. Not a lot of people were. we managed to find somebody who was. Hi, this is Rick Loaiza, and I am a lifelong Lakers fan. We just got to visually describe where Rick is because it looks like he's in a temple that is dedicated to the Lakers. The top half of the wall is yellow. Gold, excuse you. Gold, gold, gold. Laker gold. There is a molding in the middle of the room, and then the bottom half is purple, violet, if you will. There's an NBA champions banner in which it lists all the times the Lakers won titles. It is a veritable Lakers shrine. His dad was a Peruvian immigrant and eventual Angeleno and eventual Lakers season ticket holder. And Rick grew up a massive Magic Johnson fan, his favorite player ever. And in January 1992, Rick was 17 years old at the time. And his dad would pick him up from school. They would show up early. as soon as the doors open, rush down to the court and watch the guy shoot around. It's just another Lakers game he was hitting. Which is to say that when Rick discovered Jackie McMullen's book and got to page 253, he had a particular reaction. He freaked out. I jumped out of my seat, ran out to find my wife, and said, you'll never believe what I just read in this book. And I told her I was there. We're at the forum, the old forum, and the Lakers are going to play the Heat. And so Ronnie's down one end rehabbing his injury. And Magic had just made a habit of this, working out before every game. We go in, like my dad and I, we went straight through the little gate and then right down the stairs to the court. And I don't look at the court initially. I'm just looking down to make sure my steps are okay and I'm not going to trip. But as I look up and I see Magic Johnson on the court, I mean, I knew it instantly. You can't mistake his size and just the way he moves. So, yeah, I was like, oh, you know, holy crap, dad. So this is happening in real time. It's, you know, probably, I don't know, an hour before the game. As you know, each player has their own pregame routine, and most of them disappear to the locker room right before, you know, when the fans are all filing in. I mean, my eyes were as wide as saucers as I'm like, this is. And I couldn't believe how close I got because as a 17-year-old Magic Johnson fan, I had never stood that close to him. You know, so it was about 10 feet, and that's the closest I've ever been able to stand to him. And at some point during this, Rick notices Ronnie Cycli on the other end of the court who is rehabbing an injury. He is not going to play in that night's game like Magic Johnson. Cycli is just taking some shots, you know, a few little hook shots. Then he kind of moved out kind of near the elbow area. A few free throws, just doing his own thing. And after a few minutes, he just he grabbed the ball and he just starts walking toward where magic is and i don't remember exactly what he said because i couldn't quite hear him you know clearly but he just said like hey you want to go and something like that and magic said yeah so to have someone say hey you want to play this was a big deal for ervin it was such a relief and he was so happy about it I think Magic gave Cycli the ball to start. I do remember that at first there was just, I think Cycli started with a jumper, so no contact yet. And then Magic had the ball. And rather than shoot from outside, I think he just wanted to test Cycli. And he comes down and tries to, back to the basket, tries to get into the post. So he's forcing Cycli into low post defense. And I think Magic took just kind of a simple, kind of a baby hook shot kind of a thing. and again, not really recognizing what's happening, but now there's starting to be, there's contact. There's defensive contact going both ways, but it started slowly. And then it kind of got more intense and more intense. And now it got to be a pretty good game of one-on-one. But what happens now is, you know, it's getting closer to game time and the Miami Heat players are wandering out to get ready to actually play this actual game that Irvin has no place in, or Ronnie for that matter, and neither one of them are playing in the game. and again, the tensions are heightened. What's Ronnie doing? We don't want him doing that. We need him back. Why is he playing with Magic? Why is he taking this risk? I do remember that some Heat, not the whole team, but there were some Heat players and some Lakers players that were starting to come out of the tunnel and kind of hung back in the tunnel, but you could see them, and they were definitely watching Magic and Cycli. I have no idea, and I don't want to try to kind of guess, but they were definitely talking to each other, and they were pointing. they were talking and but they stayed back they were not going to get on the court they were going to wait until this was done I mean they wouldn't even go to the other end they were just going to just stay there kind of at the where the tunnel opens up and just wait but yeah there was definitely kind of some hushed conversation maybe it was