Big Johnson

It’s a Friday night in the West Bottoms, and Larry Johnson is late arriving at Club Vital.

The four lanes of James Street are busy during the day, but at midnight, only an occasional truck rumbles through, drowning out the sound of crickets.

Once in a while, cars cruise by. Drivers and passengers study the bouncer standing beneath the awning and the sign reading “Eat Drink Dance Live.” But few stop.

Johnson is always looking for a new place to hang out when he’s not playing football. But he’s learned not to get his hopes up in Kansas City. The town is really too small for him. He’s originally from Baltimore, and he keeps a condo in Las Vegas — both of them are towns with entertainment options for a young African-American man with money.

Kansas City has Mi Cocina and The Drink.

Tonight, Johnson isn’t particularly excited about going to Blonde, the supertrendy new club on the Plaza. He’s heard that fellow Chief Dante Hall was turned away at the door for wearing a hat. Johnson says Tony Gonzalez is the only Chief who can go anywhere wearing whatever he wants.

“The word is they don’t want Chiefs players,” Johnson says. (A Blonde manager tells the Pitch that the club welcomes Chiefs but did turn away Hall when he wouldn’t take off his hat.)

Johnson is one of the few Chiefs players who enjoys going to places such as the VI Ultra Club at 11th Street and Grand downtown. Though it’s under new management, the hip-hop club occupies the same space as the former Club Chemical, which was the site of multiple shootings. The scene there is different now, but Johnson says he knows some people think he’s courting trouble.

“People say, ‘You go down there just to show you can go down there.’ No, I go down there because I like it…. I’m not saying I’d go to the middle of Oakland. It’s not about risking it. It’s about being comfortable in a situation.” Johnson, who grew up in mostly white suburbs, says, “I like to be around black people.”

There aren’t too many black people tonight at Club Vital. There aren’t too many people of any color.

“No hats. No white tees,” the bouncer yells across the wide, empty street. Johnson tosses his Team Roc cap into the tiny back seat of his maroon Mercedes coupe.

He’s riding with the agent of another player, who doesn’t want his name published.

The two men show their IDs to the bouncer and follow the velvet ropes inside, stretching out their arms automatically to be patted down. Johnson pays the $10 cover charge.

He’s greeted immediately by a tiny woman in a brown chiffon dress. She doesn’t understand why he got lost. He tries to explain that Interstate 35 loops around downtown and he didn’t know where to exit.

Johnson buys a Corona at the long bar. He wanders toward the club’s second room and the dance floor, where a single interracial couple gyrates beneath the lights in a hyper-popping style. Two black men recognize him, and he accepts their smiles and handshakes.

The club is quite dark, but Johnson glows in an oversized white Team Roc warmup jacket that still barely fits his hulking shoulders. His pea-sized diamond earring and his diamond-rimmed watch sparkle in the lights.

He greets fellow Chief Julian Battle, who has one foot in a walking cast. His achilles-tendon injury has ruined his season but not his night.

The place isn’t bad — it’s just empty. Johnson and Battle decide to seek more action at the reliable Mi Cocina. Johnson and the agent climb into Johnson’s Mercedes.

Mi Cocina’s basement VIP room is the most exclusive party spot in town, and Johnson greets the manager, who makes the call on who gets downstairs.

It’s not as if only pretty people get in. A short white guy in a Steelers cap greets Johnson at the bottom of the stairs. The man is a little drunk, and he gushes: “You’re going to rush for 1,000 yards. I think you’re going to have a great year. You’re going to rush for 1,000 yards.”

Johnson thanks him and then navigates the dance floor to post up at the white bar. “This is a little more my speed,” he says. The room is crowded and hot. Except for the throbbing black speakers, most of the room is painted white, including the low-beamed ceiling and the bar itself.

The crowd is mostly white here as well, though there are a few African-American men and women besides Johnson, the agent and Battle, who has rejoined them.

Johnson has been allowed to keep his hat, which is crooked and pulled low over his eyes. He orders a bottled water and watches the dancers. He describes the music as Spanish techno.

