Magic’s Gift for Inspiring Us Tests Reality : Sportsmanship: With grace and candor, he reveals his HIV infection, a challenge to fans to put aside shock and dismay.

Now it’s our turn to make Magic smile. He has lifted our hearts for a decade and more, and now it’s our turn to touch him. To see the man at work, to see Magic Johnson playing basketball, was to know the kid in all of us. There was joy on his face and we were made better by it. Across America, from Michigan to Los Angeles to every mean street and every dreamer’s playground, Magic gave us more than we ever gave him.

Now it’s our turn. The phone calls came to my house one after another. I’d been out and hadn’t heard the news. Friends called, literally from coast to coast. Had I heard about Magic? No, what’s up? “He’s retiring and he has AIDS.” Tom Callahan of the Washington Post, a veteran sportswriter who has seen it all, said, “There are not very many stories that take your breath away. This one does.”

When Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose the day after the Boston Celtics made the college kid a multimillionaire, the news left me in a rage. The stupidity. The waste. Don’t they know that cocaine kills?

And maybe we should be angry with Magic today. Without saying so, he has implied he acquired the HIV virus by engaging in casual sex without a condom. There’s an epidemic out there. He had to know it. Maybe Bias’ stupidity is Magic’s stupidity. They believed it happened to other people.

Yet, I am not angry with Magic. I am heartbroken.

He came on my television screen shortly after 6 o’clock in the East. He looked wonderful. He could have passed for an ambitious young executive about to announce the acquisition of a new company. There was a darkness on the horizon, but Earvin (Magic) Johnson told us about the sunshine.

It’s wasn’t AIDS, he said. He had the HIV virus, but not AIDS. He said he intended to beat it. The virus wouldn’t bring AIDS to him. He intended to be around for a long, long time. That’s what he said. And he said it so brightly, as he has always said everything, that I almost believed him.

I had just hung up the telephone after a conversation with a professional football player. “Having the virus,” the football player said, “is the same as having AIDS. You can’t get rid of the virus and it always gives you AIDS. It’s just a matter of when. It’s a time bomb and it’s ticking.”

Magic did a brave thing and did it smiling. How many of us, given the dread news, could have turned that news into a crusade? He called a press conference. He would be a spokesman for efforts to educate us about the HIV virus. It can happen to anyone, he said, and then allowed himself the smallest portion of self-pity by saying, almost in a whisper “even Magic Johnson.”

The Lakers doctor said that there’s no way to know how long Magic has before the virus produces AIDS. The doctor also said what we already knew from experiences in a dozen other contexts. He said that Magic didn’t have to reveal the virus, but for choosing to do it he “should be held as a modern-day hero.”

Athletes come with special gifts which too often they believe exempt them from real life. Earvin Johnson had the gifts, and he applied them to real life. By raising $5 million in summer all-star games, he breathed life into the United Negro College Fund. He gave us entertainment as we’d seldom seen it. And he gave us, by his joy in his work, an idea that we could all do better.

Someone asked him at the press conference if he is scared now. “It’s another challenge,” he said. “Your back is against the wall and I think you have to come out swinging. I’m swinging.”