about Magic and Ronnie maybe it wasn't but it was it looked like to me it looked like they were talking about what was happening on the court What do you think when you hear that? Without also imputing the worst sort of thinking to the players observing it, I can imagine these guys freaking out, out of ignorance, out of self-interest, maybe most generously, the idea that these motherfuckers are spreading this virus and it's going to get back to us. Bewilderment is the word that comes to mind. they must be bewildered at what is playing out in front of them. The idea that a random one-on-one game that was happening between two injured players who weren't even going to play that night ends up being one of the most radical acts in sports history. For a number of reasons. And one of the reasons is because of the reaction that young 17-year-old Rick was observing. Correct. Of like these guys being like, what the f*** are they doing? And Ronnie's going to go back in the locker room, and he's eventually going to be playing again. What is happening is what these guys are thinking. And it raises a zillion questions now for me, because how Ronnie Cycli became the guy who did that, the guy who was uniquely brave enough to invite Magic into a game of one-on-one, how do we explain this And that is the question that I have wanted to know throughout all of this more than anything else And it's something that Ronnie has not talked about publicly, if at all. And this is where, yes, we also, it turns out, assigned you to approach Ronnie Cycli one-on-one. Yes. Which initially happened over email. Didn't work out. So I went to that show that we mentioned earlier in a giant warehouse in Brooklyn by the Navy Yard full of very loud music and a lot of people dancing to it. And I managed to get on stage behind the DJ booth as he was getting up. And he is also 6'11 and towering over me. And I am, for the record, 5'7 and a half. and like talking in that circumstance, telling him that I have this thing to ask him about is not easy. So I pull out my phone with the email to his manager on it and say, I have something for you to read. And he says right now. And I say, yes, I need you to read this right now. Here. Before this beat drops. Before the beat drops, I need you to read this. And Ronnie was kind enough to pull out his reading glasses and look at my phone. and he put it down and said, yes, I will talk to you about this story. We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times games, and here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people. Play with friends that you already know, or you can just be matched with someone else in the world. I have a J for 10 points, and I can put that on a double letter. So J-A-M, that's 24 points. I'm going to take facts and make it faxes for 30 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. I don't know what tanga means, so I'm going to press down on the word. And, oh, definition popped up. As in English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and coworkers. New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. So the summit you had with DJ Ronnie Cycli took place where? In Miami, home to Club Space. One of the most legendary clubs in the world. A place where Ronnie Cycli has DJed many times. We should reveal that this took place when? December 2024. You were so innocent then. I was a sweet summer child. And young Ronnie Cycli, the child, like what's his background? He always loved dance music. It's been a thread throughout his entire life. Music was always part of my DNA. We listen to so much music when we're home. My dad loved music. So I think I get that from him. He listened to a lot of soul in disco growing up, a lot of Barry White around the house. So music was always a constant presence in his life. He always knew he was going to be an athlete. He was built like an athlete. But he loved music. He was buying records. He had turntables. and he was messing with records and going to clubs when he was definitely way too young to be there and hanging out in this world as he was achieving ascendance as a college basketball player and then a pro basketball player. And his favorite player growing up was who? His favorite player was Magic Johnson. First of all, you got to understand that Magic was like an idol. Growing up in Greece, There was no television broadcasting NBA or anything like that. All we got was the finals, Magic Against Bird. That's all I know of the NBA when I was living in Greece. So to me, Magic Johnson was like an idol. So Ronnie Cycli in 1991, he was with the Miami Heat, as we established. his reaction to the HIV announcement was what when he heard it for the first time? Devastated? We were on the road somewhere and we watched it on television. You and the other guys on the team. Yes. And it was just one of those, like, shockers, you know. It was kind of like when Elvis Presley died, when John Kennedy got assassinated. It's one of those moments when 9-11 happened. You kind of remember where you