“This is no fucking salsa club. Ain’t no motherfuckers who can dance but a couple,” he says with a smirk. Johnson doesn’t smile much. And he rarely dances. A friend from Vegas says Johnson can tear up the dance floor. But not here. Not tonight. Not in Kansas City.

Johnson is joined at the bar by Sean Deaver, a school friend of Chiefs return man Dante Hall. The men don’t seem surprised to see each other.

Deaver jokes that he calls Johnson “King Pink” because of his attraction to white women.

A tall black man dressed in all white — clear up to his floppy fishing hat — comes in. Johnson and Deaver exchange looks.

Johnson explains that the newcomer is an ex-boyfriend of the tiny woman he spoke to at Vital. Johnson and the man never look directly at each other, but they’re clearly posturing. “He’s mad because I’m fucking his bitch,” Johnson says.

Another smiling white guy approaches Johnson to congratulate him on his successes last year. He is with two women, one of whom Johnson has been eyeing — whether she’s sexy has been the subject of a debate between Johnson and the agent. She is a willowy brunette who’s nearly 6 feet tall in heels.

She leans in to meet Johnson. But they’ve hardly said much when the lights come up. It’s 2:20 a.m.

The exiting patrons cluster on the corner outside. Battle loudly chats up the woman Johnson has just met, confusing her in the process. “Do you like peanut butter?” he asks her. “Do you like jelly?” Then he spots a thin, dark-skinned black woman striding across the street on high, high heels.

“That’s Africa in the making,” he says to no one in particular.

Johnson and the agent linger only a minute before getting into the Mercedes, which Johnson left in a no-parking zone out front.

In 17 hours, Johnson will take a handoff from Chiefs quarterback Trent Green and run 97 yards for a touchdown, leap into the arms of his fellow Chiefs players and bathe in the deafening roar of a packed Arrowhead Stadium.

That run, in the Chiefs’ second-to-last preseason game, will amp the buzz about Johnson. The noise will grow louder after Johnson’s thrilling performance in the season opener on September 11 at Arrowhead Stadium — and when a woman accuses him of assaulting her at another Kansas City nightspot.

Johnson has been the star of the Chiefs’ young season.

He was great at the end of last season, after Priest Holmes was sidelined by a knee injury. Johnson scored nine touchdowns and ran for 541 yards in six games. Projecting those stats over a full season, Johnson would have run for 1,443 yards and 24 touchdowns — more TDs than any player in the league last year. His roll continued in the off-season camps and the preseason games.

Even Coach Dick Vermeil, who dissed the young athlete last season, raved.

As good as Priest Holmes was — he was the most productive running back in professional football over the past three seasons — he never ran a 97-yard touchdown. He never ran a touchdown longer than 35 yards.

Johnson’s 97-yard dash left every Chiefs fan impatient for the team opener against the New York Jets at Arrowhead, eager to see what Johnson would do when it really counted.

As the game neared, even Johnson was excited. He flew in a woman he began seeing in his days at Pennsylvania State University.

The Friday night before the game, Johnson and the woman decided to go out. They chose The Drink.

In the tiny world of Chiefs nightlife circles, Johnson couldn’t have been surprised to see another woman he’d been dating show up at the club.

According to that woman’s account of the night’s events, Johnson saw her from across the club and sent her a text message asking her to meet him downstairs. They argued, and Johnson pulled her to an exit and tried to have her removed by a bouncer. The club manager allowed her to stay, and she marched upstairs to confront Johnson’s date. Johnson then became upset, pushed the local woman to the ground and grabbed her, scratching her wrist. She made a police report ten hours later. (When she is contacted by reporters the next Monday, she will tell The Kansas City Star that the police report was inaccurate, that Johnson had neither pushed nor grabbed her.)

When Johnson wakes up the next morning, though, he has no idea that a woman has filed a police report accusing him of assault.

Instead, he finds that someone has broken into his SUV in the driveway of his Leawood home.

Among the missing items are his stereo amplifiers, the game tickets he intended to share with his girlfriend and his manager, and his fat playbook, the loss of which will mean a $5,000 fine from the team.

He’s clearly grumpy, but that doesn’t mean he’s canceling his photo shoot with the Pitch.

