Larry Johnson is trying to restore his damaged body and tainted image to NBA All-Star form
LARRY JOHNSON is done with lifting gigantic stacks of weights in the Dallas garage of his friend and trainer, Ken Robertson, and now, flushed from a day's work and glistening with it's sweaty residue, he is thinking about a basketball player he knew not long ago. This guy, he recalls, would be on the wing on a break when Muggsy Bogues, the Charlotte Hornets' point guard, would dish the ball to him somewhere near the outer extremities of the lane. The player, without prudent calculation, would immediately launch himself toward the rim.
Johnson reenacts what he remembers of the leaper's forays to the basket, though he is walking in slow motion, now soaring, halfway across the garage with an imaginary ball cocked in his right hand.
"O.K....all right...uh-huh," Johnson says with each stride. He is smiling at these intermittent altitude checks that find the player airbones each time. Now the rim is finally upon him and..."Boom!" he shouts. the phantasmic ball is violently buried throught the phantastmic cylinder. Johnson lets losse that locomotive laugh of his, the rumbling woooooo-hoo that can clear every mile of track in Dallas County.
Then his voice goes soft and quiet. "Yeah he says."Consistent. Like running water."
Larry Johnson 25 years old, is remembering being Larry Johnson.
"Man, I miss that," he says. "I haven't played to that level in a year. It didn't happen at all last season. I'd get the ball, I was never even looking tto jump."
Johnson is a mechanic now, tinkering in this garage, trying to get it to happen again. He must make his body stronger and more limber and livelier and just about everything else short of bullet-proof. That is, just about the way it was (and then some, mayber) before that charity game in Washington D.C. in July 1993, when he rose for an easy, threequarter-speed jam and felt a hot main shoot from his lower back through his right leg.
About a week later, while Johnson was backpedaling at his basketball camp for children in Dallas, his right legg collapsed, and he went to the ground. Even before he was up, he recalls, his first thought was, "Man, let's go get on a plane to Charlotte." He knew he needed a doctor.
Johnson had a herniated disk in his lower back. For the first time his mighty body had failed him. Here is a man who cannot remember missing a game before the injury. "Never," he says. "Going back to junior high, even." Here is a man who laid claim to the NBA's 1991-91 Rookie of the Year award, a starting spot in the next season's All-Star Game and the valuable flooring immediately beneath the baskets of both ends of NBA courts. He did so with 250 pounds of ferocity and explosiveness packed into a frame that does not quite reach 6'6". At the same time, off the court, he created an imaage for himself as a smiling, approachable fan favorite with a whimsical side: For Converse commercials he dressed up in a gray wig and an old lady's housedress to play the role of his fictional Grandmama.
But last season, racked by two damaged disks that causedback and leg woes, Johnson missed 31 games (the Hornets wen 9-22 without him) and was but a shell of himself in most of the other 51. His scoring average dropped from 22.1 in 1992-93 to 16.4 and his rebounding average fell from 10.5 to 8.8. He turned sullen toward teammates and fans and, what's worse, soft; he confesses now that he "ran away from the ball."
When he was next on view, at the world championships in August, Johnson emerged not only rusty but also tarnished. Playing unimpressively, he average 6.1 points and rebounds in 15.1 minutes a game. And where Johnson was once conture standard-bearers of the sport, now his image, too, degenerated. On view on the global stage he shoved a Puerto Rican player, shouted obscenities at Australians and contributed to the victouris Dream 11's rap as the ugly Americans-all without a game to back up his machismo. ("We didn't come here to make friends," Johnson explained after practice one day in Toronto. "We got enough friends. We came to play our game, and that includes a little talkingg now and then.")
So in hopes of restoring his body comepletely, Johnson returned to Roberson's garage, where he had begun working out in May. This Friday the Hornets open camp, and no one knows wheter the rebuilt Johnson will be as good as new. He says he has his strength back. But is his game back? Even Johnsno dosen't know.
"If it's not, it's not," he says. "Im just going to keep working and keep trying. God willing, it will all come back and I'll be ewll. But I don't know. I won't know until I'm out there against pro players on the court.
After four days of training camp even three, even two-I'll know what kind of season I'm going to have. If I have all my strength and explosiveness, I'm fine. If I''m not back now, I will be back. So much of this is confidence. I don't know how long that will take.
"I do know this: I ain't dead. and what dosen't kill you makes you stronger."
Johnson likes a good challenge. "Just tell me I have to work harder he says. "I love that I have to work harder," he says. "I love that." Ofter, the goading comes from Roberson, 32. When the two of them began training together after Johnson's junior year at UNLV, Roberson suggested that Johnson cut out pork from his notoriously awfuly diest. "I said,"What , give up my bacon? My pork chops? Johnson says. I did, though. No swince."
