YouTube Gold: Magic Johnson’s Greatest Hits

Magic Johnson was a very unusual player. When he was in college at Michigan State, he was clearly a great passer...but he was 6-9, somewhat ungainly and wanted to play point guard. There was immense skepticism about that possibility, even within the Los Angeles Lakers, until he proved he could do it.

He wasn’t an overly athletic player but he had brilliant court sense and vision, and something else too, that Dick Vitale noticed when he was still in high school: he had a tremendous work ethic. Vitale told a story about him during a major snowstorm shoveling the court near his home so that he could practice.

The Magic we saw with the Lakers was real but the basis of that was the guy who shoveled his court to practice in the dead of winter.

In this video, you see lots of examples of his court vision and well why he was called Magic.

He made magic in a way very few players ever have.