He Pitched to Get Into Field of His Choice

Bryan Johnson was 24 and new to journalism when he met a Dutch girl in Toronto and subsequently went to visit her in Amsterdam in 1973.

“I was hanging around the American Express office (in Amsterdam) when I found I could take a bus all the way to India for $150,” Johnson said. Johnson and his girl friend got on the bus and spent a year in India. Then Johnson returned to Toronto and worked as an entertainment feature writer and theater critic. But he’d been bitten by the Asia bug, and in 1979, he persuaded his editors to send him to Peking for three years.

Back in Toronto again after that stint, he resumed writing features, returned to Asia periodically to report on various stories, and also wrote a weekly baseball column. When the Toronto Blue Jays began challenging for the American League pennant last year, Johnson’s editors said they’d like him to write about baseball full time.

Johnson likes baseball, but he said he told his editors, “I want to write about real things.”

His editors made him an offer: If he’d write about baseball full time during the season, they’d let him spend most of the off-season traveling and writing in Asia.

Johnson spent most of the last “off-season” in the Philippines, covering the election and the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos--an especially welcome assignment since his wife is from the Philippines, and “we speak a lot of Tagalog (the Philippine national language) at home.

“I could feel the story coming out of my pores,” Johnson said. “Everything was on the line in a country I care about.”

How did Johnson feel when his time in Asia was up, and he had to return to Toronto--and to baseball?

“To come home and . . . go up to a 24-year-old, semiliterate multimillionaire from Oklahoma City and try to talk to him and he doesn’t want to talk to you and . . . to have to worry about whether George Bell (the Blue Jays’ left-fielder) can pull the ball instead of hitting to right field all the time is a wrenching experience.”

Last month, Johnson took a leave of absence to write a book on the overthrow of Marcos. He’s back in Manila now, researching the book.