Magic Johnson, 20 years later

last updated 8 January 2015

Magic Johnson knows he’s a lucky man, said Allison Samuels in TheDailyBeast.com. Twenty years after the basketball great announced he’d contracted HIV, he’s alive and well. Back in 1991, when he startled the world by disclosing that he’d been infected, the disease was usually fatal.

“Hands down, the first five years were the most difficult for me,” he says. “There were those moments when thoughts came like, ‘What if I don’t make it?’ But they were fleeting. I couldn’t let myself stay there for long.” Eighteen months before it was approved for the general public, Johnson was one of the first patients to try a new, powerful cocktail of antiretroviral medications. The cocktail worked, suppressing the virus’s replication so completely that he never developed AIDS.

Now 51, he rises every morning at 4 a.m., and jogs five miles to his offices at Magic Johnson Enterprises, a multimillion-dollar company that specializes in urban redevelopment. He takes nothing for granted. “My son Andre, his wife, and baby girl were over to the house on Easter,” he says. “It was such a special moment, to be able to hold and play with my granddaughter and see my son actually become this great husband and father. I had to stop myself from tearing up, because who knew? Who really knew?”