were at that time. And I happened to be watching TV at the time, and it came on as breaking news. And obviously, we couldn't believe it. But he also knew a little bit more about what was going on with Magic than pretty much every other player in the NBA, you have to imagine. Why did Ronnie have a perspective on HIV and AIDS in 1991 that was shared by seemingly very, very, very few people, not just in sports, but in America in general? Yeah, a couple reasons for this. But where it concerns DJ Ronnie Cycli, there is a significant overlap between the history of dance music in America and globally and queer communities and communities of color and queer communities of color, which is where the HIV epidemic really took hold in America. It is the dominant subculture that it came of age in, so to speak. And house music as we know it today originated in a Chicago club called the Warehouse. It was the sound of the culture most affected by HIV in the 80s. Which is to say that as much as sports was riven by this scandal, what this genre of music was dealing with in real time was not unfamiliar to Ronnie. But just the mechanics of the science of the virus, like why did he already have such confidence that this was a risk that wasn't really a risk in the way that people saw this one-on-one game being? Right. He had a personal connection to it. My cousin who was living in Washington, D.C., was one of the earliest patients with AIDS. He was a hemophiliac, and he got it from a blood transfusion. And we would always, you know, whenever I got to Washington, D.C., I would go to the hospital and sit by his bedside. and we were never told not to touch or not to feel or not to do anything. It was just kind of a normal thing that he just got a blood transfusion that was not good. So we knew it was kind of more of a blood thing. So I had like an early kind of recognition of what was going on with this. I also had a lot of gay friends. that got the virus, and they got it sexually. And yet we still went to the hospital, and we saw them, and we were around them, and nothing happened. And he got, this happened around that time, 89, 90, yeah. And then my other gay friend, probably in 91 or 92, so I started a couple of different times. Yeah, I'd never heard any of that before. Neither had I until I was in that warehouse in Brooklyn with Ronnie and he says this to me. I had no idea that Ronnie and couldn't have imagined. I thought maybe he was just somebody who was incredibly well-educated about these kinds of things or... Or hadn't really thought about it even. Yeah, or just hadn't thought about it. The idea that Ronnie Cycli, a professional athlete, NBA player, is just casually saying, oh, yeah, and my gay friend. Right. Like, that alone is sort of subversive in ways that we should not be numb to given what the timeline here is. And, you know, not to expound too headily about the virtues of dance music, but you have to imagine, he came into contact with a lot of, and made a lot of gay friends, through his love of dance music. This was all just him privately making friends, living his life, caring for people. Correct. His own loved ones, family members and otherwise. And what happened? How are those people doing now that he mentioned? They passed away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He passed away. He just disintegrated completely and passed away. My other friend was here living in Miami and, you know, he started getting the skin lesions and we stayed with him as long as we could. He was at Mount Tainai Hospital here. We stayed with him as long as we could and he just – he was getting injections in his eyes in order not to go blind. Like the early barbaric ways of treating this was really, really hard. Discushating it. Yeah. He had to go to the hospital. Before he actually checked into the hospital in order not to lose his eyesight, he was getting injected in his eyes. And so I've seen the ugly side of it. And I'm glad that they found a much easier way to go through with it and live with it. Like, part of me wants to not be awestruck when someone who's like the prom king in the movie is kind. And yet there is a reason you are. Yeah, which raises the question of like, in an NBA locker room, what was it like to be the guy who DJs at this point in American history? Needless to say, the rest of the players on the Miami Heat were not house music fans. House music did not really get a foothold in the NBA still hasn't, really, if we're being honest. So he was a little different. Besides not being from America, he had some different tastes as well. And yet, it is an interesting wrinkle when Magic Johnson, who is the most popular athlete in America until this happened, ends up being the guy who needed, without ever asking for it, needed a Ronnie Cycli to care for him in ways that clearly only a couple people knew about. I walked out on the court knowing what he had just gone through and the backlash that he was getting from all the players of not wanting to play against him. Nobody wants