I think people are missing one important fact here....LJ is not the type of guy that we want on this team. Portis plays hard, is a leader, and does anything that the coaches ask him to do. LJ, meanwhile, has gotten in trouble for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend (I think that the charges were dismissed). He also spend a good deal of time in Vermeil's doghouse and Vermeil even told him to take off his "diaper". This guy is way too high maintenance and I don't like his "me first" attitude. That is exact opposite of Portis. Check out this recent article about LJ from the Kansas City Star.
Larry Johnson stares down obstacles, runs through them
By WRIGHT THOMPSON
The Kansas City Star
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — There are memories everywhere in Fran Ganter’s office. Pictures of all the great running backs he coached at Penn State. They blend together, faces from a different time. If not for the jersey numbers, and the wear on the photos, you couldn’t tell them apart.
Then there’s this other picture. The man in the simple frame is different. He’s coming off the paper, a reservoir of passion in his eyes. Even in a small photo, you can tell Larry Johnson is different.
“He is unique,” says Ganter, who was Johnson’s position coach and offensive coordinator. “You could see it in his eyes. I know I wouldn’t mess with him. Me and two other guys, I wouldn’t mess with him.”
For five years, Ganter studied those eyes. Like most everyone else, he tried and failed to understand Johnson. So he’s been watching closely the past few years, and what he’s seen from a distance is the same thing he saw up close in State College. Here, he’ll show you. Ganter taps the speaker-phone button and dials the equipment room. These guys know everything. He asks two questions of the unnamed manager.
Who was Larry Johnson’s best friend when he was here?
“Himself,” the man says.
Did you see anyone he really trusted?
“No.”
Everywhere Johnson’s been, it’s the same. He makes people mad. He challenges authority. He whines and receives special treatment. He’s misunderstood, misused, misjudged. He also succeeds wildly, be it gaining 2,000 yards in high school and college or rushing for 100 yards in all eight games he’s started this season.
He’s always been enigmatic, an angry man who has his own peculiar view of the world. But if you want to understand him, people say, you’ve got to see it the way he sees it. You’ve got to wind through the mountains, down the Mt. Nittany Expressway. Go into the small Penn State assistant football coach’s office, where his dad reads a self-help book about sudden wealth. Visit the big stadium he electrified, the high school where he came of age.
You’ve got to see life through Larry Johnson’s eyes.
On the first day of his life, Nov. 19, 1979, Larry Johnson saw a football. A Nerf one, lovingly given by Larry Johnson Sr. to his newborn son.
Larry Sr. was a high school coach in Maryland, a big but gentle man who’d been taught the game by Herman Boone, from “Remember the Titans.” The elder Johnson played a season in the NFL and came away still loving the game. Not surprisingly, little Larry was drawn to his father’s world.
They would sit for hours in front of the television, watching old and cracked images from NFL Films. Football in black and white, the way both father and son like it. For a shy child, a loner, those old players became imaginary friends. He picked pioneers as idols. He saw Marion Motley, among the first wave of black football players who desegregated the NFL, bull over defenders. He watched the outspoken Jim Brown do the same thing.
At around the age of 7 or 8, he traded the Nerf ball for a real one. He signed up for the 75-pound league, and Larry Sr. signed up to coach. He lined up at tailback, where he could see everything and everyone, already a student of the game.
During a scrimmage one day, carrying the ball near the sideline, he got hit harder than kids like to get hit. He landed at his father’s feet, dazed. Suddenly, Larry didn’t want to play anymore, so his dad put him on the bench.
“I promise,” Larry Sr. told him, “you’ll be all right.”
A quarter later, Larry put himself back in the game. He stared out at the field again. The first play was a sweep. Instead of breaking for daylight, he located the defender who’d hit him. He ran him down, ran him over, then scored. Larry Johnson, the little kid, was running angry. Larry Johnson, the football player, was born that day.
“It’s the first sign of that determination,” his dad says proudly.
Nearly a decade went by, and Larry looked out the window, watching city turn to country as the family moved from suburban Maryland to State College. Dad had gotten a new job, a big one, as an assistant coach for Joe Paterno at Penn State.
As the family got closer to State College, Larry’s life was changing faster than the scenery along Highway 322 West. Buildings became mountains and valleys, lush green in the summer, soon to be covered in snow.
Back home, he had friends like himself, a life, a football reputation. Now, he had none of those things at State College Area High School.
“Larry had to prove himself again,” says Dave Lintal, one of Johnson’s high school coaches in State College. “He was gonna be the man at his old high school, but he came here and — who’s Larry Johnson? It was difficult. Where he came from, Maryland, there were many, many, many more black people.”
As he walked down the halls for the first time, Johnson saw white faces everywhere he looked. On an average year, African-Americans make up less than 3 percent in the school of around 2,600. Johnson saw kids wearing the de facto school uniform of North Face fleeces and Penn State hoodies, kids whose dads taught at the university, or coached there. The students at State College did great things. Harvard. Princeton. Law school. Jobs at the White House. A culture of success prevailed, with SAT scores rivaling the most prestigious boarding schools in the country.
