LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2018

ERNIE JOHNSON: AN OPEN DIALOGUE WITH A PROFESSIONAL TALKER

Interview by Jeff Hopper

Can we go to golf first of all? You write of a time when you played Augusta National with your father. Do you have a specifically strong memory from that day, perhaps a hole, or a shot, or an exchange between you two?
I just remember us driving down the night before and we stopped in one of the towns between Atlanta and Augusta and had dinner and we went and stayed at our hotel at Augusta and got all our clubs ready. We were putting in the room the night before. It was great.

It turned out to be a beautiful day, in the 60s or 70s. Augusta was everything we dreamed it would be. It looked like every blade of grass was manicured by one person—you know, everybody was responsible for a blade of grass out there. The place was pristine.

It’s the one round of golf that I’ve ever played where I wanted to go slower. We’re all used to going out and playing and saying, “Geez, it’s taking forever.” We’re behind a slow foursome or something like that. This was one of those where you were saying, “I wish somebody would jump in front of us and slow us down.” But it was magical. That’s the only word I can use to describe it.

Every stroke of the way, you’re walking those fairways with your dad, the same guy you’ve been playing golf with all your life, and here we were at this shrine. It was just a wonderful day. I couldn’t believe we finally reached eighteen and I was like, Man, we’re here already? This can’t be almost over. It lived on for us, because every time we watched the Masters together after that, I’d say, “Dad, remember this hole? Remember what you did here? Remember what I did here?” It was just a great thing.

How is covering golf different than baseball or basketball? Are your eyes trained on different kinds of things?
It is completely different from what you do in baseball play-by-play wise or in the NBA studio with Charles and Kenny and Shaq. But the common denominator there is my feeling is always, how am I going to get my analysts in their best possible position to shine? How do I play to their strengths? So that’s always the way I felt, whether I’m in the studio working with those guys, or whether I’m working with Ron Darling on baseball, or whether I’m working with Ian Baker-Finch or Bill Kratzert or Trevor Immelman or whoever on the golf side. It’s to ask the questions that get them in their wheelhouse.

I think the important thing is always knowing your role and always being prepared. Golf is a nice change of pace. I’ve been doing it since 1995. The first one I did was the PGA Championship at Riviera. Your role kind of morphs over time. Those early years, I filled in for Verne Lundquist for a half hour on Thursday and Friday, then did the Saturday and Sunday morning shows. Then it’s kind of changed through the years, from that into a hosting role and then into full-time hole-by-hole coverage. I’ve always enjoyed it.

For me, I just love those first few days of practice rounds, when you can walk the course and talk to players and see how they’re playing shots. It’s impossible to do that and not kind of try to incorporate things into your game and see how guys play shots. Not that it’s all about golf, but I feel like a have a better handle on the game when I go out and play after having watched these guys do it.

And don’t you wish you could pull off what they pull off?
It’s ridiculous, c’mon! It’s like you’re not even playing the same sport when I go out and play on the weekends with my buddies. That’s what you have to remember is that everybody out there in that field of 156 at the PGA Championship, they’re all unbelievable. Obviously, some of these guys have the résumé and the bank account to show that they are a notch above, but everybody in that field hits the ball so incredible that you’re kind of in awe when you’re walking with them in the fairways.

Do you get the same sense when you watch basketball? Do you think, Yeah, I can put up shots, or do you think, No way, not even the same gym?
It is incredible. When you watch Golden State play and Steph shoot the ball, you are in amazement. We talk about this during the All-Star weekend a lot, when you’re talking about the slam dunk contest or the three-point contest. I think people relate more to the three-point contest, because everybody’s gone out and shot a basketball. Everybody’s gone out to the driveway and shot, or gone to the gym at lunch time and played at the Y or whatever, but very few people out there can really relate to what it’s like to take off at the free throw line, put a ball behind your back, and then jam it. That’s so foreign to everybody. But everybody knows what it feels like to shoot. Everybody knows what it feels like to get on a little bit of a roll.