to touch him. Nobody wants to be around him. And I just walked up to him and I said, do you want to play one-on-one? and he looked at me kind of like not sure if I was joking or not. And he was like, sure. And I said, I'm not going to take it easy on you. I'm going to push you. I'm going to shove you, and we're going to go at it. And he looked at me. It was like as if it was Christmas, and this kid got a brand-new present that he wanted, that he's always wanted. His eyes just lit up and he looked at me He was like let go I wanted him to feel human and not like an amoeba You know like everybody wants to be away from him I wanted him to feel good about himself. I wanted other players to see this. And so I wasn't kind of like playing him. I was playing him. I was playing him. He was posting me up. He was taking me down, pounding the ball, trying to take me, you know. And then we played. We played. Was it fun? It was so much fun. And he was so grateful. And he was so thankful that I take that to my grave, that I was able to put a smile on somebody's face that doesn't necessarily need it with all his fame and fortune, everything that he's done in his life. But in that moment, I put a smile on his face. And that's the most important thing for me. Right. You know, I just wanted to show him that somebody cares for him, that somebody is there for him. Somebody is going to play basketball with you, something that you love. And the least thing I can do as a young kid who grew up watching you is be respectful to you, knowing that I'm not going to get infected by pushing you, shoving you, and playing basketball against you. And so all of this now raises the next question, which is, have Magic and Ronnie talked about this event, this one-on-one game, since it happened? Not publicly, but once. Ronnie told me that he ran into Magic Johnson in an elevator in New York. And Magic expressed his gratitude again and basically said to Ronnie, anything you ever need from me, you got it. Now, the thing that we needed for Magic Johnson that now kind of explains why we took more than a year of waiting before publishing this episode is Magic Johnson. We kind of needed magic. We did. To fully finish the depth of story. But this was difficult And I apologize I should mention here that I've listened to many episodes of this Regal podcast Not every single one And I had not listened to a certain episode When Neely gave me this assignment And said, by the way Have you heard the other Magic Johnson episode? Are you familiar with our landmark investigation into who actually sends Magic Johnson's tweets. Because that, I think... Look, we can't say definitively, and I should say this for journalistic reasons, I cannot tell you that the reason Magic Johnson is not in this episode, spoiler alert, is because we outed Alexia Grievous Henderson, who was his communications person, his trusted employee, as the person who was basically taking dictation for Magic Johnson when he says stuff like the Lakers won period by a score of 109 to 97. Right, and because Magic didn't participate in the episode and she declined to comment, you guys got Rob Lowe, who partied with Magic Johnson in the 80s to comment on the veracity of Magic Johnson's Twitter and then found out we believe that it was her anyway. Yeah, I mean, listen, I have it on very good authority. that he dictates it. He has somebody who, you know, whatever occurs to him, and with the emphasis on whatever occurs to him, it's the best. I mean, that's what Twitter was made for him. Made. Exactly. But I'll ask Magic next time I see him. I'm going to say, the world wants to know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you investigate everything all the time, it turns out, you end up burning bridges that you wish you hadn't singed. And so, just to give you the full accounting for the audience of what we tried to do, we tried going through Magic's Foundation. We certainly directly reached out to the communications person aforementioned, who is now the president, who has perhaps uncoincidentally only grown in power since these last calls were made. And Magic, by the way, is somebody I've interviewed before previous to that Twitter investigation. There's a very embarrassing video, and this is the effect that Magic Johnson still has on people. He visited the Seaport Studios in New York City where ESPN used to tape. I was an employee. I f***ing, and this is not something I'm proud of, I jumped on a couch like Tom Cruise to meet him eye to eye and like dap him up, which is a violation of all sorts of principles that I have journalistic and otherwise in retrospect. But that dude, I can tell you, is a great hugger. Yeah, I bet. The warmest man. You denied me that hug. I feel personally responsible for how this got derailed. I do want to say in your credit, there has been some real attempts at shoe leather reporting, specifically with Pablo getting ejected from the lower tranche of a Dodgers game while stalking Magic Johnson like prey in the heat of the moment. Can