Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 18, 1991 TAG: 9102180073
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: EMORY LENGTH: Long
Before he ever imagined coaching basketball and teaching, when Johnson was a youngster, the enemy was something "frightening" inside him. He stuttered.
The son of a four-star general, Johnson was a lieutenant and platoon leader in Vietnam, in a war in which the Viet Cong wasn't the long-term enemy.
For a while, Johnson saw the enemy in the mirror, when he "wasn't interested in much more than the next beer, what brand it would be, how cold it would be."
There even was a night several years ago when Johnson, coaching the Emory & Henry College team, saw the enemy at the Bast Center on the Roanoke College campus. Johnson went into the stands after the fans heckling the coach and his family.
More recently, the foe was cancer. Johnson seems to have won that battle, too, but he lost a kidney.
Now, he turns on the television and watches slivers of another war, and the enemy seizes his thoughts away from a basketball program he took from rubble to Old Dominion Athletic Conference success and the Top 20 of Division III.
So it seems that this soldier-turned-coach is smoldering when he isn't attacking. Then, how is it that people who know him - basketball friend and foe alike - rhapsodize about Johnson?
"He's a really good guy if you get to know him," one says. "A great coach, a great guy," another says.
Johnson's smile doesn't seem to be camouflage. Are there two Bob Johnsons?
"Yeah, probably," he said. "I think that because I've realized the real one is probably the one you see at games, unfortunately. I also realized that if you're going to live with people, it's just as easy to like them as not like them. And liking them takes a lot less effort."
One Johnson corrects the E&H players' grammar during basketball practice. The other drives a 10-year-old Volvo station wagon with 178,000 miles on the odometer and papers strewn all over the seats.
\ Johnson, 44, went to West Point. In October 1964, he tried out for Army's plebe basketball team. The freshman coach was Bobby Knight, who quickly cut Johnson.
"I think it was the behind-the-back pass out of bounds that did it," Johnson wisecracked.
He left West Point after two years and became an ROTC graduate at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. By then, Johnson was determined he was going to serve in Vietnam. He wanted to be an Army Airborne Ranger.
Johnson's father, the late Harold K. Johnson, was the Army Chief of Staff during President Johnson's term. LBJ selected Harold Johnson over 43 generals with greater seniority. Johnson, a West Point grad in 1933, was a survivor of the Bataan Death March and was held prisoner for three years by the Japanese in World War II.
Gen. Johnson handled the Vietnam troops and supply buildup in 1965. His son served in Vietnam for almost a year, going home after he blew out a knee in a pickup basketball game with fellow Rangers.
"I would have been a 4-F, my knees were so bad, but I really wanted to go serve," Johnson said. "So, I worked hard and got a doctor who would pass me on the physical."
It seems that much of Johnson is his father.
"A better question would be: How much of me wishes I was my father?" Johnson said. "The answer would be: all of me. I'm unhappy I'm not more like him. I wish I had more of his drive, integrity, compassion, gentleness. When he died [of cancer in September 1983], it hurt; it hurt a lot. It wasn't pretty. . . . That was stupid to say. What death is pretty?"
When Johnson returned from Vietnam, he spent nine months at Walter Reed Army Hospital, undergoing knee surgery and living with others who had come back to a nation feeling ambivalent about a war that some Americans still refuse to call a war. Johnson's knee was fixed and he medically retired as a captain in 1972, but his inner self remains scarred.
"I think the Vietnam experience has helped me in every phase of life, except personal relations with others of my generation who were not there," Johnson said. "There's still a bitterness there. I wish it wasn't. Well, I guess I'm not sure I wish it wasn't. It's something I'm not going to make an effort to forget.
"When I first came back, it was very difficult. It was like people wanted me to get right back in the world. It was like, `Where have you been? Vacation?'
"To forget that would be a disservice to myself and people like me who were there. I'm going to keep holding it against people, not to the extent that it consumes and defeats me, but I don't want to forget."
\ Like the rest of America, Johnson watches news of the Persian Gulf War on TV.
"What they can't show and what people who haven't been in the service can't understand is what it's like for the guys on the ground, and what they go through waiting," Johnson said.
"What's our mission? When's it going to be? And most importantly in their minds, how will I perform? How will I do? Will I run? Will I be a coward? Will I do my job? Will I die? Sitting and waiting, those are questions you can't answer.