That’s what really started the thing between me and Charles one year is that I made that point on the air. He was like, “You can’t shoot three-pointers!” So we had our contest at the Western Conference Finals a few years ago in Oklahoma City. I said, “Charles, if you’re going to just criticize me and say that I can’t shoot, why don’t you and I have a contest?” Then we set it up for the Western Conference Finals and I wound up beating him. Here was the grandfather beating the Hall of Famer in a three-point contest. I do have that on the résumé.

You had an interruption to your career in 2006 when you were treated for lymphoma. You were famously known for working during your treatments. What does work mean to you?
I picked up my work ethic from my father. When you hang out and watch him do his job for as many years as I did, hanging out at the ballpark and watching him go about the same routine pretty much any time he went to the ballpark, that stuck with me when I got into this.
I’ve always found that the more I bury myself into that work, the more it sticks with me, just in my memory. So even if I don’t have a stat right there in the front of my mind, I know where I can put my hands on it.

One thing that I always strive to do is to never be driving home saying, “If I had worked a little harder, I would have been ready for this, or if I would have done more homework on this, I could have added something to the telecast.”

So that’s what I’ve always tried to do and tried to pass that on to my kids—the value of hard work and the value of not settling. I got that from my dad and I’m trying to be the one who passes that on to mine.

In broadcasting, there are stat guys and there are story guys. Vin Scully is probably the ultimate story guy. Where would you say you fall in that? Are you more a stats-interested guy or a story guy?
I’m more of a story guy. I do a lot of stats and that kind of thing, and I think you have to have that in your saddle bag going in, especially these days in baseball where the value of stats has changed. But to me it’s always been the stories. To me it’s been, What makes an athlete relatable? What makes you want to root for this guy?

Did your love for stories make it easier for you when you sat down to write your story?

In a way. Number one, you have to have that in you if you’re going to write the book. You can’t just say, “OK, let’s write a book. I don’t really want to tell any stories, but I want to write a book.” The two just don’t go together. So there has to be that desire to do that.

Then there has to be the time to do it. I did a lot of late night writing, when everybody was in bed and I was just in my office at my house. I found myself going into depth about stories I hadn’t thought about in a long time. In a way it was cathartic, in a way it was emotional. But that’s in your wheelhouse if you are at heart a storyteller and want to share that. It was a really cool process.

Now let me ask you about your take on work more generally. You have a high profile job and you interact with a lot of famous athletes and others. But your wife couldn’t care less about sports, you have a large family including an adult son with major physical challenges, and you have your faith. How in the world do you keep your job in perspective yet still do it with excellence?
Like a lot of folks, that’s an ongoing struggle. It was for a long time with me in terms of where your priorities lie and trying to really look at the big picture of why you’re here. Am I here to describe basketball highlights, or do I have a bigger purpose than that, where having the platform that I have just plays into that?

This job tends to make you self-centered. You want so badly to take the next step, or move from this market to this market to this job and try to continue to improve. Sometimes it can really make you me-centered. Suddenly, you think the most important thing is that I progress in my job and not that I’m a good father—that I can take care of the father thing, but the job comes first. For a while, it was that way with me and I had to change that. I really did. I felt early in my career that it was too much about me.

That’s really something that ignited my search for faith. That was the turning point for me back in 1997 when I rededicated my life to Jesus Christ. The crux of all that was, Why am I still searching if I think this is all there is? I knew there was something more out there than doing basketball highlights or trying to be the best basketball broadcaster that I could be. I had to really search and discover what that is. I found that in Christ.

You’ve been open with that. A lot of people would say, “I can’t touch this with a 10-foot pole when I’m on my job.” You have a public job and you’ve actually spoken of this at times.
Yeah. I’ve had opportunities, given the platform that I have and the position that I have on the NBA or whatever sports I’m doing. I’ve got opportunities to speak at a lot of FCA and Athletes in Action events, to emcee those and to speak at them and give my testimony or present the gospel at the end of those. I think the more comfortable you get doing that, then who you are isn’t a secret anymore. I’m going public with my faith.