Johnson and his younger siblings battled stereotypes, even among their friends.
“We’ve always grown up in the suburbs,” says his sister, Teresa, laughing. “We didn’t grow up in the ’hood. Every black person who comes to State College is not from the ’hood, not from the inner city, not from the ghetto.”
Everywhere Larry looked, he saw something different. He watched closely, studying people’s motivations. His dad had always given him good advice, wisdom learned growing up in the South, watching his own father.
“When you walk in,” Larry Sr. preached, “walk slow.”
Larry walked slow.
The first few months of football practice at the sprawling high school, located on both sides of Westerly Parkway near the Penn State campus, was a test of will.
For the first time, Larry looked up at his head coach and didn’t see his father staring back. Johnson was in his junior year, the coach in his final one. In the coach’s estimation, Larry hadn’t paid his dues, and the starting running back, Mark Hagen, had. Sound familiar?
“After I’ve watched him at Penn State and watched what he’s doing now,” says Hagen, now an officer in the U.S. Navy, “sometimes I wonder, should I have still been there?”
The answer, of course, is no. Larry saw that talent didn’t equal playing time. That didn’t sit well. His analytical mind surely stalled as he tried to figure out why an inferior running back was on the field instead of him.
“Nothing has ever come easy for him,” Larry Sr. says. “That’s kinda been his trail. It’s been the same story for him.”
About four games into his high school career, Johnson finally got on the field. He went off for more than 200 yards, showing everyone he belonged.
By his senior year, he played like a man possessed. Each time he got the ball, he saw a wall. Each brick represented a different setback. Each brick, a different person or situation between him and his NFL dream. It’s a wall that would grow with time.
While his intensity solved problems on the field, it created them off of it. Even his high school coaches handled Johnson with kid gloves.
“I think with Larry,” Lintal says, “he’s always been a complex individual. You had to treat him differently. He’s not the person you get in his face and challenge him. You would never want to call Larry out in front of a crowd.”
The games he sat out as a junior seemed to leave their mark on Johnson. Never again. Each game was a statement.
“He’s always been angry on the field,” says high school teammate Brian Spanier, “which is what made him so good. He’s always had something scratching at him.”
Even practices became a chance to prove himself. He refused to do drills at the assigned slower speed. He’d crush anyone in his way. Finally, Lintal told the defensive backs to just get out of there.
“You freeze up when he’s running at you,” says Spanier, one of those unlucky defensive backs and now a real estate analyst in Philadelphia. “He’s one of the only people I’ve ever seen that runs right at you. He always runs you over. That’s what happened every single time. I never tackled him.”
When it came time to pick a college, Johnson was enamored with North Carolina. But the family is tight, and Larry chose to stay close to home.
The Penn State football office sits across the street from a nuclear reactor, believe it or not. The first thing Johnson saw every time he walked up the steps and through the glass double doors was John Cappelletti’s Heisman Trophy, dominating the foyer. He wanted one, even doing a paper about it in an art class.
First, he had to play. He could hardly get on the field. He’d walk up the staircase, past Paterno’s office, with the comfortable couches and large desk, to the hall where his dad worked. He trudged around the facility, slowly coming unglued.
“You can imagine how he felt,” Ganter says. “He thought I was nuts. He thought I was against him, that I had it out for him. I feel bad that he was so unhappy.”
As the years slipped away, the things he’d felt in high school became hard-wired into his psyche. He grew even more surly, taking joy in it, telling reporters, “I’m always angry, all the time, on and off the field.” He saw an offense he felt was boring and predictable, so as a sophomore backup, he called out Joe Paterno. The coaches learned to tiptoe around him. Again.
“Larry is so proud, you have to be careful how you coach him and what you say to him,” Ganter says. “Sometimes, you’d say, ‘I’d rather not have a confrontation in front of eight guys; I’ll just get him off to the side later.’ ”
He took out his frustrations on anyone who got in his way, from opponents to Penn State scout-teamers. Assistant coach Brian Norwood recalls one of the safeties managing a rare shot on Johnson during a drill. Later, Norwood said, Johnson ran over the offending safety, looked down at his victim and dropped the football on him.
Point proved. Larry Johnson never forgets. His mental bulletin board is always full.
“He took everything personally,” Larry Sr. says, “and it drove him on the inside and it angered him on the inside.”
Beaver Stadium is the biggest thing in town, squatting alien and gray on the edge of campus. It’s an American cathedral, built and rebuilt in bits and pieces, growing along with Paterno’s program. It took four years, but Johnson finally got his chance to be the star there. He ran on the field, taking it all in. Norwood noticed that opponents often talked trash to other players during warmups, but not to Larry. His eyes were that scary.
After four seasons of watching, he made up for lost time. By October, he had the school’s single-game rushing record. When the coaches took him out for the final 28 minutes of the 49-0 rout of Northwestern, Johnson bristled. “I wanted to get mine after the last three or four years,” he told reporters.