"A man called me the other day and complained about a prayer we said before a game. The more I thought about it, the madder I got. I mean, we're praying for people to come back alive. It's not a Jesus vs. Mohammed thing. And when those troops come home, I hope we let them know we appreciate what they have done, that we care about them.
"In Vietnam, we were over there so long I think some people just forgot about it. The war became a sitcom. It was something to watch [on the network news] from 6:30 to 7 every night. Watching it on TV, people say it makes the war more brutal. I think it does just the opposite. I think it hardens you to reality. It's like, `Another village is bombed. Oh, it must be quarter to 7.' "
\ On Oct. 15, a few hours before E&H started basketball practice, Johnson underwent 3 1/2 hours of cancer surgery at Bristol Memorial Hospital. A tumor the size of Johnson's fist was in his right kidney. The kidney was removed, and Johnson was told he would be in the hospital for another 10 days and couldn't return to work for a month.
He spent five days in the hospital and was back at work, sitting in a lawn chair watching practice, on Oct. 21. He was determined to defeat the cancer, just as he licked a bad stuttering problem as a kid.
"I did cry. It was scary," said Johnson, who said his thoughts included flashbacks to his father's cancer. He and his wife, Sherry, did research and found that some people who lost a kidney lived 40 to 50 more years. But their immediate reaction was one of despair.
"I think my family worried. Not that I'm a wonderful guy, but it would be nice for them to have somebody around. Sherry and I talked about how we had to especially be strong, for the kids [son Casey, 13, daughter Leigh, 11].
"There is a tough-guy thing people say about me, so I guess it's true. I do know that I made a conscious decision that if there was any way I could affect it, and I believe there is, then it was going to get beaten.
"I called my wife and I said, `I'm usually not the nicest guy in the world anyway, but it's going to be real bad for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to focus on this thing.' I shaved my head and said I was going to war, and that's what I did."
\ Johnson is a dissertation short of a Ph.D. He earned a master's degree at Springfield (Mass.) College - "Springfield is the birthplace of basketball," he interjects - after his future wife "saved me," Johnson said. "I wasn't focused at all. I guess you could say I was kind of wild. Until Sherry got me to consider grad school, I was just slumming around."
E&H hired Johnson just before the 1980-81 season. He had been an assistant coach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Johnson is a graduate of Wakefield High in Arlington. Still, Emory & Henry was nowhere to him.
"I took it because it was a head coaching job," he said. Like everyone else up there [in Northern Virginia], I thought Virginia stopped at Roanoke. . . . Anyway, there couldn't have been a worse job in America at the time."
The first four seasons, Johnson's Wasps won only 17 games. He was often like a filled and shaken 2-liter soft-drink bottle, with the cap one twist away from being a geyser. But the brush-cut, towel-gripping Johnson had a plan and an off-the-floor optimism fueled by life experience, and E&H has gone from four winning seasons in 33 years to six straight winning winters.
Johnson's scheme is based on motivation and one of the most overused words in college basketball - intensity - a word that doesn't do Johnson's game face justice. You create better teams by helping your players be better people as well as performers, he said.
"I just teach the game. Basketball is the most under-taught, over-coached sport there is," he has said.
Johnson gives his players a 36-page pamphlet, "The Mind Game," a compilation of mostly motivational quotes and sayings. The authors on the pages are as diverse as statesman Dag Hammarskjold, Walt Disney, Mario Andretti and St. Francis de Sales.
"The players don't have to read it," Johnson said. "They should though. If they don't, I'll kill them."
Johnson has a great laugh. It gets more practice than most people think, too.
"People think I'm really serious. I don't think I am serious at all. I think some of it is my countenance. I have a furrowed brow, probably a scowl. God knows I don't try to take myself or the game too seriously. What I do take seriously is what can be accomplished through the sport.
"I don't try to be intimidating, but evidently I am. I don't mean to be. Do I scare players? Evidently I do, because every three or four years, the stories are there again. Do I want players to like me? Well, I'd rather be liked than disliked, but that's not the major issue.
"The major issue is that they at least listen to what I tell them and think about what we talk about. I want them to understand the values of effort and focus on purpose. Not that a basketball game is all that important, but learning how to focus on any task is important.
"What you accomplish, you accomplish with your heart. Everything you can possibly do, do it as well as you possibly can.
"I guess I'm a perfectionist, certainly more than I'd like to be. In basketball, you can't be afraid to make errors, and you will make errors, and so maybe I shouldn't try to point out every error.
"I'm just not good about mistakes."
Then, he smiled. Really.
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