35 years ago today: Magic Johnson announces he has HIV and retires from the Lakers, and a news conference changes how the world sees the virus

Thirty-five years ago today, on November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson walked into a packed news conference at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California, and told the world he had tested positive for HIV. “Because of the HIV virus I have obtained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today,” he said.

Johnson was 32 years old, a five-time champion and a three-time MVP, only five months removed from the NBA Finals. He did not look sick, and he did not sound scared. “Life is going to go on for me, and I’m going to be a happy man,” he said. At a time when many Americans thought of HIV as a death sentence, and thought it could only happen to other people, the most famous smile in basketball changed the conversation in a single afternoon.

The afternoon at the Forum

Johnson had missed the Lakers’ first three games of the 1991-92 season with what the team called flu-like symptoms. The positive test came out of a physical for a life insurance policy. Team doctor Michael Mellman told reporters that Johnson was healthy, but that the grind of an NBA season could weaken his immune system, so he had to stop playing.

Johnson made the announcement with his wife, Cookie, close by. The couple had married that September, and she was pregnant. He made clear that she had tested negative and that he did not have AIDS, only the virus that causes it. Commissioner David Stern was in the room, along with former teammates Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Cooper.

“I think sometimes we think, well, only gay people can get it, ‘It’s not going to happen to me,'” Johnson said. “And here I am saying that it can happen to anybody, even me, Magic Johnson.” He said he would become a spokesman in the fight against the virus and wanted young people to understand that “safe sex is the way to go.”

A league in shock

Lakers general manager Jerry West called the news “a huge shock to us” and said it was “particularly emotionally” hard for the people around the team. That night at Madison Square Garden, Pat Riley, who had coached Johnson to four titles in Los Angeles and was now coaching the Knicks, asked for a moment of silence before New York played the Orlando Magic and then led the players and the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer. Outside the Forum, a couple of hundred fans stood quietly, waiting to see Johnson leave the building.

President George H. W. Bush called him “a hero for anyone who loves sports.” Later, Johnson said AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser was the person who convinced him to go public instead of hiding the diagnosis, and made him promise to become the face of the disease.

The 1992 All-Star Game

Johnson stayed retired, but the fans did not let him go. They voted him in as a starter for the 1992 All-Star Game in Orlando, even though he had not played a game all season. Some players, including Utah’s Karl Malone, worried about the risk if Johnson got cut on the court, and former teammates Byron Scott and A.C. Green said he should not play. Stern let him play anyway.

The 1992 All-Star game is a core memory of mine! I owe so much to Commissioner David Stern allowing me to play in the game and helping me change the world after my diagnosis. Love the last couple minutes of the game, competing against my two good friends and NBA greats Michael… pic.twitter.com/q8SBZCWzVM

— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) February 19, 2024

• Final: West 153, East 113, Sunday, February 9, 1992, at Orlando Arena. The West led 79-55 at halftime. The attendance was 14,272.
• Johnson’s line: 25 points on 9-of-12 shooting, 3-of-3 from three, 4-of-4 from the free-throw line, 9 assists and 5 rebounds in 29 minutes. He was named MVP.
• The ending: In the final minutes, Johnson went one-on-one with Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan. His last three-pointer ended the game early, and players from both teams ran onto the floor to hug him.

Johnson went on to the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona as co-captain of the Dream Team, which went 8-0 and won gold by an average of 43.8 points a game. His knees limited his minutes, but crowds gave him standing ovations.

Two comebacks and a long life

In September 1992, Johnson announced he would return to the Lakers. It did not last. Malone said publicly that he was worried about playing against him, and in a preseason game against Cleveland in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Johnson got a cut on his right forearm. “You could see the fear upon people’s faces,” Johnson said. On November 2, 1992, he retired again without playing a regular-season game.

He came back in other ways. Johnson coached the Lakers for the last 16 games of the 1993-94 season and went 5-11. Then, at 36, he returned as a player on January 30, 1996, coming off the bench at the Forum with 19 points, 8 rebounds and 10 assists in 27 minutes of a 128-118 win over Golden State. He played 32 games that season, mostly at power forward, averaging 14.6 points, 6.9 assists and 5.7 rebounds, and the Lakers went 22-10 with him. After a first-round loss to Houston, he retired for good. “I am going out on my terms, something I couldn’t say when I aborted a comeback in 1992,” he said.

Off the court, Johnson started the Magic Johnson Foundation in 1991 to fight HIV and AIDS. He joined the National Commission on AIDS and left after eight months, saying the White House had “utterly ignored” the panel’s work. Researchers later wrote about a “Magic Johnson effect,” as more people, especially heterosexual men, got tested and changed their behavior after his announcement.

Johnson finished his career with 17,707 points, 6,559 rebounds and 10,141 assists in 905 games, and his 11.2 assists a game is still the best average in NBA history. He went into the Hall of Fame in 2002, became a part-owner of the Lakers and later the team’s president of basketball operations, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025. In 2011, he said that if he had known then what he knows now, he would not have retired. Thirty-five years after the day at the Forum, the man who promised he would be around “for a long time” still is.