Going back to the time around 1997, I was going, “What’s this going to look like? Does this mean I have to go out and preach the gospel every time I get on the air?” No. People aren’t going to tune in to the NBA and I’m going to say, “OK, turn to Romans 8. We’re going to dive in, guys.” This is something that you have to know your opportunities, where who you are is going to come out, depending on what the conversation is that’s going on on the air.

The one that you would point at the most was after the election. On our NBA show, we talk about every kind of social issue out there. We’ve never just kept this show to what’s going on between the lines on a basketball court. So that night when we had two minutes each to tell folks what we thought about the election, I had two options. I could play it safe and say, “Wow, what a surprise that was. Let’s hope it turns out OK.” Or I could be totally as honest as I possibly could, and that’s the direction I went. I had to tell people, “Look, I process things like this just like I process everything else in my life and that’s through the lens of my faith.” It wasn’t like I was going to make a big thing out of it. I’m just going to talk. We’re just going to talk, folks. I’ve been coming into your living room for 28 years now, and here we are talking about this. So it’s, “Look, I don’t know who’s going to be in the Oval Office from one election to the next, but I know who’s on the throne.” And as I said that night, “I follow this guy named Jesus. You might have heard of him. So look, I’m going to love on other folks and I’m going to pray for our leaders.”

My wife looked at Facebook on Saturday morning, two days after that, and said, “You know, what you said about the election has 15 million views on Facebook.” Again, it was not any intent on my part to break the internet that night. It was my intention to be as totally honest and transparent as I could about how I processed something that everybody’s talking about. So that was a pretty amazing thing. But again, as I walked to my car that night, it was like 28 years in this chair for such a time as this. For such a time as this election to say here’s how I feel and here’s how I have come to grips with it. It was a pretty amazing few days.

And that faith of yours. Your autobiography is titled Unscripted, because the show you do on TNT runs without a script, but more because the events of your life have taken many surprising turns. But it’s not that you believe your life was unscripted, just that it was unscripted by you.
That’s the thing. We can always follow the script that we’ve written. We can always do that. We try to control the strings and say, “Look, this will be the best thing for my life, so let’s have that happen.”

But it’s those moments that you don’t see coming. It’s when they tell you that your son has muscular dystrophy. It’s when the doctor tells you that you have cancer. It doesn’t fit your script. It’s when you have a boy and a girl and you have a great wife and all of a sudden you’re going to adopt. That wasn’t my script. But ultimately, it’s in the script that God’s written for my life: You know what, you guys really do need to go to Romania, and this blond-haired boy does seem to be one you can possibly handle. He’s the one in my script who needs to be in your house. I think it’s fully surrendering yourself to the script that he has written for your life, even though it maybe runs against the script that you have written, without question.

You’ve talked about what your hopes were when you were 25, 35. But what are your hopes now for the rest of your life?
I’m in such a good place. I really am. I was sitting there the other day with my little grandson on a day off, sitting on the front porch swing on a 70-degree November day, and him falling asleep in my arms. You’re sitting here and you’re so proud of the kids that you’ve raised and the way they’ve turned out. And you’ve got two grandchildren and you’ve got 35 years of marriage. I’m in a great place. I’m past that point where you’re driven by, Boy, I’ve got to get out of Macon and get to a better market. Now I’ve got to get out of Spartanburg and get to Atlanta. I’d love to work some national sports.

Sometimes you look back and it’s just a blink. I think the whole key there is how you’re looking out. You’re not looking inward at yourself, at what can I do next for me. You’re looking at how can I help other folks. I think that’s the whole key, saying, “What can I do for you today?” That’s the kind of attitude that I try to wake up with every day.

COPYRIGHT 2018 LINKS PLAYERS INTERNATIONAL