Hammock Parties
08-27-2006, 01:47 AM
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/football/nfl/kansas_city_chiefs/15348287.htm
Larry Johnson's running revolution
Even with all his success last season, Chiefs back still manages to fan the flames burning inside him.
By ELIZABETH MERRILL
The Kansas City Star
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Larry Johnson waits on the sideline, a knee planted in the grass and a helmet pressed against his side. He’s a finely-toned statue, brooding, watching, blankly staring. Everyone always wants to know what is churning underneath that helmet, what makes Larry so scary.
Do not look here, under the puffy white clouds, in the corner of the end zone on an innocent August day in training camp. This is not Larry Johnson.
He’s sitting in a giant room, alone, one headphone over an ear, the other stuck to the top of his head. The Doors are on his iPod because Jim Morrison was off the wall and unpredictable and stayed true to himself. In his head, you don’t want to know what he’s thinking: The Chiefs are resting their sudden superstar, and LJ is slowly dying.
“I play the game with all the chips on the table,” Johnson says. “I know the situation we’re in. It’s a business, and we’ve got to keep me healthy. But damn, I love to play. I want to play the whole damn game. That mindset, I can’t let go because I’m not used to being the man. I’m always used to having to work, work, work.”
He stops, head down. He rarely makes eye contact.
In the hours before the start of the Herm Edwards era, Johnson stands alone, the club’s unfranchised franchise, the running back chasing history with his head slightly turned back. He can’t stop looking behind him, not after the Pro Bowl, the 1,750 yards and the fantasy-stud status.
He feels the feet closing in and the hand waiting to swat it all away.
This is how you know the fire still burns in Johnson, that the angry young running back is still feeling slighted. He keeps things tattooed in his brain for years. He recalls verbatim how Dick Vermeil told him he wouldn’t break 50-yard runs in the NFL, how for 2 1/2 years, he wasn’t considered good enough to be the Chiefs starter.
He’s asked about Michael Bennett, a recent acquisition for depth, and Johnson is positive Bennett was brought in to take away his job.
“I know he ain’t here just to be a backup,” Johnson says.
Nobody wants to be the backup.
•••
Carl Peterson is sitting at a burger joint near downtown River Falls, and in a small border town in Wisconsin, nobody recognizes him as the GM who plucked Johnson as the 27th pick of the 2003 draft. He tells LJ they will be forever linked, good or bad, because that’s the way it is with general managers and first-round draft picks.
He knows their relationship is closer than that. Every couple of weeks, when Johnson was frustrated, tired of backing up Priest Holmes and even Derrick Blaylock, Peterson always assured him: Your time will come.
Allies come in strange places. In 2004, Johnson immediately found one in defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham. Johnson helped his defense game-plan on the scout team; Cunningham offered an open door when LJ disconnected from Vermeil and offensive coordinator Al Saunders.
“He’d always come in and say, ‘Hey, if I was head coach, you’d be running the ball 40 or 60 times a game,’ ” Johnson says. “We had a connection where we understood each other. I’ll never forget the relationship we had when I was kind of down in the dumps.”
Cunningham had been fired in 2000 as the Chiefs’ head coach, and in some ways, they were both misfits. Castoffs. Johnson’s story had been well-documented by then — benched in high school, backup in college, exploded his senior season, still found his way near the bottom of the first round.
Johnson never needed somebody in Kansas City to believe in him. His father, Larry Sr., a defensive coach at Penn State, did that. But Johnson liked that Cunningham talked to him about something besides football.
During warm-ups before each game, Johnson hugs Cunningham and says, “I love you.”
“I’m the type of person,” Johnson says, “who can pretty much see through bullshit quickly.”
Johnson’s anti-establishment façade was quickly torn down in January with the hiring of head coach Herm Edwards. In one of his first days on the job, he called Johnson into his office and told him he’d be the starter heading into training camp. He also asked him to be on his team leadership board.
It seemed like an odd role at the time, a 26-year old running back who spent his first years grousing over playing time and whose public persona was perceived as standoffish. They just didn’t know LJ, Edwards says.