He doesn’t want to take the pictures without his manager, though. “Let’s wait ’til Evan gets back,” he says before settling into his couch and retrieving his Xbox to continue a game of Madden NFL. He’s controlling the Pittsburgh Steelers, who are three minutes from routing the Oakland Raiders on the flat-screen TV above his fireplace. A mostly eaten plate of Stouffer’s frozen lasagna is balanced on the arm of the couch.

Evan Osborn and the girlfriend return with their takeout lunches. Johnson continues playing his game, and the voice of broadcaster John Madden berates him for a poor defensive decision.

Then Johnson goes back to his bedroom and emerges wearing a Team Roc outfit similar to the one he’d worn two weeks earlier. He’s also carrying two fist-sized pendants with the Team Roc logo in glistening gold, silver and diamonds.

Before long, 50 Cent is chanting his summer anthem “Just a Little Bit.”

Johnson is scary-good for the photographer. His poses work. He has already figured out a way to drape his pendants across his bare arm to show off his rounded muscles.

Johnson knows his best side, even if Kansas City doesn’t.

“My reputation is I’m crazy. I beat women. I carry a lot of guns,” Johnson says. He doesn’t argue some of those points. “Everybody’s crazy to a point,” he says. “I am crazy to a point.”

Johnson isn’t likely to turn the other cheek when slighted, even by teammates. He remembers losing his temper during a practice when a coach asked him to block the towering defensive lineman Eric Hicks. “Apparently, I did a good job. He got frustrated. He ripped my helmet off.”

In return, Johnson says he blindsided Hicks, knocking him to the turf. “I tried to kick so hard to try to break his neck through his helmet.”

In public, Johnson appears stoic. “I don’t say much. I just stand there.” He knows how that comes across. “I look like I’ve got an attitude problem.”

He describes himself as bipolar — not in a clinical way, he says, but in a way that causes different people to see different men. Even his friends get a moody Johnson, one who smiles and jokes one day and scowls and broods the next.

And he does own guns — or he did. That’s one reason his treatment of women has become an issue.

He’d been in town only a few months when Leawood police were called to his house. An ex-girlfriend was visiting, and the two of them had begun arguing. “She wanted to get back together,” he says. “I didn’t.”

Johnson summarizes their exchange: “She shoved me. I shoved her. I went to sleep, woke up, the police were at my door.”

The woman wasn’t hurt, but she told police that Johnson kept guns in the house — which upped the charge to felony assault.

Johnson entered a diversion program; the charge will disappear if he can stay out of trouble through February.

He gave his guns to a friend and attended the required anger-management classes, though grudgingly. “It’s hard to admit you have a problem when you don’t have a problem,” he says.

But that’s not what’s on his mind now. Today, he’s eager to show the world that he’s more than a uniform and angry strides. Johnson has the legs to follow football greats such as Walter Payton and Emmitt Smith. But he’s also got his eyes on rappers-turned-cultural icons such as Russell Simmons and Sean “Diddy” Combs.

During the offseason, Johnson opted out of his endorsement contract with Nike, signing instead with Team Roc, the athletic apparel line owned by rap star Jay-Z.

Nike had given him free clothing but had never featured him in any of its ads. Johnson says he had to make an appointment just to buy new outfits at Nike Town — with a $1,000 limit. “If you’re not Lebron, Vick or Tiger Woods,” he says, “Nike could give two shits about you.”

So Johnson went where he was wanted.

Rapper-designed clothing was pioneered by producer Russell Simmons, who launched his Phat Fashions in the early 1990s. Garments that he’d created for a niche market of his fans grew into a label sold at department stores across the country; Simmons unloaded the business last year for $140 million.

Combs replicated Simmons’ success with his own Sean John line in 1998. Jay-Z, with partner Damon Dash of Roc-A-Fella Records, followed suit — and may have done it best of all. Rocawear has quickly become a top contender for the urban market (in 2003, Jay-Z told The New York Times that Rocawear would produce $300 million in sales that year), and company officials have designed the Team Roc athletic apparel in a push to expand to other markets.

