Saturday, August 15, 2009

Happy 50th, Magic!


Sorry I'm a day late, but I've been busy. I had to take the time out to say "Happy Birthday" to Magic Johnson, who turned 50 yesterday.

Magic Johnson is one of the very few players that I can actually say that I idolized as a kid. Magic Johnson made me love the NBA. He made me love the Lakers. I don't care about the looks I get but I keep telling people that I think he's the second best NBA player ever (behind Wilt, not Michael).

Thanks to NBA-TV for replaying some old Magic Johnson games this week. I got to watch some of those epic Lakers-Celtics battle, Game 7 of the Lakers-Pistons series, his very first NBA game against the Clippers when Kareem hit the game winner, his 1992 All Star Game appearance and a bunch of games in between.

I always said that the one athlete that I'd die to meet was Magic. I got to "meet" him once when he was the speaker at an event at a local college. My (future) wife scored us tickets because she knew it would be so important to me. On the day of the event, my wife was very, very sick. But because I didn't know my way around, she went with me anyways. The speech was televised on local access or something late nights and we got to see how sick she was. One of my fondest memories.

It's funny because you kind of think that Magic would be older than 50. After all, he initially retired 18 years ago.

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