Road to redemption

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This article was published 24/11/2011 (5249 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

VANCOUVER — The house had four bedrooms. And 12 people living in it.

That was about the only thing in abundance — people — in the home that Jovon Johnson grew up in.

“There was definitely no extras,” the Winnipeg Blue Bombers cornerback recalled here at BC Place Wednesday following his club’s first practice of Grey Cup Week. “I’ve told my story and people are appalled by it. I went through a lot of things growing up.”

And yet despite that — or, more accurately, perhaps precisely because of it — Johnson has a chance here tonight to make Canadian Football League history. The CFL Player Awards are this evening and if Johnson should beat out Saskatchewan linebacker Jerrell Freeman as the Most Oustanding Defensive player in the CFL in 2011, he would become the first defensive back ever to win that award.

Would it be special? More than you know.

“It would be crazy special to me,” says the 28-year-old. “I’ve faced a lot of things in my life. My lifestyle back then was completely different than it is now. I was living on the street and running with people I shouldn’t have been running with. Still to this day, I get phone calls about guys I grew up with getting killed.”

One of those calls — the most painful of those calls — came on Sept. 22, 2008. Johnson’s brother, Daquan Crosby, had been shot to death, caught in the crossfire of a robbery. He was just 15.

It could have been Johnson, quite easily could have been Johnson, given the path he was on as a younger man. But Johnson’s story is one of those redemption tales you come across from time to time, where an athlete growing up in desperation and gripping poverty is able to rise above — even while all those around him are falling through the cracks — through a combination of athletics and education.

Home for Johnson was — and still is — Erie, Pa., a hardscrabble place in the U.S. Rust Belt where the population has been in steady decline — right alongside the industry that once sustained it — since the 1960s and where the median income is two-thirds the national average.

Blacks represent 20 per cent of the population in Erie and Johnson spent the first two years of high school at an all-black school. He’s vague about that period, except to say he was involved in what sounds like bad and dangerous things.

And then everything changed. A move in his junior year to a prep school focused him athletically and academically and within two years he was attending the University of Iowa on a scholarship. A few years after that, he was leading the NCAA in interceptions at one point and seemed bound for the NFL.

But for reasons that seem to stem principally from the one statistic he cannot do anything about — his diminutive size — the call from the NFL never came and his draft number never came up.

He ended up with the Roughriders in Saskatchewan in 2007. Which was a great year — a rare Grey Cup year– to be a Rider. But Johnson was miserable. He wasn’t playing, had a big chip on his shoulder and got placed on the practice roster for Grey Cup week.

Bitter and resentful, he spent that Grey Cup Week partying and, admittedly, being a distraction to his teammates. Things hit rock-bottom on the Thursday of Grey Cup Week when he mocked a Riders receivers coach named Paul LaPolice on the field during practice. “They got really mad,” he recalls.

Johnson says an embarassing shouting match ensued on the field, with the only consolation being at least it happened on the one day that week that the media wasn’t allowed at practice.

Still, no one was impressed and Johnson was cut loose by the Riders after the season.

“I just really felt like I was never on the same page with the people in that organization,” said Johnson. “It was a situation where — coaches, players, staff — I felt like everybody was against me.”

Cut out of the players’ share of the money that goes with playing in the Grey Cup because he was only on the practice roster, Johnson brazenly put his Riders Grey Cup ring up for sale on eBay, where it ultimately fetched $10,000. “It meant,” he says, “absolutely nothing to me.”

A ring this week, on the other hand, would be an entirely different matter. After four standout seasons in Winnipeg, Johnson feels like he’s found a second home. His relationship with LaPolice — with whom he quarrelled the last time he was at a Grey Cup — is now one of admiration.

The Winnipeg fans love him, he led the league in interceptions this year and he has this whole us-against-the-world mentality about him that seems to embody the spirit of the 2011 Bombers defence in the same way quarterback Buck Pierce’s never-say-die persona embodies the offence.

“This moment,” Johnson says, “is bigger than all of us and you never get these moments back… If I win (a ring) this year, I will definitely keep this one. It will be just so much more meaningful to me.”

If the meaning of life is a life with meaning, Johnson may have finally found his.