Johnson pops in at Edwards’ charity bowling event, wearing a Kansas City Royals hat, catering to every fan.
“He’s sometimes looked upon a little differently by people,” Edwards says. “But when you know him and sit down and talk to him, he’s got a great heart. And he cares. He cares about kids, he cares about people.
“He’s been in a situation where you have to earn his trust, and once he trusts you, you’ve got a friend for life.”
•••
Johnson wants to clear something up about trust and friendships. He has both of them. He cringes at a cover story in a national magazine that portrays him as a loner. Yes, he hates talking on the phone. No, he doesn’t keep many people within arm’s length outside of his teammates.
His closest confidant is probably his brother, Tony. They share a house, and LJ did most of the decorating, a bachelor’s pad-meets-70s style-meets jazz. Johnson, Tony says, gets his sense of style from a love of art. Ever since he was a kid, he’s done sketches. He draws himself now, in football pads, running downfield, stomping somebody.
Tony played football with his brother at Penn State, so he can explain the trust issue better than anybody. As a coach’s kid, they always heard the whispers that they wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for Daddy. His first three years of college, Larry would run 15 yards and look for somebody to hit downfield.
“I’d hear it numerous times,” Tony says. “ ‘Golly, what’s wrong with your brother today?’ Man, that’s just LJ. It’s just his way of explaining how to play football.”
Old-school to the core, he decorates his house with prints of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. He’s fascinated by artists who can cross over to fashion. His hippest celebrity friend is rap star Jay-Z, whose athletic apparel line, Team Roc, signed Johnson to an endorsement contract.
Jay-Z seems mainstream, the antithesis of the multilayered Johnson, who listens to “U Don’t Know” before every game.
Put me anywhere on God’s green earth, I’ll triple my worth,
(Expletive), I, will, not, lose.
He poses for photos in T-shirts that rankle readers. Last fall, he brooded for a pic wearing Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on his chest.
“I love revolutionary people because they go against the grain,” he says.
“Martin Luther King went against the grain, Malcolm X went against the grain. They were never the richest people in the world. If you can control people’s hearts and minds and have them follow your beliefs and have them believe in you, money doesn’t mean much.”
•••
There is a debate on the exact moment Larry Johnson arrived in the NFL. Tony says it was at Tennessee on “Monday Night Football” in December 2004. Johnson scored two touchdowns, broke runs of 46 and 41 yards, and eventually found his way back to the bench in 2005 when Holmes returned from a knee injury.
Scratch that, Tony says. It had to be Oakland. Because so much happened after that game — Vermeil retiring, Holmes going on injured reserve, the Chiefs failing to make the playoffs at 10-6 — Oakland is forgotten.
Five seconds left, the Chiefs down by three, and Vermeil decides to go for the win, not the tie. Holmes was always money in these situations. Johnson gets the handoff at the 1, leaps high in the air, plunges over the pile and into the end zone.
Larry Sr. asks him what he was thinking on that play, and LJ says he wasn’t.
“I just knew I had to jump,” he says.
And you didn’t even look down?
There was no time to look anywhere.
“I told LJ, ‘Thank God you made it,’ ” Tony says. “ ‘If you would not have gotten into the end zone, I think all of Kansas City would’ve been calling for your head.’ ”
•••
From a spot not too far away in Minnesota, Bennett watched Larry Johnson tear up the NFL in the final nine games of the season. First came Oakland, the first game without Holmes, then Johnson put up a club-record 211 yards at Houston.
“How could you miss it?” Bennett says. “I mean, it’s all over ESPN and everything.”
If Johnson had kept up his end-of-season pace through all 16 games, he was projected to finish with 2,400 yards. But who’s done that? Nobody.
Every game, every “SportsCenter” highlight, Johnson was finding new ways to find a slight. Sure, he had more yards than LaDainian Tomlinson. But they’ll say Johnson can’t do it over a whole season …
“People expect me to perform and be productive, and I just tense up all the time because I know if I don’t do it one game, it’s going to be, ‘Oh, see, he can’t do it,’ ” Johnson says. “I know that’s coming. There may be games that I may not rush for 100 yards. But I know in the back of my mind, I’m trying to force that not to happen.”