By the end of the year, he had the school’s single-season rushing record, too, and was aiming for 2,000 yards. And he still wouldn’t run away from defenders, even when it cost him. Sitting alone in his sprawling office recently, Paterno smiled at the memory of Johnson trying to destroy people. It was like Larry was proving he was tougher than the suburbs where he was raised.
“He wants to be a hard-nosed kid,” Paterno says, “and I was trying to get that out of him. I thought he was one of the best open-field runners we ever had.”
The season had to end. Johnson saw flashbulbs popping as he got to 2,015 yards, going home that night and watching highlights over and over with his father, content for a moment. He watched the Heisman Trophy go to Carson Palmer, but he took a picture of himself by it anyway, a picture that’s still the wallpaper on the family’s computer at home.
He saw the NFL draft unfold predictably as he was picked … by a team that already had a star running back. He didn’t know whether he could do it again, for the third time. He heard himself telling Carl Peterson, according to his father, that he didn’t handle being a backup well. The past five years had taught Larry Johnson a lot, including self-awareness.
“Larry understands failure,” his father says. “He understands that to get to the top, you’ve got to fall to the bottom. Every time he’s climbed to the top, there’s always been a mountain a little higher.”
The mountain grew. Every day, it seemed, another brick added to that wall. He watched most of the Chiefs games from the sideline and didn’t know what to say afterward. When his family was in town, their usual postgame activity of watching highlights was pointless.
“I don’t know why they would bring me in here when they already had Priest,” Johnson told reporters. “If you’re not going to use me, why draft me?”
When Priest Holmes was injured last season and Johnson received his chance, the situation got improbably worse. Coach Dick Vermeil said it was time for Johnson to take off his “diaper,” and Larry exploded. He’s particularly sensitive to accusations of being a crybaby. Would anyone dare to tell Jim Brown he needs to lose the diaper?
With each slight — some real, some perceived — he picked up the telephone. Back in State College, his dad waited for those phone calls, wishing Larry could just walk up those stairs to his office again. The conversations became daily maintenance.
“He’s holding that inside,” Larry Sr. says. “When the phone rings, and it’s Larry, I listen because I know he’s getting all of those things out. He can quiet the storm and go back to being himself.”
Several times, when his son was at his worst, Larry Sr. hopped a flight.
“I wasn’t afraid to get on a plane to Kansas City,” he says. “I heard it in his voice. It’s in his voice. You feel the tears running, but you can’t see them. You’ve got to go. You can’t just sit there. He was by himself.”
This season, it seemed like Johnson saw light at the end of his tunnel. His play in replacement of Holmes in 2004 convinced the coaches that he had to be on the field in 2005, so they began rotating running backs.
Then, in early September, he was arrested for domestic assault. Though the woman in the accusation recanted, Johnson found himself in the news for the wrong reasons. His play slipped. After a hot start, he managed just 13 yards on eight carries against Denver. Around then, his brother Tony moved from State College. Larry needed a friend, and Tony brought comfort.
“He’s himself when Tony’s around,” little sister Teresa says. “He’s at home. He’s not on edge.”
Larry doesn’t have a bigger fan, or better confidant, than Tony, who also played at Penn State. Tony believed when no one else did. Before the season, he selected Larry first in his fantasy draft. The league is online and anonymous, so the competitor didn’t know who he was speaking to when he messaged smugly, “He’s not gonna play this year.”
Now, months later, with his draft pick recently selected to the Pro Bowl, Tony grinned.
“I’ve got the best record in my league,” he says.
All this has led Larry Johnson here, to a stool in front of his locker at Arrowhead Stadium, with an entire city trying to figure out what pushes him to run like he does. They don’t know where he’s been, what those piercing eyes have seen.
“Larry is probably much the same as he was at Penn State, as he was here, as he was as an 8-year-old,” Lintal says. “You have to keep going back to the story when he was 8. It’s genetic. It was there at that age, and it’s still there now.”
His father realizes now that this running-angry bit, though created by Larry himself, has turned his son into a caricature, hiding his true complexity and beauty.
“Don’t make him a monster,” Larry Sr. says. “He’s not. It looks like he’s running with a chip on his shoulder, but he’s running to prove that this is where he belongs.”
What Johnson sees now is people trying to figure him out, never a comfortable position for a man accustomed to doing the observing. Sitting in his locker last week, he fiddled with his cell phone. A television reporter approached cautiously: You want to talk about the Pro Bowl? Larry shook him off. Then he returned to his phone call, leaning back in his locker, burying himself in a Team Roc coat. A teammate a few spaces down looked over and laughed. It was both profoundly weird and appropriate. In a room full of people, Larry Johnson was hiding, a jacket covering his eyes. He’d seen enough.
At least until game day, when the ball is snapped and he sees that wall again, daring him to run through.
ey, and the Dirtbags. This would be a trade that would finally get us over the hump as an organization.