we throw to that picture? Do we have the photo that I... I have the screen grab of the text. It was infuriating because I went to a Dodger game and Magic Johnson happens to be, you know, part owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers among many other enterprises that he partakes in. And I made it behind home plate. You were close. Genuinely like a mid-range jumper away from Magic Johnson, who was right there behind the plate. And I stood slash crouched there for so long that the security guard at Dodger Stadium, who clearly doesn't subscribe to this YouTube channel, told me that I had to leave. And I never got to approach Magic one-on-one either. It was a great attempt. it was pathetic. And so we had to figure out in lieu of the man himself, who can help explain what this all meant to Magic Johnson? And we found someone who I genuinely think is probably the next best thing. My name is Lon Rosen. I'm the executive vice president of the Los Angeles Dodgers. But in my previous life, I was Magic Johnson's agent. And you know, there are some agents where it's like, yeah, okay, you know, you get 10% or whatever. Lon Rosen has been his dear personal friend. Magic's, like, intimate since 1987. And so when it gets to who was there, who was right alongside Magic for this rollercoaster ride through the national news of, you know, this moral panic, turns out that Lon Rosen was also at the forum right alongside our 17-year-old friend Rick at the time for the one-on-one game on January 5th, 1992. I was there. This was two or three hours before the game. Magic was shooting on the Lakers side of the court, and Ronnie was shooting on the other side by himself. I believe he was injured at this point, and he was just working out. And at one point, he just came over to say hello to Magic, and the next thing I knew, they were playing a game of one-on-one, and they were really, really playing hard. It was a huge turning point for him. And I think it showed that, yeah, you can go near him. You can touch him. You could even maybe sweat. Because it was really the first physical activity on a basketball court he had since his announcement, you know, two months prior to this. He had worked out, but really on his own, just shooting on his own. In a way, it sparked him for the rest of his life. I mean, he was down. Let's face it. He was sad. He was down. He was scared. But that day was like a rebirth, and it just, he went out from there. I mean, he never looked back. And so the game, the game that Magic Johnson was practicing for by playing one-on-one against Ronnie Cycli, we're now in Orlando. 25 of the game's greatest stars, and the top attraction today in Orlando is Magic. Urban Magic Johnson of the Lakers, the NBA's premier playmaker for more than a decade. It's February 9th, 1992. It's the NBA All-Star Game. And the game is, by the way, absurd. So the West, Magic Johnson's Western Conference team, defeats the East 153 to 113. There has never been a blowout like that in the history of the NBA All-Star Game. And Magic Johnson, wouldn't you know it, was the MVP, leading everybody, Foster, everybody with 25 points. Not bad for a guy who, you know, wasn't supposed to be playing basketball. anymore. Right, except there's something I want you to see, which is the very last shot of the game in the final moments. Michael said, you're not getting it. Yes, he is. Six, five, three-pointer. Yes! Oh, my! Yeah, there's like 22 seconds left, and Isaiah Thomas is trying to guard him. He's at the three-point line, and Magic just turns around and basically off of one foot just sinks this parabolic three. It's a ridiculous punctuation mark. It is, it is, but that's not the actual punctuation mark. What is is what happens immediately after that, which is all these guys running up to him, giving him high-fives, giving him hugs, doing something that was probably unthinkable to Magic Johnson just a couple months before as he's dealing with the fallout of his announcement, playing basketball by himself before Ronnie Cycli ever comes up to him on the floor of the forum and says, let's ball. Ladies and gentlemen, you just can't orchestrate it better than that. But when you're great, you deliver on cue. Three straight plays for Johnson. Foster, at the end of episodes like this, I, of course, need to say thank you for your reporting. Thank you for your patience. Anytime. But I also am now glancing through Ronnie Cycli's musical catalog on my computer where a playlist is being assembled. And I do feel like the only way to appropriately end this episode is to do the thing that you just alluded to, which is to say we should probably just press play. this has been pablo torre finds out a metal ark media production and i'll talk to you next time When I wake up in the morning, love And the sunlight hurts my eyes Something without warning, love That's heavy on my mind Then I look at you And the world all right, baby Just one look at you And I know it's gonna be A lovely A lovely A lovely A lovely A lovely