People close to Johnson — OK, on the periphery — say he isn’t talking about 2,000 yards. But each time a national scribe drifts in, it’s bound to be brought up. They say it will be harder now, with left tackle Willie Roaf gone and fullback Tony Richardson in Minnesota.
Arms folded, T-shirt stained, 2,000 seems distant for LJ now. Edwards knows his offense will be built around his 6-foot-1, 230-pound bruiser, and he won’t risk getting him hurt. Johnson has never had a camp like this — one so anticipated, yet disappointingly docile. He cuts through a pile, relatively untouched, then sprints 40 yards downfield.
He tosses the football back and reverts to his corner and the knee. There’s no drama, no chasing Priest, no murmurs of a possible trade. No hitting.
In their heart-to-hearts in the upper-level offices at Arrowhead Stadium, Peterson has told Johnson if he wasn’t a running back, he’d make a hellacious linebacker.
“You don’t want running backs often to seek contact,” Peterson says, “but he will do that. When people said, ‘He can’t pass protect’ … Well, wait a minute. He has no fear. If he can’t pass protect, that’s our job to teach him. He’s a tough guy.
“I think, I certainly hope, he’s going to run the same way, with a great passion. I’m as proud of him as any player I’ve ever been around.”
•••
John Riggins answers his phone somewhere on the East Coast, and he’s confused. He doesn’t think he was an angry runner. He doesn’t know what an angry runner is.
Riggins’ relentless image crackles on old-school film, running over linebackers, disregarding tacklers. Something, surely, was burning, a coach who told him he couldn’t play, a critic who said he couldn’t make the Hall of Fame.
“I was scared,” Riggins says. “If anything, I was a scared runner.”
The NFL is about preservation. And when the hits start to pile up and the body gets sore, reckless abandon fades. Jim Brown ran through people, too, but his career lasted less than a decade. On the field, Riggins had only one thing on his mind — finding daylight, avoiding the pursuit.
He doesn’t know if Johnson can live off anger forever.
“Fear is one motivational tool,” he says. “Anger is another one. Both kind of feed off one another. Chances are if you’re attacked by a bear and are as scared as hell, if at some point you think you’re going to die, you’ll get angry and fight back.”
Dante Hall understands what it’s like to be a disgruntled young rookie who, in the eyes of a community, didn’t belong. Hall used to give him a list of do’s and don’ts, and at the top of the list was don’t gripe to the media. Johnson did it anyway.
When Hall touches the ball now, he thinks of his son. And if Johnson runs out of things to be angry about, “He’ll make something up.”
Hall wonders if his friend can sustain a career-long rant.
“It’ll be hard,” he says. “With success comes a lot of good things. People like you, people want to give you this … It’s going to be hard.”
•••
In the early days of February, it was rumored that Larry Johnson cracked a smile. He’d earned his first trip to the Pro Bowl, his entire team stood up and applauded weeks earlier, and Johnson bought his family tickets to Honolulu.
He ran into Tomlinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Vick. He gushed that the players he watched in college were watching him.
Tony told him, “Yeah, I know, LJ. You’re a star, too.”
Some days, his brother says, Johnson forgets who he is. He’s still that 16-year-old kid, holding the helmet, waiting for acknowledgement.
Johnson wonders if he alienated people at Penn State. It’s not that he didn’t want friends. He just figured many of them were doubting enemies.
Here, he says he’d do anything for his teammates. He hangs out with Hall. Richardson, who’s gone, was like a big brother. The thing about being elite is that somehow, you’re alone. Brown retired at the top, at 30, and nobody understood.
Johnson has everything now, the spotlight, the love, the starting job. And nobody can understand why he’s still angry.
“People say, ‘You should be happy. You should smile, you should be grateful, you’re one of the best,’ ” Johnson says. “But until I hear 450 times on TV that I’m the best and nobody else is above me, that’s when I’ll smile. That’s when I’ll have fun.”
He stops himself.
“Probably not. But that’s when I’ll have enough to be at ease with where I’m at in my position.”
