DerMarr Johnson, all 6 feet, 8 inches of his slinky frame, strolled confidently into the crowded Teaneck, N.J., gymnasium. He had no reason for such self-assurance — yet.
Johnson was 16 in the summer of 1997 and had played only one season of high school ball. He was unknown in this gym, where the prestigious adidas ABCD basketball camp was being staged for the nation’s best prep players.
But Johnson didn’t remain unknown for long. He was not simply impressive, as many kids are at these camps. He was electrifying.
He dunked with thunderous authority. He drained three-pointers with a feathery touch unheard of for a big man. He snuck behind opponents for steals, blocked their shots with his long arms, passed the ball with precision, rebounded with muscle and defended with quickness. Only more mature players did those things with such ease, and rarely in such stunning completeness.
‘‘I’ve never seen anybody at 6-8 that special,’’ says his summer league coach, Curtis Malone. ‘‘That was something you dream of.’’
Three years later, the skills Johnson showed at that camp — and the roller-coaster ride that followed — are the reason the now 6-9 Johnson enters his freshman season at the University of Cincinnati with a pressure-packed label: UC’s greatest recruit since Oscar Robertson.
‘‘D.J.’s ready for whatever’s thrown at him,’’ Malone says. ‘‘He’s still a kid, and he still has some maturing to do. But he’ll be everything everybody expects sooner or later.’’
A star is born
One camp alone didn’t make Johnson. He put on a repeat performance the following summer, and college coaches and reporters watched in awe as the new kid from suburban Washington, D.C., dazzled.
Johnson didn’t believe he was doing anything extraordinary. ‘‘I was unknown. I wasn’t a target,’’ he says. ‘‘I could just go out and play my game without worrying about people knocking me off.’’
At first, Johnson loved the sudden attention. He wouldn’t show it, but his coach could tell. If there were no outward signs, no more high fives or chest bumps than usual, there was the new, cocksure way Johnson carried himself.
‘‘All of it was new to him,’’ Malone says. ‘‘He had never been out of town to see that caliber of player.’’
Reporters began talking about Johnson becoming the first player to skip his senior year of high school and jump to the NBA. There wasn’t a college coach at the camp who wasn’t impressed with his skills, and not an NBA scout there who wasn’t evaluating him for a future draft.
The expectations became overwhelming, and Johnson started to resent them. He got bored with the competition in his high school league, then nosedived at the adidas camp before his senior year.
Disinterested, Johnson looked out of sorts, took off plays on defense, didn’t shoot well and played himself out of the hype and into the label of a lazy bust. His performance in other camps and a Washington summer league only added fuel to that perception, and he dropped from No.1 to No.30 on one recruiting list.
‘‘I didn’t have any motivation at all,’’ Johnson says.
He believed he had nothing to prove.
‘‘Everything he picked up said NBA, NBA, NBA, and now the kid is reading that stuff, and he thinks it’s a possibility,’’ Malone says. ‘‘The expectations were so much higher than the way he played. He just wasn’t himself.’’
Basketball wasn’t fun any more. Johnson wanted just to play and feel like a normal kid, hanging out and not having to suffer the constant scrutiny. Instead, he went to camps and played in summer leagues and worked out for scouts.
‘‘I was ready for it to be over (at the camps). It’s bad to put all that on a kid,’’ he says. ‘‘I was trying so hard not to make mistakes, I felt like I couldn’t make any.’’
Instead, he made more.
Worse, his lackadaisical effort translated to the rap of Johnson as a ‘‘bad kid.’’ And because Johnson never opened up and didn’t always look people in the eye when he spoke, he was viewed by some as selfish and sullen.
‘‘People thought this kid only cared about the NBA,’’ Malone says. ‘‘He had his hair braided, uncut. To me it was all perception. People were always assuming, but no one really knew the kid.’’
A Good choice
The course of Johnson’s life changed on a hot, muggy July day in 1998. That’s when he met Max Good.
Good, the longtime coach at Maine Central Institute, one of the most successful prep school basketball programs in the nation, drove to Washington to watch Johnson play at Malone’s urging. Malone believed Johnson needed a change of scenery, a new challenge, and Good — known as a strict disciplinarian who turned kids with talent into winners — could be the perfect fit.
In 10 years at MCI, Good had never traveled to watch players in summer-league games. His program recruited itself, and he had no basketball need for Johnson, since his team had finished 35-0 the season before. But the combination of Johnson’s raw talent and untapped potential intrigued the gruff 57-year-old.
The two met after one of Johnson’s summer games with D.C. Assault, the team Malone coached. Johnson sauntered over, his hair in corn rows.
Good was not impressed. ‘‘I heard you played like crap at ABCD,’’ he told Johnson in his gravelly voice. ‘‘If you play like that, you can keep your butt home.’’
Johnson, shocked, smiled incredulously.
