Giving "Magic" the basketball is like giving Hitler an army, Jesse James a gang, or Genghis Khan a horse.

The sentence argues that certain people are so perfectly matched to their instrument of power that granting it to them makes their success feel foreordained. By pairing Magic with figures associated with conquest or outlaw prowess, Murray emphasizes sheer effectiveness: the basketball becomes Magic’s “means,” and possession becomes a decisive advantage. The shock value of the names is deliberate—an attention-grabbing way to say that Magic’s talent is not merely skillful but overwhelming, capable of bending the game to his will. Read as sports rhetoric, it’s a compressed claim about agency: in the right hands, a tool becomes destiny, and opponents are reduced to reacting rather than initiating.