Larry Johnson is the first athlete signed to the new label. His modeling debut is a full-page ad in the October issue of Men’s Fitness. More national ads will follow. Johnson will be getting a lot more attention. “As soon as they are with Team Roc, they are a part of Rocawear,” explains Anthony Doran, Team Roc’s director of promotions and marketing. “We’d like to put Larry in music videos and in campaign ads.”

Rocawear sells better than Sean John or Phat Fashions at the Harold Pener clothing store at the Landing shopping mall. Cashier Nicole Stewart sees the wisdom of bringing in Johnson.

“You’ve got a young, black athlete, and who better to put on your label?” she says. “With the body and the look … did I say he was fine?”

Johnson wants an image apart from the man in a bright-red Chiefs jersey. But that will be a challenge — and not simply because he may be dogged by legal questions following the alleged altercation at The Drink. Everything about Johnson’s day job is designed to unify him with his teammates.

The National Football League may produce stars, but there’s also an unspoken rule that the team comes first, the player second. The code punishes those who speak up or out of turn. The Denver Broncos’ offensive linemen have been known to fine one another when their names show up in the paper. Players who speak out get criticized by their fellow players and by the media. Keyshawn Johnson, now a Dallas wide receiver, was dubbed “Me-Shawn” for his brash talk and self-promoting book when he joined the league. Eagles receiver Terrell Owens got similar treatment over the summer for his public feud with the team and quarterback Donovan McNabb.

At Johnson’s alma mater, Penn State, the football team doesn’t put its players’ names on the backs of their jerseys.

“Athletes, once they get into a team atmosphere … they feel like there are certain boundaries they can’t cross,” says Radue Watson, an executive with Team Roc before leaving to start his own clothing line. Watson saw firsthand how Jay-Z was able to market his name and image beyond his rhymes. “Rappers are individuals, and they still have that hustler’s mentality, that go-getter mentality,” he says.

Watson wanted to find an athlete in the same vein, and he had followed Johnson’s career since seeing him play at Penn State. As a football fan, Watson understood that Johnson’s statistics were unbelievable for a guy who hardly saw the ball before his senior year.

Johnson grew up in suburban Baltimore, where his father coached high school football. He wasn’t naturally the best athlete among his friends, Johnson tells the Pitch. But every night after practice, he watched film with his father. “I think I was born to do this,” he says of the game. “I didn’t want to do anything but football. I love it so much.”

When Johnson was 16, his father took a job as an assistant coach at Penn State, working for the legendary Joe Paterno. Johnson would play high school ball in the shadow of the stadium where the Nittany Lions suited up in plain blue and white. After graduation, Johnson joined them. He took a Penn State scholarship, he says now, not because of his father but because he thought he had insight into the Penn State backfield.

He’d heard horror stories about talented runners taking scholarships and then discovering that they were just one of three or four outstanding backs. Johnson thought he had a sure thing in Penn State and imagined he’d be the leading back by his sophomore year. Besides, the running backs’ coach was the father of one of his best friends. “It was impossible for me to get screwed,” he says.

He got screwed.

“That year, he recruited Omar Easy, Eric McCoo and Eddie Drummond,” Johnson says of Paterno’s assistant. “He had to take care of these guys.”

Johnson didn’t suffer in silence. As a sophomore, he made news by criticizing Paterno, his dad’s boss. He called the team’s offense predictable and griped that the coaching staff was too old and set in its ways. Whether that insolence played a part or not, Johnson wouldn’t start until 2002, his senior year. He made the most of it, running for 2,087 yards — a single-season record for the Big Ten Conference.

He hoped the Pittsburgh Steelers would draft him. Instead he fell to the Chiefs.

But Johnson didn’t come to town with a chip on his shoulder.

He told reporters he was looking forward to coming to Kansas City and learning the pro game behind Holmes. He bought the house in south Leawood. And he got a dog, a Lhaso apso he named Chief.

But Chief was hardly housebroken before the reality hit.

Vermeil was not going to play his first-round draft pick.

Johnson says he couldn’t get an audience with the coach, whom he calls too old-school for befriending veteran players while ignoring the younger ones. Johnson didn’t even suit up for half the games. He wasn’t happy, and he said so.