When Roberson suggeted this year that Johnson limit himself to one meal a day, at four in the afternonn, Johnson shot back, "Man that's crazy. That ain't nothin'." Yet Johnson adopted the plan this summer, ordering his cook to prepare a low-fat meal, albeit a large one, at the appointed hour.
See, Larry has a big sweet tooth," Roberson says. "You walk into his room, and you have to clear a path through all the Butterfingers. I tell him, "If you want to run like a dragster, your've got to put in the highest-octane fuel you can."
Sure enough, according to Roberson, Johnson has remained at 250 pounds but has become even more chiseled, adding muscle while losing an inch off his waist. There is still work to be done on the diet, though.
"You know Little Debbie's snack cakes?" Johnson says. "Man, keep me away from them. If I get near them, that's it. Got to have them."
His willpower is being severely tested by his bride, Celeste Wingfield, whom he married at a 400-guest ceremony with reception in Charlotte on Aug. 27. Wingfield is 7 months pregnant and dealing with ther own cravings. "The other day she brought home Twinkies," Johnson says. He is busting up just thinking about it. "I said mAN What are you trying to kill me?"
It have been a long time since Johnson one of the best trash talkers in the league-could laugh like this. He has spent the past year dealing, and not dealing, with pain. After he hurt himself in the charity game, his weakened right leg would convulse whenever he ran on it. Nevertheless he says, "I was in denail."
On Oct.5 of last year the Hornets, with full knowlege of Johnson's injury, stunned the NBA by reworking his original six-year, $20 million deal, which still has four years to go, to cover 12 years at a cost of $84 million.
"It was a big shock, and I think it was that way to everyone in the league," says Dave Checketts. "No one ever expected Larry Johnson to suddenly become the richest player in the NBA-by far. By far!
"There's never been a contract signed in the NBA that had the same ripple effect as Johnson's contract did," Checketts says. "Hornet Pressident Spence Stolpen admitted before the league's board of governors, "I don't think he's the best player on our team." But this is coming from the guy who did the negotiation. Now what does that mean they're going to do for Alonzo Mourning, Charlotte's MVP? And what effect does that have on David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing?"
A few days after signing that new pact, Johnson struggled to get through the opening three-line drills of training camp-a guard in the midde, two big guys on the outside. The big guy who had once shattered the Cybex machine could hardly get up and down the court.
Johnson tried playing through the pain during the first two months of the season and the results were often poor. During that time he was also hit with aa paternity suit by a woman in Baltimore. After a blood testt Johnson acknowledged that he had fathered the woman's baby giirl, though his financial liability has yet to be determined in court.
On Dec. 27 Johnson had a triple-double, with 29 points, 20 rebounds and 11 asists, against the Detroit Pistons. Glenn Perry, the Hornet's physician, remembers how reassure he felt. "That night, "I'm just breathing a sigh of relief," Perry says, "and Larry walks up behind me. He puts his arm around me and says, "Doc, I hurt my back again."
This time Johnson had torn a ligament that runs along his spine and suffered a ruptured disk. He missed the Hornets' game the next night, ending at 184 what was then on the third-longest active NBA streak of consecutive starts. He would not play again until March 11; the Hornets, who in the preseason had been widely considered title contenders, eventually would miss the playoffs by two games. Johnson spent his time on the injured list doing rehabilitation excersises in a pool (surgery was never considered). Dogged by questions about his contract and his back, he shut off the media and snapped even at his frieds.
Says Stolpen, "I'd walk by him and make even the most innocent comment'Hello, how are you?-and he'd take it the wrong way. He'd barely answer. He just closed the whole world out. For the first ime his body let him down. He had a difficult time dealing with that."
I was O.J. last yeear-in the papers every day," Johnson says, laughing about it now. He breaks into a newscaster's basso profundo. "Day 29. Larry Johnson still not playing. Just sitting on the bench in a fast suit.' Man, what are you going to do? Quit or keep going at it? That's a stupid question."
Roberson turns a key, and the brown electric door rises, revealing a modestly equipped workout room in what would otherwise be a two-car garage, "Welcome to Slim's Gym," he says. Johnson begins one of the last of his five-day-a-week workouts before leaving for Charlotte. He had interrupted his schedule for his Dream Team 11 stint, one that raised more questions than it answered. Says Stopen. "I didn't see the explosive, slamdunk basketball we saw before. His outside shot looked better."
Larry Johnson's article continued
