c.1997 The Arizona Republic
PHOENIX - Win Williamson knew the boy was different from the first day he walked into her third-grade class in Room 12 at Sacramento's Ethel Phillips Elementary School.
Kevin Johnson was so eager, so bright, so independent, so much of a challenge.
``He would come up to me and talk to me just like he was another grown-up,'' she said. ``He could just communicate with adults. He was my point guard even back then, before we knew what a point guard was.''
He was elected class president. He led the daily devotional. And he was so stubborn that he wouldn't accept that he was wrong until she showed him.
It wasn't good enough to just mark an arithmetic problem wrong. Williamson had to show him exactly where he had gone wrong. ``He had his own mind,'' she said.
Still does.
Johnson, the Suns guard whose quickness and speed have amazed NBA fans for 10 years, is on the brink of joining perhaps the most elite group in professional sports: great athletes who retired in the prime of their careers.
This does not surprise Williamson nor anyone else who knows Johnson well. He is just different enough, they said, to walk away from the game while at his peak.
Like any other decision he makes, Johnson's retirement plan did not come off the top of his closely cropped head. He rarely acts on impulse, but only after careful thought and deliberation. When he commits himself to a project, nothing can dissuade or discourage him.
Muhamed Muqtar has learned not to scoff at Johnson's plans. He has known Johnson since KJ was a student at the University of California and Muqtar was working a third job at a small campus library. Muqtar, from Somalia, and Johnson, the inner-city kid, quickly forged a strong friendship.
``Muhamed,'' Johnson said during one of their many late-night conversations, ``I'm going to play 10 years in the NBA, and then I'm going to retire when I'm on top.''
Johnson was a junior in college.
Ideas and plans flow through Johnson's heads like streams carrying runoff from a mountain. Sometimes they converge into something so large that Johnson can't contain it. He tells friends. He gets so excited that he draws plans on napkins. He bugs people so much that they end up helping.
This is why he intentionally has made no plans for what he will do beyond the NBA playoffs, which begin next week for the Suns, who end their regular season tonight against Vancouver.
Johnson knows himself. If he had made specific plans for the future, they would have dominated his life and basketball would have become secondary.
``I'd be spending half of my time planning whatever it was,'' he said.
Hardly anyone believes Johnson will retire. It's as if the whole basketball world is rolling its eyes in disbelief.
After all, Johnson is as healthy as he has been in years, and he is averaging 20 points and more than nine assists per game. He has rarely, if ever, played better, and at 31, he could play five more seasons, Suns Coach Danny Ainge said.
Then, of course, there's the money. A free agent after this season, KJ could command a contract worth more than $10 million next season.
So why would any normal person walk away from that?
``Kevin always tries to be different,'' said Houston Rockets forward Eddie Johnson, a former teammate of Johnson's with the Suns. ``That's pretty much dictated his whole career.''<
Those close to him believe Johnson is committed to retiring. He does what his heart and mind—not conventional wisdom—tell him.
That governed him when he was deciding which college to attend. Coming out of Sacramento High, he could have signed with a number of high-profile basketball programs. Instead, he went to the University of California, which then had a downtrodden program, because he wanted to help build something.
He proved again through his charitable efforts that he was different. In college, he dreamed of creating a program to help kids in his old neighborhood. After he had made it in the NBA, he committed himself to building St. Hope Academy, a program to help disadvantaged kids in his old neighborhood in Sacramento.
It is located in a 7,000-square-foot facility, and there is a similar, but smaller, program in Phoenix.
``It's a unique pattern for Kevin,'' Muqtar said. ``Some people are builders and some are sustainers. Kevin is a builder. He's always had a vision and always had a plan.''
That was obvious to Williamson, now retired, who keeps a scrapbook filled with pictures of Johnson, newspaper clippings and letters he has written her. For years, Kevin would return to Room 12 just to visit her and her students.
It was obvious to Rita Lopez, who lived next door to Johnson when he was growing up. As a child, Johnson slipped into her heart, and she still has pictures of him hanging on a wall.
And it's obvious to Patricia Lee Burks, a friend of Johnson's from high school, who gave up a promising job to help him start St. Hope Academy in Sacramento.
