The media coverage of U.S. basketball star Magic Johnson's revelation of his HIV status and the unfolding of the “Magic Johnson Story” invokes and traverses a range of discourses, including the medical, the sexual, the racial, and the “celebritorial.” A series of discursive contradictions and boundary confusions is thereby produced in the domain of media sport. This combination of significatory and ideological possibilities provides an opportunity to examine the making—and potential unmaking—of (a) celebrity. In the process, some of the more obscure structures and processes of social power, exercised through the construction of the body and its various dispositions, come into focus. The narrativized predicament of Magic Johnson is used here to interrogate how particular constructions of the body may be enlisted in the domain of popular culture, invested and inscribed by the media with ideologies of dominance, and deployed to deter disruptive, antihegemonic readings of discomfiting social phenomena. Viewed in this manner, the sporting body emerges as a key site of politico-cultural contestation, its celebration inevitably accompanied by its dissection.