by fans of both teams.
I prefer to look at the better side of sports, the "rest of the story" as Paul Harvey used to say. In this light, I would like to share one of my favorite stories about Floyd Johnson, former equipment manager of BYU sports teams.
This is a post of an article written by Dick Harmon, sportswriter for the Deseret News shortly after Floyd Johnson passed away in 2002.
Floyd Johnson remembered
Contributed by Dick Harmon on Saturday February 16, @ 10:43PM
BYU lost its Lord of the Rings.
This special Hobbit, the candle that lit so many ways for good, is gone at 83, his golden rings of legend remain.
Floyd Johnson, the equipment manager at BYU for half of a century, died last Thursday, Valentines Day. The funeral is Wednesday.
Upon learning of Johnson’s passing, Philadelphia NBC affiliate sports anchor Vai Sikahema, on assignment in Utah for the Olympics, called to find when services would be. Sikahema, a former NFL all-pro and Cougar punt returner, could hardly talk. “I’m telling my station, my producers that whenever it is, whereever I have to be, I’m taking that day off from the Olympics. I’ve got to be there.”
Johnson’s life and death carries that kind of weight on so many lives. “Our institution just lost an institution,” said former athletic director Glen Tuckett.
“He impacted on the lives of more BYU athletes than any coach, any player or administrator,” said former forward Mark Durrant.
“If anyone epitomized what BYU stands for, it was Floyd Johnson,” Tuckett said, who nicknamed him Brother J.
Johnson was more than an equipment manager, dishing out uniforms, fixing cleats, mending jerseys, repairing facemasks and doing laundry. He dished out self respect, fixed souls, mended feelings, repaired spirits and while mending human beings.
You see, Johnson was a chaplain before the school hired and named one. He was never a coach, never was a player. But, as former basketball guard Nathan Call put it, Johnson was a man in the background who watched, took note and never missed anything with how coaches and players dealt with life on and off the court. Then, he made a difference to help fix it. He’d affectionately call freshmen “doe heads” and he immediately became a father/grandfather away from home.
The God “Brother J” worshiped must have grabbed him upon birth and stamped him with an imprint licensing him to radiate energy and enduring love. It oozed from him, leaked from him like light from a creaky barn door. He was a man without guile, a person who could look right into your soul without squinting.
He was a man of faith, who believed in unseen powers and preached mountains do move, seas do part and things that die can live once more.
As thousands of BYU athletes came through the locker rooms over the years, Johnson impacted their lives far from lights and headlines. He’d get people one-on-one and say things people aren’t supposed to just say in a few sentences carrying the impact delivered.
BYU never knew what it had in the back rooms. The sponsoring church sent mission presidents all over the world, many of them corporate CEOs, lawyers, doctors to train and look over young people. In the equipment room, they had a humble master of made men. He was offended when Cougar coaches would counsel young men to choose athletic careers over LDS missions. To him, balls that dribble would fade in and out, but the work in God’s Army was tattoo a mark of service and devotion on life that would never fade away.
They never paid him much money. His house, his car were simple. But his work was priceless. Johnson was like a sponge. He soaked in love and put it out for others to squeeze. He led the campus in hugs given and received and is the career leader in life assists. He knew your name. He never forgot it. He managed the department’s player speaker bureau, spreading out athletes at podiums and classrooms throughout the state.
“He was very perceptive,” Call said. “You didn’t think he knew how you were feeling, but he did. One time I was down and discouraged at practice and he put his arm around me and offered encouragement and he knew exactly what I was experiencing. He reminded me of my grandparents -- somebody who’s there for you.”
Former KBYU broadcaster Jay Monsen calls Johnson the greatest missionary he’d ever known.
Johnson was never ashamed to talk of things people are ashamed of having surface -- things that run deep, that are emotional and hidden in the heart. He brought them out like a surgeon, worked them, then tucked them back away.
Victor Hugo, author of the classic “Les Miserables” must have had Brother J in mind when he wrote the scene of the priest who winked at the candlesticks stolen by the prisoner Jean Valjean, turning his life around.
One day Brother J caught one of his student managers with a handful of T-shirts. The scene was obvious. He called the young man over and told him he’d been wanting to talk to him for some time. He had some T-shirts he wanted him to have. He knew he’d like them and he knew he had friends who’d enjoy them and it would make him feel good to give them away to those friends.
“I’d like you to have these. Take them now. Boy, it wouldn’t be a good thing to ever feel like you coveted them enough and you were tempted to just take them,” Johnson said.
The young man went his way with the shirts and a lesson he never forgot.
“He was a great read of people,” BYU basketball coach Steve Cleveland said. Players from the men and women’s basketball teams will sing at Wednesday’s funeral.
Cleveland remembers his first face-to-face with Johnson when BYU hired him to coach basketball. “When I first got here, he put his arm around me and set an example for me. I never understood fully how important the ecclesiastical part of this job was until I talked to him and he gave me advice and comfort about what to do. It changed my job, my outlook, my approach and my work.
“Floyd had a way to know you. He could then sit with you and speak to you about things other men just don’t.”
Yes, BYU’s Lord of the Rings, has gone to another kingdom. One where he’s loosed from the pain of cancer and the tears of this world.
“His passing isn’t a sad thing,” Durrant said, “because if anyone is with God in heaven and happy, it’s Brother J.”
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