``He's a Renaissance guy, and he thinks about a lot of different things,'' said Dave Butler, a teammate of Johnson's at California. ``He studies a lot of different people and ideas.''<
His personality was nurtured in a small, white house on 16th Avenue in Sacramento, about four blocks from St. Hope. It looked like many others in the hardscrabble neighborhood in a section of Sacramento called Oak Park, but the inside of the home was unlike any other.
It belonged to George and Georgia Peat, Johnson's grandparents, who happened to be white.
Mr. Peat, as people in the neighborhood called him, knew that KJ's grandmother was pregnant by another man when he married her.
The baby, also named Georgia, was KJ's mother, who happened to be black. Georgia was just a month shy of 17 when she gave birth to Kevin, whose father drowned in a boating accident when KJ was 3.
So together, KJ's grandparents and mother raised the little boy.
``There were no kids in the neighborhood back then, so guess who (Kevin) picked to be his playmate?'' said Lopez, who still lives in the same house and remains close to Johnson. Three years ago, he surprised her by paying for a new fence and sprinkler system for her home.
``Even before he could walk, he would come over, dragging a dirty blanket behind him. I'm surprised he didn't become a hairdresser,'' Lopez said. ``He used to come over here and mess with my hair, comb it until I got tired of it and told him to go bug Grammy.''
KJ had another blanket at home, one made of love and compassion. His grandparents and mother worshiped him, and unlike his friends, Johnson grew up in a structured environment. While his family wasn't typical, it was stable and caring.
``You know you are different. You always know that,'' Johnson said of his racially mixed home. ``But the love was so strong that it covered anything. You could not penetrate that. It protected all of us.''
Lopez remembers that KJ came to her house one time after playing with older kids up the street. ``He told me some kids had called him `nigger,' and he asked me what that meant,'' she said. ``I couldn't deal with it. I didn't have the right answer, so I told him to go talk to Grammy and Grampy.
``A few minutes later, Kevin returned and with a big smile said, `They said I'm a beautiful brown, just like Rita.' ''<
Grammy, who died in 1987, and Grampy, who passed in 1991, were quiet, understated people who were never concerned with climbing the social ladder. But they instilled in their grandson the idea that he had an obligation to help those less fortunate.
His grandfather always would stop to help someone change a flat tire, even though KJ would be sitting in the car, impatiently wondering why his grandfather had to help everyone. ``You know how it is when you are a kid, you just want to go play,'' he said.
George Peat, a sheet-metal worker, spent many weekends fixing bicycles for kids in the neighborhood.
``My grandfather was a fair man,'' Johnson said. ``If anything, he believed in Robin Hood. Those people who had much had to understand they were required to give more. They just had to understand that.''
After Johnson went to college, his grandfather often bought gifts for his grandson when he visited. He usually included something for Kevin's friends, too.
``If Mr. Peat got groceries for Kevin, I got some,'' Muqtar said. ``If he got a shirt, I got a shirt. If he got a sweater, I got a sweater. I used to tell Kevin, `If you could get half of your grandfather's character, you will be fine.' ''<
KJ was no angel during his first two years at Berkeley. He went to parties and did whatever it took to get by in class and stay eligible.
But as a junior, he made a vow to read a chapter of the New Testament each night. It took him more than eight months to finish, and at the end he was a changed man.
For years, he had searched for a role model. In junior high, he read Henry David Thoreau ``because he was a non-conformist.'' He soon moved on to other authors, philosophers and sports stars, but at each stop he ran into contradictions, hypocrisy and other imperfections.
But his search ended with the New Testament. ``We talk about it symbolically at times, but I really did see the light,'' he said. ``When I read about Christ, I thought, `This is the role model. This is somebody who is not a hypocrite, who was teaching me what I was supposed to do even when it was not convenient.' ''
The lessons he learned from his reading, and from his grandparents and mother, came together to forge Johnson's commitment to kids who didn't have the advantages he did. In college, he often spoke with his college friends about starting a project such as St. Hope once he had made it in the NBA.
