Honoree Clyde Drexler attends The 24th Annual Great Sports Legends Dinner benefiting The Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis (national fundraising arm of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis) at The Waldorf=Astoria on October 6, 2009 in New York, New York. (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images for The Miami Project)

theGrio reported yesterday on a Deadspin.com article about Jack McCallum’s latest book coming out in July about his experiences following the Dream Team during the 1992 Olympics. In the article, one of the Dream Team players he interviewed, NBA Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler, was quoted by McCallum making very controversial comments about Magic Johnson.  Today, Drexler is denying the claims the article made about him stating the Dream Team “kept waiting for Magic to die.”  Deadspin has Drexler’s full comment:

Dream Team, Jack McCallum’s exhaustive account of the life and times of America’s 1992 Olympic men’s basketball team, was already looking like the most anticipated sports book of the summer when we ran a brief excerpt yesterday, one that dealt with Hall of Famer Clyde Drexler and his comments on how the team dealt with Magic Johnson and his having HIV. Here’s the passage straight from the book:

“Magic was always…” And Drexler goes into a decent Magic impression: “‘Come on, Clyde, come on, Clyde, get with me, get with me,’ and making all that noise. And, really, he couldn’t play much by that time. He couldn’t guard his shadow.”

“But you have to have to understand what was going on then. Everybody kept waiting for Magic to die. Every time he’d run up the court everybody would feel sorry for the guy, and he’d get all that benefit of the doubt. Magic came across like, ‘All this is my stuff.’ Really? Get outta here, dude. He was on the declining end of his career.”

Drexler had played exquisitely in the 1992 All-Star Game in Orlando, although the MVP award eventually went to Magic, who had been added by Commissioner Stern as a special thirteenth player to the Western Conference roster. “If we all knew Magic was going to live this long, I would’ve gotten the MVP of that game, and Magic probably wouldn’t have made the Olympic team.”

In the wake of that post, McCallum responded on his personal website yesterday in an attempt to give some further context:

Click here to read McCallum’s response, as well as Drexler’s comments.