Mitch Johnson helps father defeat alcohol

The way he recalls it, almost from the day of his birth, basketball bonded Mitch Johnson and his dad. He says his love for the game and his competitive instinct was genetic.

After all, in his day, John was a starting forward on the Sonics' 1979 championship team. And his mother, Jenny Redman, was a tennis player at the University of Washington.

Mitch says he got "the double competitive gene."

The gym always felt like Mitch Johnson's second home, and his dad was his first teacher. Some of his earliest and fondest memories are of spending time in the gym at Bellevue High, when John was the head coach.

Later, as Mitch began to mature into a very good high-school point guard, then-Sonics assistant coach Dwane Casey used to open the gym at the Furtado Center and Mitch and J.J. would drill with an almost insatiable hunger. Sometimes, it seemed to his father, Mitch never wanted to leave the gym. If J.J. stayed, Mitch would stay.

Eventually, Mitch grew into a heavily recruited Division I player and earned a scholarship at Stanford.

"Basketball's always been our connection and he's always been there for me," Mitch says. "People ask me how old I was when I first started playing basketball and I tell them, honestly, that it was almost from day one. It was kind of always an important part of my life. There was school, family and basketball."

John Johnson, who is divorced from Mitch's mother, admits he could be hard on his son in the gym. As a Sonic he became one of the game's first point forwards. He knew how to run an offense. He was a perfectionist and he pushed perfection on his son.

"He could be hard on me, but I became just as hard on myself," Mitch says. "There were times when he was hard on me, then I'd look in the mirror and I'd agree with him.

"I never thought what he was doing was negative. It was more like, 'Come on now. You're better than that.' Just motivating stuff. He wanted me to excel and 24/7 he's always been there to help."

Says his father, "Mitch never has objected to hard work. Sure I pushed him a little bit, but he always had a yearning for knowledge."

Mitch says he still was young when he realized something was wrong. It was just a vague notion, at first, that his father was drinking too much. He believed he was too young to say anything. Believed, like any other problem he had seen his father confront, J.J. would find a solution.

"I had seen signs of it growing up," Mitch says. "But I kind of didn't know how to handle it. My mom and other people knew about it, and it got to the point where I told them that I was mature enough to handle it and [told] them, 'Don't keep me in the dark.' But it started getting worse."

Last summer, after his freshman season at Stanford, Mitch made the difficult decision to confront his father about the drinking. It was an act of courage and an act of love. To do nothing, he believed, would be to quit on his dad, something in all those thousands of hours in the gym, his father never had done to him.

Mitch Johnson was an adult now, and he called an intervention.

J.J. was moving to the Bay Area to be closer to his son, and Mitch says he decided if his father was coming to California, he wanted his father to be healthy.

In the beginning, J.J. fought the idea of an intervention. He told his son he had grown up in the ghetto in Milwaukee and believed he could fight his way out of any difficult situation. He told Mitch that the Bob Marley song "Buffalo Soldier" was his national anthem.

"I'm just a Buffalo Soldier, in the heart of America.

"Stolen from Africa, brought to America.

"Said he was fighting on arrival, fighting for survival.

"Said he was a Buffalo Soldier, win the war for America."

John Johnson, 59, believed his drinking was under control. He could moderate his intake. It wasn't like he was always falling down in public. His problem was more subtle than that.

He says he always had thought of himself as a survivor, and drinking was just another crisis he could overcome.

"I'm a fierce competitor, and I've always had to fight," John Johnson says by cellphone from his home in Menlo Park, Calif. "Being black in America, it just comes up. I wake up every morning knowing that there are things I'm going to have to overcome. People have always doubted me. I've always had to overcome obstacles. Battling through things, that's just my nature.

"But I've always listened to Mitch. Mitch has always been a few different things to me. Sometimes I think he's my boss. He gives me good advice on a lot of things. Advice on women. Who's good and who's not so good. I listen to what he says."

Late last summer, John Johnson agreed to the intervention. Former teammate Gus Williams came. Phil Lumpkin, who played in the NBA in Portland with Johnson in the 1974-75 season and later was Mitch's coach at O'Dea, was there, as was John's godson Chuck Williams, who was one of Mitch's AAU coaches with Friends of Hoop.

"He cares for his dad," J.J. says. "Calling for that intervention, that was someone who saw a situation and acted in a very adult manner. And I decided that was fine. I wanted the intervention. For Mitch, I wanted what was best for his dad. I wanted to improve myself. I wanted to get better."

It wasn't quite that easy.

"He thought about it for a while," says Mitch, a sociology major who will be a junior and the starting point guard on a very good Stanford team next season. "I think he saw that he had enough people who wanted to support-slash-help-slash-care about him that he agreed that the timing was right to do the intervention.

"The hardest thing was to get him to realize that it was OK to make a drastic change. To get him to accept it and realize he had a problem. People made a great effort to help and when we had the intervention there were people there who loved him and told him, 'You're not as tough as you say you are,' and, 'We're here to help.' "

John Johnson, who remains one of the most beloved athletes in Seattle sports history and is another example of how this community rallies around teams and players who give an honest effort, moved near the Stanford campus last year. In September, he entered an alcohol rehabilitation center, spending 30 days there.

"I've seen a big change in his overall happiness," Mitch says. "His health is better. His body feels better. He's having this new beginning in California. I think he got a little stale up in Seattle. He got tired of it and a little bitter. He had a little bit of a me-against-the-world feeling, whether it was justified or not.

"We've always been as much like brothers, as father and son. We spend a lot of our time together talking trash back and forth. Having fun like that."

John says he's retired now and waiting to have knee-replacement surgery, probably at the end of the year. He does volunteer work for non-profit organizations that service the elderly and underprivileged kids.

"It makes you feel good to see somebody change their life for the good and move forward," he says of his mentoring work.

This fall and winter he will be courtside, as he has been since Mitch first picked up a basketball, to watch his son run Stanford's offense.

"I think he's due for a breakout year this coming year," J.J. says. "He's seen the light. He knows the game inside and out. He's a true point guard. That's the position I taught him to play. He sees the court very well, and he's a hell of a ballhandler.

"More importantly, he's a pleasure just to be around. He's a wonderful kid and I'm real proud of him. And he's a damn good basketball player. He wants to follow in my footsteps and make it to the NBA, and I think he can. But my No. 1 goal for him, the thing I'd like to see, is Mitch getting his degree from Stanford. To see him walk across that stage and accept that diploma. If I get to see that, then I can rest in peace."

As he thinks about that moment, John Johnson's voice briefly cracks.

His son has grown into a strong, compassionate young man. And now the spoils of all those days and nights in the gym, bonding over basketball, are theirs to spend.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com