Is it ironic, tragic or just plain stupid that the hardest part of being HIV-positive for prominent athletes – the nervous, scared, terror-defying part – is telling the world? And who can blame them, given that the reward for candor can be fear and loathing? It didn’t seem that difficult for Magic Johnson to play basketball, for example. In February 1992, three months after he announced that tests showed he had the human immunodeficiency virus, Johnson accumulated 25 points, 9 assists and 5 rebounds in the NBA all-star game. Later he starred at the Barcelona Olympics. This following some of his teammates’ protestations that he shouldn’t suit up at all. “That hurt the most. It put the “t’ on the end of retirement,” Johnson said.
Arthur Ashe continued his public life – writing, speaking, witnessing – after he publicly acknowledged having AIDS in April 1992. But Ashe had concealed his condition for three and a half years. And he was dead less than 10 months later. Louganis has hidden his affliction for an astonishing seven years, even from the cast members of the off-Broadway play “Jeffrey,” which he appeared in as an HIV-positive chorus boy. “Sometimes,” he said, “I’d find a corner and just cry.”
The first prominent pro athlete known to be struck by AIDS was Jerry Smith, the former Washington Redskins tight end. He was on his deathbed at the age of 46 before he revealed he had the disease. For his condition to be made public, “that’s been his biggest fear,” Smith’s mother, Laverne, said back in 1986. Her son had received word of his induction into the Washington Hall of Stars. “When the committee finds out, will they change their mind?” Laverne asked. “No,” Jerry Smith whispered.
Barely two weeks ago, Bill Goldsworthy, 50, an original member of the Minnesota North Stars hockey team and its first star, disclosed he was dying of AIDS. He acknowledged being an alcoholic and, after a divorce 15 years ago, “[not being] careful” about his sexual relationships. Goldsworthy said that at a hockey game recently, “each time I talked to someone, I remember wondering if they knew I had AIDS and what they would think of me if they did. It’s no way to live.”
In his time, Tim Richmond was a swashbuckling rake of the stock-car circuit. “James Dean-like,” one NASCAR spokesman said of Richmond, who earned more than $2 million in prize money in eight seasons. But too much drinking, wenching and falling asleep before races caused officials to demand Richmond’s medical records. He refused. They suspected drugs. He knew better. Ten days after Richmond died in August 1989, the revelation that he succumbed to AIDS shocked a community where drivers share women openly and often.
Male figure skaters have been harder hit than any other group of sports stars. According to The Calgary Herald, more than 40 world-class skaters and coaches have died from the disease. But even among skaters, sexual orientation and illness are seldom publicly discussed. John Curry, the great British skater who won the goldmedal at the ‘76 Olympics, learned he was HIV-positive on Christmas Day in 1987. But he performed, choreographed and taught skating without revealing his condition to anyone. Finally, in 1992, he told of his illness, explaining his fears. “Some judges said . . . they wouldn’t put me first because I was “queer’,” Curry wrote in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. “I knew other [skaters] who were HIV-positive, but people were terrified of being exposed. I was afraid people would throw bricks through the window.” Curry died last April at 44, of complications related to AIDS. But not of shame.
