This is the Dream Team Tapes, a diversion podcast's original series in association with IHeart Radio.

This is the story of the United States Olympic basketball team that won gold in Barcelona in 1992, known worldwide as the Dream Team.

First of all, let me say good after late afternoon.

Because of the HIV virus that I have attained,

I will have to retire from the Lakers today. Many of us still remember where we were when we heard the announcement.

Now, I'm not going to compare to the assassination of a president.

Of course, I remember exactly where I was on November 22nd,

1963, Mrs. Harris' freshman English class at O'Crest High School, when John Kennedy was shot

in Dallas, or the day that planes flew into the World Trade Center.

9-11, I was in my living room organizing a charity golf event for the day.

But this was November 7, 1991. Around 1 o'clock that day, I had gotten a call from

somebody in the NBA saying that Magic Johnson was going to retire from basketball due to a

medical reason. What the hell? You'll have to come into the office to write a story, Sports Illustrated's basketball

editor Sandy Padway told me. Now, what you have to understand and what many younger listeners

will find it hard to understand was that we weren't concentrating on the retirement part

or what it's going to do to the Lakers or what what it means to the NBA, or what it means to the

dream team, what people of my age were thinking was, we're going to watch him die.

Irvin Johnson, called magic, was to our collective mind a dead man walking.

Roy Johnson, who was an editor at SI and a book collaborator with Magic, flew to L.A. that day

to shepherd through a first-person story with Magic.

That was the power of SI back then.

We got Magic's voice into the magazine.

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