The Key to Success

It is the spring of 1990 on a littered field with puddles in the middle and roaring traffic in the end zone.

The Dorsey High football team is running drills when an assistant coach notices a kid standing in the sideline weeds.

The kid is laughing.

The coach is curious.

“Why are you laughing?” Darryl Holmes asks.

“It’s your receivers,” the kid says.

“What about my receivers?” Holmes says.

“They’re sorry,” the kid says.

“Oh, and you’re better?” Holmes says.

“Yep,” the kid says.

“Then get in our huddle and prove it,” Holmes says.

“Lemme get my shoes,” the kid says.

“Your shoes?” Holmes says.

Keyshawn Johnson runs to the parking lot, pulls his cleats out from his car’s trunk, joins the huddle.

Then he does something he’s been doing in strange and splendid ways ever since.

He proves it.

*

What he did last week in leading the New York Jets over the Jacksonville Jaguars?

What he is supposed to do Sunday in the AFC championship game against Denver’s overmatched secondary?

It’s about more than catching footballs or scoring touchdowns. It’s about drama.

It’s about soaring leaps, devastating falls, nothing in between, always being the best player, the brattiest, or both.

Keyshawn Johnson was doing that sort of thing long before you turned on the TV last weekend, or last year, or during his two years at USC.

In fact, he did it best when he was right under our noses, but nobody was looking.

From his one and only season at Dorsey, where he finally became a legitimate college prospect. . . .

To his first year at West Los Angeles College, when he quit. . . .

To his second year at West L.A., when he was thrown out. . . .

To his third year at West L.A., when he finally dedicated himself to becoming the player you see today.

The one who blocks as well as he runs. The one so loved by Bill Parcells.

Between 1990 and 1993, Keyshawn Johnson became that person.

Most everyone has heard about his childhood days as a USC ballboy, admitted child drug runner, and inmate at a juvenile camp after he was repeatedly arrested for scalping tickets.

But it was the years he finally decided to fix his future--and still nearly blew it--that friends say turned the child into a man.

When Keyshawn Johnson’s greatest drama was often real.

Those were the years of his best catches, his most spectacular misses, his most important fumble recoveries.

Some of it even involving football.

So obscure was Johnson during those years he bounced around Southwest L.A. that only one known photo of him exists to show he was even there.

It was as if, when he joined USC, he was dropped from another planet.

But those who helped him and scolded him and hung with him during those troubled and terrific times remember.

“I have it all right here,” says Holmes, tapping his finger against his head. “Couldn’t get rid of it if I wanted to.”

*

The Dorsey High football team breaks a huddle during one of its first games, and Coach Paul Knox notices his new wide receiver stopping to confer with teammate Chris Miller before running to his position.

It happens again, and again, and Knox finally gets it.

Keyshawn Johnson is too proud to admit that he has not yet learned the offense.

So he waits until the play is called, then asks Miller where he should run.

“I knew then this kid would do anything to succeed,” Knox recalls.

Later, Knox understands this even better when he is talking to a major college recruiting coordinator.

Knox has sent more than 70 players to colleges on full scholarship since he joined Dorsey 17 years ago.

But he has never had a conversation like this one.

“Hey, Paul, what do you think of this Keyshawn Johnson kid?” the coordinator said.

“I just got him, how do you know him?” Knox says.

“Well,” the coordinator says, “he keeps calling me . . .”

*

Keyshawn Johnson is better than any other receiver in town even if he doesn’t know the plays.

He signs with the University of Miami, prepared to become its next Michael Irvin.

But he doesn’t qualify with either the class requirements or the test scores.

“Keyshawn was doing all this talking about what the big schools were going to give him and I said, ‘Dude, wake up! You are going to a junior college and they are giving you nothing,” says Ava Shah, mother of close friend Sharmon Shah (now Karim Abdul-Jabbar) and an important maternal figure for Johnson.

Embarrassed about attending a junior college in his hometown, Johnson flies to South Carolina and spends three weeks at a junior college near Clemson.

Homesick, he returns to South-Central Los Angeles and Holmes, his former Dorsey assistant coach who is now an assistant at West L.A.

It is not a sweet homecoming.

“He suffered from what a lot of guys suffer from around here,” Holmes remembers. “He thought he was too good to play junior college.”

He misses classes. He is late for practice. The team is losing.

Finally, upset with the Oilers’ 3-5 record, he walks into Holmes’ office.

“I quit,” he says.

“See ya,” Holmes says.

Two days later, he returns, saying he has changed his mind.

“Sorry, Key,” Holmes says. “I’m quite sure we can lose just as easily without you.”

And they do lose, both remaining games.

