Menu
Hall of Fame Journey
When he stepped inside the East Prairie gymnasium, Danny Johnson was a little timid.
The former football standout hadn’t been inside the high school gym for 40 years as he walked along the basketball court at East Prairie High School with his black leather shoes thumping along the hardwood with each step. Dressed in a suit and tie waiting to get his picture taken, Johnson paused and took it all in.
He was home. But not like some would think.
Before he forced a few smiles for the camera he visited his one-time bedroom. He wanted to make sure his tie and collar were picture-worthy, so he stepped inside the boys locker room.
For two weeks Johnson called that place home. A dysfunctional relationship with his father and a coach who loved Johnson like the father he wished he had led him there.
From homeless to the Hall, Johnson turned a bitter childhood into a flourishing career on the football field which culminates this weekend during his Hall of Fame induction at Murray State University.
Johnson’s journey into Murray State lore began when he moved away from East Prairie. Born in Dorena, Mo. – just 20 minutes away from East Prairie – Johnson attended an all-black school and was bussed to his future hometown school during middle school.
His parents split up when Johnson was 12 years old. He was forced to move to an area known as Quad Cities, which is located in northwest Illinois and southeastern Iowa. The move hinged on getting away from Johnson’s father, who Johnson described as a “drug addict, alcoholic, abusive.”
“This is the God’s honest truth, he hated me from the time I was born,” Johnson said. “This I know. He went to his grave hating me and I feel the same way about him. It really hits me home when I see a father and son doing something. I never had that feeling knowing what it’s like to have a dad. You can have 99 good games and everybody love you. You have one bad game and nobody speaks. I always wondered what it would be like to have a father for me to have a bad game and he come put his arm around me and say, ‘They had your number tonight son. Let’s go get a hotdog and a Coke’.”
Though he was now six and a half hours away from the danger that surrounded his father, all Johnson wanted to do was get back to East Prairie. The Quad City area was just as unsafe.
“I hated Illinois. There wasn’t nothing there but drugs and gangs and all that,” Johnson said. “I begged my momma for two weeks, 24/7 to come back to East Prairie… A lot of people think she was an unfit mother but she wasn’t. She let me come back because she loved me. I came back and, of course, you know you I got to stay with.”
Once Johnson finally convinced his way back to East Prairie, he was forced to stay with his father. Though he was back in the town that he loved, it didn’t mean things got better.
“My two best days with my dad, and when I tell people this they think it’s going to be something awesome,” Johnson said. “When I came back and it was just me and him, he said, ‘Danny, you got to go. I’m kicking you out in a week.’ I didn’t have no where to go or anybody. That’s one of my good days.
“My other good day with him, he walked up to me and said, ‘Nigga, you’ll never be (expletive) as long as you live. That was my second good day.”
Johnson found solace in sports. He dreamed of one day playing basketball professionally, but a chance meeting with then East Prairie football coach Ed Nichols changed his course. But it almost didn’t happen.
As a freshman football player, Johnson was asked to move up to play varsity by Nichols midway through the season. Johnson, who wanted to play basketball instead, couldn’t be swayed. Even after a more than persuasive face-to-face meeting with Nichols in the high school gym while Johnson shot baskets during his lunch hour. That’s when Nichols blew his whistle and made everyone take a seat in the bleachers, except Johnson.
Nichols challenged his future running back to a game of 1-on-1. If Nichols won, Johnson played football.
“I’m thinking to myself this old man don’t know what he got himself into,” Johnson said. “Come to find out, I may have bitten off more than I could chew. He must have played college ball or something.”
With Johnson up 16-15 and needing to win by two, a deep shot from the corner was waved off by Nichols. Apparently Johnson didn’t take it back far enough. Three buckets later, Johnson would report to football practice on Monday.
“I made so many mistakes on the football field, but I always got a pat on the back from [Nichols].” Johnson said. “He meant everything to me. He was an uncle, a big brother, more like a father to me. As a player, I probably got closer to him than anybody in his career because of the situation that I was in. When my mom let me come back and my dad kicked me out, he was the person I came to.”
It wasn’t long after that, that Johnson found himself without a home after his father forced him out. For two weeks, Johnson slept in the East Prairie locker room on top of football mats. Nichols set the move up. A refrigerator accompanied him in his new room.
“Right here,” Johnson pointed from his seat on the gymnasium bleachers. “In that boys locker room is were I slept for two weeks.”
Following his stay inside East Prairie’s gym, Johnson found out he was on food stamps, welfare, and had a foster care guardian to help him. It’s been 40 years since that time and he still doesn’t know who put in the work to get Johnson help.
“I know I went to coach Nichols and I brought it up to him just last year,” Johnson said. “He told me that times were hard on me back then, but I made it. The conversation stopped right there. I have no idea who done all that for me. I know you couldn’t do anything like that now.”
