Sports idiots should STFU

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Sometimes, it simply takes a few words from a couple of ignoramuses to remind me that we live in a society proliferated with idiots. The most recent wake-up call was served up by Chris Baker and Langdon Perry of KLTK radio in Minneapolis, when they accused Magic Johnson of “faking AIDS.”

My grandmother always told me, when she sensed me becoming intoxicated with the sound of my own voice, that it was better to keep my mouth shut and be perceived as a fool, than to flap my gums and have it confirmed.

 I wish someone would have imparted this nugget of knowledge to these ignorant assholes somewhere along the lines.  Baker and Perry’s remarks were in response to a caller’s assertion that health care in America is not a basic right. The idiots (as they’ll be referred to for the remainder of this piece) segued into the topic of treatable diseases that people can live with, as long as they take some basic drugs.

“Like Magic Johnson?” asked Baker.
“Like Magic with his faked AIDS. Magic faked AIDS,” replied his colleague Perry.
 ”You think Magic faked AIDS for sympathy?” Baker asked.
 ”I’m convinced that Magic faked AIDS,” Perry replied.
 ”Me too,” said Baker. 

SAY WHAT!

OK, so let me attempt to wrap my brain around this one.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson is one of the greatest players the game of basketball has ever seen. As a boy, he idolized Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and practiced from sunup to sundown, often sleeping with his ball. The sport courses through his veins, as essential to his sense of being as water and food is to one’s nutrition.

He lived to play. With his singular abilities, he altered the way the game was played, coached and thought about. He won five championships with the Lakers and helped rescue the NBA from the stagnant, second tier reputation it suffered at the close of the ‘70s.

So, that Magic Johnson, whose love of the game and Hollywood flair on the court dazzled those with no interest in hoops, the one who bathed in the applause and adulation of fans around the world, the one whose whole life was wrapped up in and defined by his transcendent excellence in the sport he loved, decided to fake having AIDS? 

Please help me here! I’m trying to understand. So, at the prime of his career, at the age of 32, he stands in front of the eyes of the world and announces that he has H.I.V. and will be retiring immediately from the only profession that he’s ever dreamed of.

And the idiots actually think that it was a ruse? For sympathy?
Now I’ve seen dumb and I’ve seen stupid. But these idiots are so unintelligent, dim-witted, obtuse and just plain slow that it would be simply laughable, except for the inherent insensitivity and racism, which make the comments unpardonable.

Magic is a much better man than me.  He actually said the idiots should not be fired. Rather, he’d have them educate their audience.

I hear you Magic. But had it been me, I’d have handcuffed those jokers to a tree in the middle of New York City’s Queensbridge Projects wearing “MAGIC FAKED AIDS” T-shirts.

Magic’s announcement that he’d contracted HIV on November 7th, 1991 shocked the world. Until then, HIV/AIDS was associated with drug addiction and homosexuality. Magic’s honesty in confronting the disease in a public forum, and the promiscuous heterosexual lifestyle that led to his contraction of the disease, educated millions on the risks and realities.

The current state of HIV/AIDS in the African-American community is a public health emergency. Due to poverty, a lack of access to health care and the fact that one in approximately ten black men in their twenties and thirties are incarcerated and engaging in high risk sexual activity before returning to the general population, among many other factors, the disease is affecting people of color in alarmingly disproportionate numbers.

Although only accounting for 13% of America’s population, approximately 50% of the new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2005, according to the Center for Disease Control’s HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report that year, were those of African-Americans.

Magic Johnson continues to lobby on behalf of those afflicted with the disease, although far from the public spotlight. He brought the discussion into the mainstream. As an athlete, businessman and activist, he’s done more in one lifetime than most can hope to accomplish in three.

And for these idiots to even suggest such nonsense, in my mind, crosses over from the simply idiotic to the severely asinine.

From Jimmy “The Greek” to Rush Limbaugh to Don Imus to these idiots, I just can’t take it anymore. It’s one thing to say an athlete faked an injury, but HIV/AIDS? And Magic Johnson at that?

So let us all take a pause for the cause and be reminded that ignorance is not only alive and well, it thrives when the idiots, and others like them, feel comfortable enough to let the diarrhea spew from their lips.

This story is filed under: Leave Me Alone, I'm Watching the Game!, Sports