Johnson spends the end of what was supposed to be a brilliant freshman season living in a cramped house with a buddy and his mom, watching his team lose, bragging about how he is better than all of that.

Nobody is listening.

“I told Keyshawn, ‘You are the most known, unknown person in this town,’ ” Ava Shah says.

*

He is sitting on a bench in a tiny, windowless weight room at West L.A. in the spring of 1992.

He has returned after quitting. But while his teammates are working out, Keyshawn Johnson is still talking.

Says he’s not going to be stuck here like they are. Says he hates playing for a losing operation like this one.

Coach Rob Hager hears him, confronts him. Johnson talks back.

“If you don’t want to be part of the team, we don’t want you around,” Hager says.

“Fine,” Johnson says.

He storms out the door, down the steps to his car, and is effectively off the team for the next calendar year.

“He was so competitive, yet so misguided,” Holmes says.

*

A breakout sophomore season? Not quite.

Johnson manages to get signed by Mississippi State, even though he has not completed two years of junior college schoolwork, which gets Mississippi State in a heap of trouble and Johnson a quick trip back home.

He stays with eight people in a two-bedroom apartment near Mount San Antonio College in Walnut.

He takes some classes at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys.

He watches his high school rivals become college stars.

He quietly returns to West L.A. in the spring and begins working out like never before.

“He came to me one day and said, ‘You know, I need to do something if I’m going to make it,’ ” Holmes says. “He’d been trying to go around things, but now decided to go at them head-on.”

He runs track to improve his speed, and he often finishes last. But for the first time, he doesn’t care.

“You know Keyshawn, he would brag when he didn’t finish last,” friend Tamecus Peoples says.

Instead of running the streets for money, he and Peoples do it the right way, collecting cans around school.

Some time after he is found vomiting in the hills behind the Culver City campus during a workout, the football coaches allow him to rejoin the team without a word.

“If we don’t keep opening the doors for these kids, who will?” Hager says.

*

And through that open door, Keyshawn Johnson flies.

He moves into an apartment with Abdul-Jabbar, who by now is a running back at UCLA.

He watches his friend star at the Rose Bowl, while he plays on a bleak patch of grass surrounded by portable bleachers used at the Rose Bowl parade.

And he gets furious. And he gets better.

And in his final 1993 season at West L.A., he creates what will forever be the two perfect Keyshawn Johnson moments, no matter how many passes he intercepts or touchdown reverses he runs.

*

It’s the middle of the season. The opponent is Pierce College.

Keyshawn Johnson has made a promise to the guy who runs the school sandwich truck, and now he will keep it.

After scoring on an 80-yard kick return, Johnson doesn’t stop in the end zone.

He keeps running over the dirt track and up the side of a small hill to where his buddy’s truck is parked during the games.

He runs up to the window, smiles at his buddy, and orders a Snapple.

“Never seen anything like it,” buddy Marlin Lewis says. “Nobody had ever seen anything like it.”

Then, after taking a swig of the drink, he runs past the usual crowd of several hundred and takes his place on the kickoff team.

And recovers an on-side kick.

*

It’s the last game of the season. The last time Keyshawn Johnson will be part of hidden Los Angeles, the last moments before he is discovered by the nation.

His team is losing by three touchdowns at halftime in Bakersfield.

As the Bakersfield team prepares to run through a giant paper banner to start the second half, Johnson runs around whispering to his teammates.

Moments later, the West L.A. team runs through the banner.

Then the players ball up the paper and throw giant wads at the Bakersfield band.

Then on the first play of the second half, Johnson catches an 80-yard touchdown pass.

“There were 20,000 people screaming at us,” Holmes recalls. “Then all of a sudden, they are silent.”

Several weeks later, Ava Shah receives a call from her nutty protege.

“Ave, this is Key,” he says. “I just signed with USC.”

For the first time in his life, she hears him weep.

*

Today--they never know when--a certain high school and a junior college in town may receive boxes of shoes and supplies from an alumnus named Keyshawn Johnson.

Today, an all-star game featuring the rarely publicized stars of City Section high schools against the big-name kids of the Southern Section is being formulated with Johnson’s support.

And today, the receivers at West L.A. constantly bug Coach Rob Hager.

“Just throw me the damn ball” they tell him, echoing the cry that became the title of Keyshawn Johnson’s book.

Hager just smiles.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Catching Up

Keyshawn Johnson’s increase in production this season has a lot to do with the New York Jets’ success. How Johnson’s statistics this season compare to the wide reciver’s average statistics his first two seasons in the NFL:

Receptions

Avg.: 66.5

1998: 83

Yards

Avg.: 903.5

1998: 1,131

Yards Per Catch

Avg.: 13.6

1998: 13.6

Touchdowns

Avg.: 6.5

1998: 10