The next day, Johnson spotted Good in the stands, walked up the bleachers and sat behind him but hardly said a word. Good pointed out some of the players on the court who had talent but were committing stupid fouls and not getting back on defense. He told Johnson those things wouldn’t be tolerated at MCI.
Johnson listened intently, then said goodbye. Good had no idea if his message had sunk in, until he watched Johnson’s team play a rival from Baltimore that afternoon. Johnson played with a renewed ferocity, taking a charge, blocking a couple of shots, diving for a few loose balls. It was the best, his friends noted, that Johnson had played all summer.
‘‘DerMarr liked him genuinely,’’ Malone says. ‘‘He was thinking, ‘Maybe this is what I need.’’’
Good liked Johnson, too. But he believed Johnson needed the tough-love approach to have any chance to fulfill all that potential.
‘‘His talent was obvious,’’ Good says. ‘‘If he had everything aligned, he wouldn’t have needed us. You can always help a kid if he’s willing to be helped. I think DerMarr was reaching out and wanted to be pushed. He was screaming.’’
Johnson took a few weeks to make the decision. He would leave his family and friends in Maryland and travel to tiny Pittsfield, Maine.
There, he believed, he would find the answers to his motivational problems on and off the court, where he was struggling to get his scholastic standing high enough to qualify to play as a college freshman.
‘‘I knew I needed to do something to get away from home,’’ Johnson says.
A talent revitalized
What Johnson learned at Maine Central Institute — his fourth high school in five years — re-energized him as a player and triggered the growth he needed as a person.
First, he couldn’t be a prima donna. MCI’s basketball team had too many other good players, a fact that made Johnson feel less pressured. ‘‘If he didn’t bring his ‘A’ game to the gym everyday, he’d get his butt knocked off,’’ Good says.
More important, Johnson learned discipline. Up at 7a.m., go to breakfast, straighten your room, go to class, go to practice, study at night if you weren’t at SAT prep class.
Studies were taken seriously. Practice was tougher than anything Johnson had ever seen.
But Johnson had no problems. ‘‘What surprised me when he got to MCI was how nice a kid he was,’’ Good says. ‘‘Any demand I put on him, I didn’t have to tell him, just ask him. He was very coachable, and he was a team player. I love that kid.’’
And Johnson began exhibiting fire contradictory to his laid-back nature. When an opposing team trash-talked MCI during one game, Johnson came over to the bench during a timeout and told his teammates with a punch of defiance, ‘‘Let’s blow these guys out.’’
‘‘Sometimes, it’s got to be triggered,’’ Johnson says. ‘‘I can be playing hard, thinking I’m playing my hardest, and something happens and I play even harder.’’
For the first time in his career, Johnson felt like he fit in. He was allowed, for the first time, ‘‘to be an 18-year-old kid instead of a fledgling superstar,’’ Good says. ‘‘I think he learned there’s a lot of decent people, and if you treat them with respect, they’ll respond in kind.’’
It all added up to a spectacular season on the court in which Johnson averaged 26 points and hit 42 percent from three-point range against some of the best sub-college talent in the country. He played tenacious defense, shot with a marksman’s stroke and a pianist’s touch and regained much of the ground he had lost in the eyes of scouts and coaches.
At the end of the season, he was more than one scout’s top-rated recruit, was tabbed a McDonald’s All-American and national high school player of the year by Parade magazine and was the focus of a recruiting war between Cincinnati and NCAA champion Connecticut.
‘‘It was good for me,’’ Johnson says of his Maine winter. Did he need a coach like Good? ‘‘I don’t know,’’ he says at first, then thinks a second and adds, ‘‘Yeah, maybe I did. It was fun. It was like starting all over again.’’
Before Johnson left Maine, he gave Good a three-page letter. Good waited until Johnson was gone, then opened it. When he read his pupil’s moving thank you, the hardened coach cried.
‘‘I don’t know how I made it through, Coach,’’ was the gist of the letter. ‘‘I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I wouldn’t want to do it again, either.’’
The NBA talk began again, but Johnson weighed his choices carefully: either entering the draft or enrolling in college at Cincinnati, UNC Charlotte, Maryland or Connecticut. He had liked UC best all along and decided on the Bearcats in April.
Playing for coach Bob Huggins would continue to instill the toughness that had jump-started his talent. UC also offered him the chance to play shooting guard, his natural position, and he believed its training program would help him beef up.
But with a month left to declare for the draft, the big time beckoned. Part of Johnson wanted to go.
As the May flowers bloomed outside his dorm window in the cool Maine spring, Johnson listened to Malone tell him he should go to Cincinnati, to be pushed for a year or four or however long it took.
Johnson reluctantly agreed. He was quiet, a bit disappointed. Malone smiled inside. He knew DerMarr Johnson was maturing.
‘‘I know I have a long way to go,’’ Johnson says. ‘‘I can’t wait to get going. It’s a lot harder than I thought.’’