Larry Johnson's running revolution
Even with all his success last season, Chiefs back still manages to fan the flames burning inside him.
By ELIZABETH MERRILL
The Kansas City Star
RIVER FALLS, Wis. | Larry Johnson waits on the sideline, a knee planted in the grass and a helmet pressed against his side. He’s a finely-toned statue, brooding, watching, blankly staring. Everyone always wants to know what is churning underneath that helmet, what makes Larry so scary.
Do not look here, under the puffy white clouds, in the corner of the end zone on an innocent August day in training camp. This is not Larry Johnson.
He’s sitting in a giant room, alone, one headphone over an ear, the other stuck to the top of his head. The Doors are on his iPod because Jim Morrison was off the wall and unpredictable and stayed true to himself. In his head, you don’t want to know what he’s thinking: The Chiefs are resting their sudden superstar, and LJ is slowly dying.
“I play the game with all the chips on the table,” Johnson says. “I know the situation we’re in. It’s a business, and we’ve got to keep me healthy. But damn, I love to play. I want to play the whole damn game. That mindset, I can’t let go because I’m not used to being the man. I’m always used to having to work, work, work.”
He stops, head down. He rarely makes eye contact.
In the hours before the start of the Herm Edwards era, Johnson stands alone, the club’s unfranchised franchise, the running back chasing history with his head slightly turned back. He can’t stop looking behind him, not after the Pro Bowl, the 1,750 yards and the fantasy-stud status.
He feels the feet closing in and the hand waiting to swat it all away.
This is how you know the fire still burns in Johnson, that the angry young running back is still feeling slighted. He keeps things tattooed in his brain for years. He recalls verbatim how Dick Vermeil told him he wouldn’t break 50-yard runs in the NFL, how for 2 1/2 years, he wasn’t considered good enough to be the Chiefs starter.
He’s asked about Michael Bennett, a recent acquisition for depth, and Johnson is positive Bennett was brought in to take away his job.
“I know he ain’t here just to be a backup,” Johnson says.
Nobody wants to be the backup.
•••
Carl Peterson is sitting at a burger joint near downtown River Falls, and in a small border town in Wisconsin, nobody recognizes him as the GM who plucked Johnson as the 27th pick of the 2003 draft. He tells LJ they will be forever linked, good or bad, because that’s the way it is with general managers and first-round draft picks.
He knows their relationship is closer than that. Every couple of weeks, when Johnson was frustrated, tired of backing up Priest Holmes and even Derrick Blaylock, Peterson always assured him: Your time will come.
Allies come in strange places. In 2004, Johnson immediately found one in defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham. Johnson helped his defense game-plan on the scout team; Cunningham offered an open door when LJ disconnected from Vermeil and offensive coordinator Al Saunders.
“He’d always come in and say, ‘Hey, if I was head coach, you’d be running the ball 40 or 60 times a game,’ ” Johnson says. “We had a connection where we understood each other. I’ll never forget the relationship we had when I was kind of down in the dumps.”
Cunningham had been fired in 2000 as the Chiefs’ head coach, and in some ways, they were both misfits. Castoffs. Johnson’s story had been well-documented by then — benched in high school, backup in college, exploded his senior season, still found his way near the bottom of the first round.
Johnson never needed somebody in Kansas City to believe in him. His father, Larry Sr., a defensive coach at Penn State, did that. But Johnson liked that Cunningham talked to him about something besides football.
During warm-ups before each game, Johnson hugs Cunningham and says, “I love you.”
“I’m the type of person,” Johnson says, “who can pretty much see through bullshit quickly.”
Johnson’s anti-establishment façade was quickly torn down in January with the hiring of head coach Herm Edwards. In one of his first days on the job, he called Johnson into his office and told him he’d be the starter heading into training camp. He also asked him to be on his team leadership board.
It seemed like an odd role at the time, a 26-year old running back who spent his first years grousing over playing time and whose public persona was perceived as standoffish. They just didn’t know LJ, Edwards says.
Johnson pops in at Edwards’ charity bowling event, wearing a Kansas City Royals hat, catering to every fan.