“I don’t know why they would bring me in here when they already had Priest,” he told the Star at the time. “If you’re not going to use me, why draft me?” (General Manager Carl Peterson had been concerned about Holmes’ health. “Larry gives us great security and a great insurance policy,” Peterson said at the time.)

Things improved little for Johnson as the team entered the 2004 season. Though a few players and coaches, including Vermeil, said they had noticed a change in Johnson, he was still third on the depth chart behind Holmes and Derrick Blaylock.

Then Holmes tweaked a knee and was expected to sit out an early-season game against Houston. The injury was sure to give Johnson some playing time, and Vermeil hoped he was ready. At a press conference, Vermeil said his young running back needed “to take the diaper off and go play.”

It was an original and controversial rip that went national fast.

Johnson fired back in the Star: “If the man can’t say something in my face … it don’t mean nothing to me. For him to say that, to point me out in that situation, [knowing] how much I really busted my [rear] through this preseason, knowing I’m ready to play, knowing I’m ready to do my share, making a comment like that is unnecessary.”

Vermeil apologized the next day.

But the feud didn’t go away. Johnson opened his mouth again a couple of weeks later, still frustrated at his lack of playing time. “I’m still a Kansas City Chief, and I’ll wait it out ’til it’s my time to shine,” he told the Star. “But I want to make it clear to people that it’s not because of me, it’s because I’m not getting a chance to play. You can’t do too much when you have an offensive coordinator who doesn’t trust you and a head coach who never wanted you in the first place.”

Knowing the situation in Kansas City, Rocawear’s Watson says he wondered how Johnson would react to his backup role.

“I have a couple friends in the NBA,” he says. “The hardest thing from going from college to the NBA was going from playing every second to not playing at all…. I just kind of watched him just to see how he was going to handle that.”

From Watson’s perspective, Johnson did just fine.

“He was ready to go to war,” Watson says of Johnson’s feud with Vermeil. “That’s the kind of guy you want on your team. It’s not a selfish attitude. It’s just that ‘I know what I can do.'”

Johnson would represent the image of Team Roc well, Watson figured.

“The thing with Larry is he will never lose his street credibility,” he says. “He will always continue to be who he is. He’s not going to get up there and give the politically correct answers. He’s just who he is.”

During the season opener on September 11, Johnson runs the ball only nine times — but scores two touchdowns and puts up more yards than Holmes does in 22 carries.

That Sunday night, Johnson returns to the scene of a crime he doesn’t yet know he’s accused of, meeting his out-of-town friend, Osborn and a few other players, including Tony Gonzalez, at The Drink.

On Monday, he learns about the Friday-night assault charge from a Star reporter who calls for comment on a report he’s received from a Kansas City police officer.

Osborn says he can’t believe that the police would release the report without even trying to call Johnson to get his side of the story. But it seems almost typical of Johnson’s rocky relationship with his adopted hometown.

Given Johnson’s history as a malcontent, media reaction is predictable.

Fans call him a “wife beater” on the sports-talk programs where, just 24 hours earlier, they’d argued that he should get the starting job over Holmes. Star columnist Jason Whitlock reprimands him for being a drama king who has brought the trouble on himself.

Everything about that night and its aftermath comes off as typical: another spoiled athlete roughing up another woman.

By the end of the week, however, things have shifted again. No witnesses have come forward to corroborate the woman’s story (which she tried to recant in the initial Star story). Chiefs GM Peterson tells a radio host that Johnson was more of a victim in the situation, meaning it’s unlikely that he’ll lose playing time because of it.

Johnson has more good carries against the Oakland Raiders on Sunday but manages only a more mundane 41 yards and a single touchdown.

Johnson is clearly close on the heels of Priest Holmes, but it’s Jay-Z’s footsteps he really wants to follow. He wants his own line of clothing and accessories. He wants to join manager Osborn in the marketing business for rap and sports figures. He dreams of opening a chain of dark jazz clubs with contemporary décor, first-class all the way.

Something he hasn’t found in Kansas City.