Now, he has St. Hope, which is designed to nurture and teach children. He has paid tuition for students attending college and law school. He has four teenage boys, including his half-brother, Ronnie, living with him in Phoenix, and he is serving as role model, adviser and father figure to them.<
``Visionary'' is how Lori Mills, the program director for St. Hope in Phoenix and a friend of Johnson's since college, describes him. ``He is not someone who just sits around, envisioning things. He acts on them and gets them done.''
At Cal, KJ began to formulate his plans beyond basketball. He often returned to Sacramento and saw people he grew up with suffering from poverty, substance abuse and fractured families. He remembered his grandfather's lessons of how to be a steward in your community, and he knew he had to make a difference back home.
``Those same principles and values, that nurturing environment, that's what embodies St. Hope,'' he said.
When KJ went to the NBA, drafted seventh overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers and then traded to Phoenix less than a year later, his plans for St. Hope became an obsession.
After that first season with the Suns, KJ returned to Berkeley and had dinner with some friends. He was so excited about the project and so eager to share his vision that he drew plans on a cocktail napkin.
``He talked about this vicious cycle (of failure),'' Muqtar said. ``And he said, `The only way I can break this cycle is if I get the kids when they are young.' ''
KJ persuaded others to share in his dream. Burks, a friend since high school, had just taken a nice job with the state of California when Johnson started bugging her about working with him at St. Hope.
``Step out on faith, Patty. Step out on faith,'' he kept telling her.
``Everyone was telling me those things didn't work, but he was pretty convincing,'' Burks said.
She followed him and has been with St. Hope since it started in 1989 with 12 students and was housed in portable classrooms at Sacramento High. In 1992, St. Hope moved into a new facility that has several classrooms, a computer lab, two bedrooms and a room for community meetings.
Nearly 40 kids come there almost every day after school for tutoring, activities, SAT preparation, counseling and employment training.<
KJ hasn't made a big deal of a similar program in Phoenix, which has been in place for nearly three years. ``That's what my grandfather taught me,'' Johnson said. ``You do it quietly and silently, and one day one of those kids you helped along the way will go back and help somebody else. That's where the benefits are.''
Very little about building and maintaining St. Hope has been easy. When he envisioned the program, Johnson never dreamed the problems he would encounter.
``When you are young, you think you can change and conquer that world,'' he said. ``That naivete can get you, but on the other hand, it can be a strength. If you knew everything, you probably wouldn't do some of those things.
``The first thing that was the hardest realizing is how much you had to strip down and re-educate kids before you could educate them. There was so much garbage these kids had. Second, the people you would think would be the most supportive, the parents, often were the most impeding. Those people are still the primary influence in their kids' lives, and some of the parents had a disease, whether it was drugs or alcoholism.
``And third, it's difficult realizing you can't save every kid. I'm an all-or-nothing-type guy, and it's tough to cut your losses. I hate giving up, but you realize the energy you're spending there could be spent on kids who would really thrive.''<
He learned similar lessons in basketball. It's curious that for a player who has played most of his career in one city and helped turn around a franchise, KJ doesn't seem as beloved in Phoenix as, say, John Stockton is in Utah.
The criticisms are many. He is injury-prone, having missed 123 games over the past five seasons. Some think his off-court interests have interfered with his basketball performance.
``Kevin is different, and that rubs a lot of people raw,'' said Cotton Fitzsimmons, who coached the Suns the year after they acquired Johnson and is now a vice president. ``I don't know if it's because they think he's phony or if it's because they just can't be like him.''
Then there is the Barkley factor. With an inside presence, KJ had to adjust his game, and he did more standing around on the perimeter.
The Suns were clearly Charles Barkley's team, and that smile KJ brought with him from California to Cleveland to Arizona was seen less frequently during those seasons.
``Charles didn't have to adjust his game,'' Fitzsimmons said. ``Kevin is the one who had to make all the sacrifices and the adjustments.''<
KJ's mother, Georgia West, moved to Arizona about 1{ years ago, and she has heard the negative comments about her son. ``It breaks my heart,'' she said. ``With the names and things they call him and just questioning his character. That's the most important thing to him.''