“He’s sometimes looked upon a little differently by people,” Edwards says. “But when you know him and sit down and talk to him, he’s got a great heart. And he cares. He cares about kids, he cares about people.
“He’s been in a situation where you have to earn his trust, and once he trusts you, you’ve got a friend for life.”
•••
Johnson wants to clear something up about trust and friendships. He has both of them. He cringes at a cover story in a national magazine that portrays him as a loner. Yes, he hates talking on the phone. No, he doesn’t keep many people within arm’s length outside of his teammates.
His closest confidant is probably his brother, Tony. They share a house, and LJ did most of the decorating, a bachelor’s pad-meets-70s style-meets jazz. Johnson, Tony says, gets his sense of style from a love of art. Ever since he was a kid, he’s done sketches. He draws himself now, in football pads, running downfield, stomping somebody.
Tony played football with his brother at Penn State, so he can explain the trust issue better than anybody. As a coach’s kid, they always heard the whispers that they wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for Daddy. His first three years of college, Larry would run 15 yards and look for somebody to hit downfield.
“I’d hear it numerous times,” Tony says. “ ‘Golly, what’s wrong with your brother today?’ Man, that’s just LJ. It’s just his way of explaining how to play football.”
Old-school to the core, he decorates his house with prints of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. He’s fascinated by artists who can cross over to fashion. His hippest celebrity friend is rap star Jay-Z, whose athletic apparel line, Team Roc, signed Johnson to an endorsement contract.
Jay-Z seems mainstream, the antithesis of the multilayered Johnson, who listens to “U Don’t Know” before every game.
Put me anywhere on God’s green earth, I’ll triple my worth,
(Expletive), I, will, not, lose.
He poses for photos in T-shirts that rankle readers. Last fall, he brooded for a pic wearing Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara on his chest.
“I love revolutionary people because they go against the grain,” he says.
“Martin Luther King went against the grain, Malcolm X went against the grain. They were never the richest people in the world. If you can control people’s hearts and minds and have them follow your beliefs and have them believe in you, money doesn’t mean much.”
•••
There is a debate on the exact moment Larry Johnson arrived in the NFL. Tony says it was at Tennessee on “Monday Night Football” in December 2004. Johnson scored two touchdowns, broke runs of 46 and 41 yards, and eventually found his way back to the bench in 2005 when Holmes returned from a knee injury.
Scratch that, Tony says. It had to be Oakland. Because so much happened after that game — Vermeil retiring, Holmes going on injured reserve, the Chiefs failing to make the playoffs at 10-6 — Oakland is forgotten.
Five seconds left, the Chiefs down by three, and Vermeil decides to go for the win, not the tie. Holmes was always money in these situations. Johnson gets the handoff at the 1, leaps high in the air, plunges over the pile and into the end zone.
Larry Sr. asks him what he was thinking on that play, and LJ says he wasn’t.
“I just knew I had to jump,” he says.
And you didn’t even look down?
There was no time to look anywhere.
“I told LJ, ‘Thank God you made it,’ ” Tony says. “ ‘If you would not have gotten into the end zone, I think all of Kansas City would’ve been calling for your head.’ ”
•••
From a spot not too far away in Minnesota, Bennett watched Larry Johnson tear up the NFL in the final nine games of the season. First came Oakland, the first game without Holmes, then Johnson put up a club-record 211 yards at Houston.
“How could you miss it?” Bennett says. “I mean, it’s all over ESPN and everything.”
If Johnson had kept up his end-of-season pace through all 16 games, he was projected to finish with 2,400 yards. But who’s done that? Nobody.
Every game, every “SportsCenter” highlight, Johnson was finding new ways to find a slight. Sure, he had more yards than LaDainian Tomlinson. But they’ll say Johnson can’t do it over a whole season …
“People expect me to perform and be productive, and I just tense up all the time because I know if I don’t do it one game, it’s going to be, ‘Oh, see, he can’t do it,’ ” Johnson says. “I know that’s coming. There may be games that I may not rush for 100 yards. But I know in the back of my mind, I’m trying to force that not to happen.”
People close to Johnson — OK, on the periphery — say he isn’t talking about 2,000 yards. But each time a national scribe drifts in, it’s bound to be brought up. They say it will be harder now, with left tackle Willie Roaf gone and fullback Tony Richardson in Minnesota.
Arms folded, T-shirt stained, 2,000 seems distant for LJ now. Edwards knows his offense will be built around his 6-foot-1, 230-pound bruiser, and he won’t risk getting him hurt. Johnson has never had a camp like this — one so anticipated, yet disappointingly docile. He cuts through a pile, relatively untouched, then sprints 40 yards downfield.
He tosses the football back and reverts to his corner and the knee. There’s no drama, no chasing Priest, no murmurs of a possible trade. No hitting.
In their heart-to-hearts in the upper-level offices at Arrowhead Stadium, Peterson has told Johnson if he wasn’t a running back, he’d make a hellacious linebacker.
“You don’t want running backs often to seek contact,” Peterson says, “but he will do that. When people said, ‘He can’t pass protect’ … Well, wait a minute. He has no fear. If he can’t pass protect, that’s our job to teach him. He’s a tough guy.
“I think, I certainly hope, he’s going to run the same way, with a great passion. I’m as proud of him as any player I’ve ever been around.”
•••
John Riggins answers his phone somewhere on the East Coast, and he’s confused. He doesn’t think he was an angry runner. He doesn’t know what an angry runner is.
Riggins’ relentless image crackles on old-school film, running over linebackers, disregarding tacklers. Something, surely, was burning, a coach who told him he couldn’t play, a critic who said he couldn’t make the Hall of Fame.
“I was scared,” Riggins says. “If anything, I was a scared runner.”
The NFL is about preservation. And when the hits start to pile up and the body gets sore, reckless abandon fades. Jim Brown ran through people, too, but his career lasted less than a decade. On the field, Riggins had only one thing on his mind — finding daylight, avoiding the pursuit.
He doesn’t know if Johnson can live off anger forever.
“Fear is one motivational tool,” he says. “Anger is another one. Both kind of feed off one another. Chances are if you’re attacked by a bear and are as scared as hell, if at some point you think you’re going to die, you’ll get angry and fight back.”
Dante Hall understands what it’s like to be a disgruntled young rookie who, in the eyes of a community, didn’t belong. Hall used to give him a list of do’s and don’ts, and at the top of the list was don’t gripe to the media. Johnson did it anyway.
When Hall touches the ball now, he thinks of his son. And if Johnson runs out of things to be angry about, “He’ll make something up.”
Hall wonders if his friend can sustain a career-long rant.
“It’ll be hard,” he says. “With success comes a lot of good things. People like you, people want to give you this … It’s going to be hard.”
•••
In the early days of February, it was rumored that Larry Johnson cracked a smile. He’d earned his first trip to the Pro Bowl, his entire team stood up and applauded weeks earlier, and Johnson bought his family tickets to Honolulu.
He ran into Tomlinson, Peyton Manning, Michael Vick. He gushed that the players he watched in college were watching him.
Tony told him, “Yeah, I know, LJ. You’re a star, too.”
Some days, his brother says, Johnson forgets who he is. He’s still that 16-year-old kid, holding the helmet, waiting for acknowledgement.
Johnson wonders if he alienated people at Penn State. It’s not that he didn’t want friends. He just figured many of them were doubting enemies.
Here, he says he’d do anything for his teammates. He hangs out with Hall. Richardson, who’s gone, was like a big brother. The thing about being elite is that somehow, you’re alone. Brown retired at the top, at 30, and nobody understood.
Johnson has everything now, the spotlight, the love, the starting job. And nobody can understand why he’s still angry.
“People say, ‘You should be happy. You should smile, you should be grateful, you’re one of the best,’ ” Johnson says. “But until I hear 450 times on TV that I’m the best and nobody else is above me, that’s when I’ll smile. That’s when I’ll have fun.”
He stops himself.
“Probably not. But that’s when I’ll have enough to be at ease with where I’m at in my position.”