Announcement Enlightens Peers : Impact: The former Laker guard’s plight might compel professional athletes to change their sexual behavior.

Magic Johnson’s tragedy might shock professional athletes into changing their sexual behavior while teaching the general public an overdue lesson about AIDS, Orange County athletes said Friday.

“It has been a major topic of conversation in the locker room,” Ram free safety Pat Terrell said after Friday’s practice. “Many guys have said they are going to change their ways or at least re-think their ways.”

Sports agent Leigh Steinberg agreed.

“There is no question but that this will make athletes throughout the country much, much more careful to be involved in safe sex,” said Steinberg, a Newport Beach resident.

“It will have the same sort of effect that seeing ‘Fatal Attraction’ had on husbands who were cheating on their wives. . . . It makes concrete and real what otherwise was an abstraction.”

At the same time, Johnson’s universal popularity should greatly increase public understanding of AIDS, said Dwight Stones, a two-time Olympic high jump bronze medalist.

“This is going to impact people who don’t have any relationship to sports,” said Stones, a Tustin real estate agent.

“His (Johnson’s) impact goes so far beyond the basketball court. He brings the whole spectrum of society into play--the inner-city kids . . . the doctors and lawyers. He’s managed to bridge that gap.”

“He somehow manages to project this wonderful charisma, this wonderful energy,” Stones said. “That’s what this disease needs. It needs the kind of atmosphere where education can flow.

“If you get (former U.S. Surgeon General) C. Everett Koop and Magic Johnson together on this disease, you can find a way of handling it . . . maybe curing it,” Stones said. “If there’s anybody who can do it, it’s this man.

“He’s truly a hero. There are not many of them left.”

Stones said Johnson’s disclosure brought home the point to millions that, “Everyone is going to start having to use precautions, using some common sense. It affects everybody now. This is a heterosexual male.”

The Rams’ Terrell, a Laguna Niguel resident, said the news of Johnson contracting HIV might be a greater jolt for those pro athletes who are sexually active than it is for the general public.

But Ram guard Tom Newberry said Johnson’s revelation touched a nerve in all players.

“It really put a scare into all of us,” said Newberry, who lives in Huntington Beach. “We’re supposed to think as athletes that we are the best, the toughest and almost invincible, but now we see anyone can be stricken.”

Bruce Furniss, a two-time Olympic swimming gold medalist, seemed to sum up everyone’s reaction.

“I sort of feel like I’ve been in a funk all day,” he said. “It’s a reaction very similar to when someone dies.

“This is a moment of adversity that no one, unless they have had AIDS, can relate to,” said Furniss, who lives in Anaheim Hills. “But what a courageous human being. I don’t think you can test a person’s character more than that.”

“When I quit my swimming career, it was a very difficult time to adjust to life without sports. But (Johnson) has a cause or a mission to replace that void in his life.”

“You can’t help but be proud of him.”