It’s been more than 30 years and we still haven’t seen anyone else do what he did in the Showtime era.
The arguments about who is best in any particular sport go around and around. In basketball, it usually focuses on Michael Jordan with some younger fans advocating for LeBron James. You’ll find a few advocates for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
For Larry Bird, it was always Magic Johnson, and it’s easy to understand why. They always measured themselves against each other and Johnson, like Bird, was not blessed with surreal physical talent like Jordan, James or Jabbar.
Like Bird, Magic was a self-made player who made the most of his abilities and who made his teammates far, far better than they could have been without him.
Dick Vitale recruited him in college and when he went by the Johnson home during a Michigan snowstorm, his family told him he could find Earvin at the court.
Puzzled, Vitale went looking for Magic and found him: in the dead of the Michigan winter, he was shoveling the snow off of his neighborhood court so that he could practice.
That’s why Magic could do things like you see here. He did millions of repetitions and made tens of millions of mistakes before he perfected his gifts.
Look at the first thing in this video, a brilliant no-look pass to James Worthy. Just consider the physics: two very large men running at full speed with other large men in between them. Johnson looks to the left and passes to the right and gives Worthy the ball in precisely the location he needs it to be.
He makes it look easy but we’d bet there were 10,000 failed passes behind that.
In short, what made Magic so special, aside from his intense competitive desire and his own natural talent, was a willingness to work harder than anyone else. No one was going to shovel that court for him so he did it and he was willing to do whatever it took to be great and, most of all, to win.
The results are a point guard for the ages. We still haven’t seen the likes of him since.