During his career, Johnson learned to deal with criticism, he said. During his first few seasons in Phoenix, it gnawed at him, but he came to realize about four years ago that the opinions of strangers didn't mean much.
``It doesn't matter as much as it used to,'' he said. ``A reputation was more important to me when I was young. But as you get older, you realize that no matter what you do, other people contribute to defining what your reputation might be. You realize it's your character that's important.''
That realization, he said, was ``liberating.''
``For a person like Kevin, who tries to please the world, it sometimes takes awhile to find out he can't,'' Fitzsimmons said.
KJ credits basketball for teaching him hard lessons that take others a lifetime to learn.
``You get challenged in your faith in situations that the normal person doesn't have to go through,'' he said. ``It's where you stand in times of discomfort. Can you still stand up for what you believe? That's when you know you are on the right track.''
Johnson probably could have been successful in sports other than basketball, because he was a natural in most anything he tried. As a kid, he was ranked third in the nation in speed roller-skating, a sport that his mother credits for developing his speed on the basketball court.
Until his senior year in high school, his best sport was baseball, and the Oakland A's picked him in the 23rd round of the 1986 amateur draft.
Basketball coaches at Sacramento High didn't know they had something special until KJ was a sophomore. He had grown six inches in the previous year, and his quickness was extraordinary. By the time he was a senior, he was good enough to lead the state in scoring, averaging about 32 points a game.
Overall, KJ was a pleasure to coach, said Ron McKenna, but that doesn't mean he was easy. He had a tendency to skip some of those preseason track workouts.
And he wasn't always the idyllic team leader and compassionate hero.
KJ suffered an ankle injury early in his senior year, missed some games and slowly worked back into shape. Meanwhile, the team's chemistry was terrible, and McKenna couldn't figure out why.
Soon after, KJ and another player scuffled while on the bench, and McKenna knew something had to be done. ``I called him (KJ) in and said, `This is the end of it. One of you two guys has to go.' Obviously, it was going to be the other guy, but I made it clear to Kevin that he shared part of the responsibility for the other kid leaving. And he felt badly about it.''<
Even as a pro, Johnson hasn't been easy to coach.
When KJ arrived in Phoenix, Fitzsimmons walked to the nearest ball rack, handed a ball to KJ and gave him one sentence of instruction.
``Go do what you do best,'' Fitzsimmons said.
But as others before Fitzsimmons found out, teaching KJ wasn't easy.
``Cal is a fairly radical school,'' Fitzsimmons said. ``When you explain something to a Cal guy, he wants to know why.''
The trade for KJ led to the biggest turnaround in NBA history. The trade brought the Suns, in addition to KJ, center Mark West, Tyrone Corbin and three draft picks, one of which was used to take Dan Majerle. They signed Tom Chambers, a free agent, in the off-season, and with the ball in KJ's hands, went from 28 victories in 1987-88 to 55 in 1988-89.
``It started a run for us, which lasted seven years,'' said Jerry Colangelo, Suns president and CEO. ``Obviously, Barkley was on the tail end of the run, but Kevin was the constant.''
Johnson's game is different today. He shares playmaking duties with Jason Kidd. He has added the three-point shot to his arsenal and is among the league leaders in three-point accuracy. He is careful about protecting his fragile legs, and he hasn't dunked all season.
Still, this has been his most enjoyable season in years because he is healthy and the team has been on a roll for the past month.<
So why retire? Because Johnson began planning it this way 10 years ago. He watched other athletes hang on too long, and he vowed to be different.
``I watched Muhammed Ali and I'm like, `Muhammed, why?' '' Johnson said.
Johnson does not rule out playing another year, although he doesn't think it will happen. He and Colangelo have discussed a job in the organization, a position Colangelo said would allow Johnson to expand his work with kids. But Johnson remains uncommitted.
This summer, he'll ``lay himself open'' to God and ask for guidance.
And how will God provide it?
Johnson smiles.
``Maybe I'll be like Moses. I'll go to the top of Camelback Mountain and look for a burning bush. This is new ground for me, believe me.''<
Go back to SOCIOLOGY 260 -- Sociology of Marriage and the Family Page
If you have any questions or comments please email: