Retired NBA Finals MVPs: What are they doing now?

The Most Valuable Player in the NBA Finals is an award that's only been around since 1969. Find out what retired Finals MVPs are doing today.

Magic Johnson, Los Angeles Lakers

1980 MVP – L.A. beat Philadelphia, 4-2
1987 MVP – L.A. beat Boston, 4-2

What he’s doing: Magic made headlines several months ago as the face of the Los Angeles Dodgers' new ownership group.  And that is only the latest in his many entrepreneurial ventures, which he pursues under the banner of Magic Johnson Enterprises. He is proactive in investing in inner cities, where his company owns movie theaters and Starbucks. During the current playoffs, he has been a regular pregame and halftime analyst for ESPN.  Magic is also a motivational speaker and philanthropist whose foundation focuses on the educational, health, and social needs of ethnically diverse, urban communities. Johnson is the only rookie and the youngest player, at 20, to ever be named MVP of the Finals when he did it in 1980.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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