Eventually, Johnson’s football career took off. And in a huge way.
As a junior he rushed for over 1,100 yards. He nearly hit that same mark in four games during an incredible senior season in 1976 when he ran for 2,271 yards and scored 156 points.
Johnson reminisced about his big games and knew down to the detail how they played out. He could remember the time he had just 12 yards against Caruthersville in the fourth quarter, until he broke down the sideline for a 92-yard gain to put him over 100.
He made headlines during a Week 3 matchup against Hayti, drilling the Indians for a whopping 412 yards and five touchdowns.
Johnson ran off big play after big run and the time a South Pemiscot player nearly knocked him cold. He also listed the college recruiters that started showing up on Friday nights. And why wouldn’t they? Johnson ran for 3,458 yards in his career at East Prairie, earned honorable mention All-America status – the only East Prairie athlete to do so – as a senior and was an all-state track competitor placing third in one of the jump events.
“When we would go out to a ball game you could see them all standing there with their school jackets on,” Johnson said. “The bleachers were full of them.”
Schools like Murray State, Southeast Missouri State, Arkansas, Illinois and Missouri. Mizzou was were Johnson wanted to land. Even after the red carpet was laid out during a visit when Nebraska came to town, Johnson got word that head coach Al Onofrio was leaving after the season and class sizes were so big that professors rarely knew your name.
Murray State was next on the list. He talked with coaches and ate a steak dinner with Racer boosters and was dropped off at the stadium with another Murray State Hall of Famer, running back Don Clayton.
Clayton, a former standout from Malden High School and current career and season record-holder for rushing yardage at Murray State, was a player Johnson marveled at while he was in eighth grade.
“He was Mr. Everything at Malden,” Johnson said. “I remember watching him play at East Prairie, with me under the bleachers with a football under my arm. He was playing like a man against boys and I just said to myself, “I want to be like him someday’. We’ve been friends to this day.”
Johnson’s career with the Racers quickly took off. The first time he touched the ball with Murray State, Johnson ran for a 50-yard touchdown against Southeast. Just like at East Prairie, the accolades began to pile up.
Johnson was named All-OVC in 1978 and 79 and was the OVC Offensive Player of the Year in 1978. That same year, he had 10 games of 100 rushing yards and scored 12 touchdowns which is fourth-most at Murray for a single season. He’s Murray’s second all-time rusher with 2,522 yards. Right behind Clayton.
Johnson was well on his way to playing in the NFL, before his life took another turn.
On the road against Middle Tennessee, in a game that pinned the OVC winner and a spot in the playoffs, Johnson took his very first carry 20 yards and was suddenly whacked by the strong safety. The pain that hit his right shoulder was excruciating.
“It was like somebody stuck and drove a stake through my shoulder,” Johnson said. “It was like my arm wasn’t even there.”
The safety that hit Johnson had to be taken off the field by a cart, while Johnson stayed quiet and in the game.
Johnson tore his right pectoral, his tricep, bicep and broke his collar bone following the hit. Despite the damage, Johnson played the entire game. He used his left arm to carry the football instead.
“I never told nobody nothing and I’m surprised the coaches didn’t see me carry the ball in my other hand,” he said. “My pain tolerance is very high. And that could be a problem.”
A routine medical check eventually blew Johnson’s cover. His catastrophic injury forced Johnson to play his last game of football. Murray State head coach at the time, Frank Beamer, called Johnson to his office, closed the door behind him, and broke down.
“He wasn’t crying for his football team or Murray State and was very apologetic about it all, but he told me it was over. Nobody knows that story until now…That was it. From my sophomore to my junior year before I got hurt, there were pro scouts there every day at practice. The St. Louis Cardinals (football team) told me they were going to take me in the first round. I had a great coach and a great athletic director that got my name out there. After my shoulder, I never heard from nobody else.”
His football career was over, but that didn’t stop Johnson from pursing his next goal.
“I found a bright side in it,” Johnson said. “The good Lord let the light shine on me long enough to make an impact in other people’s life. I knew I was going to graduate and I knew I wanted to do something with kids. That’s why I got a degree in teaching.”
Though he couldn’t find a job in teaching, Johnson will have spent 33 years at the Evansville, Ind., Fire Department in May. He just recently signed his retirement papers. He’ll be 60 in July.
He spends some of his free time visiting high schools and telling kids about his life. How he came from sleeping in a locker room to one day having a chance to play in the NFL.
“The coaches always want to know about my stats, but I’ll never talk about football. I want to talk to kids about life,” Johnson said. “Some people see an obstacle in front of them and it’s a problem. Some people see an obstacle in front of them and it’s a challenge. That’s me. The mountains in front of me I’m going around, over or under. There’s no other way.”
Johnson, along with his wife Adria and his two sons, will be headed back to Murray this weekend for his Hall of Fame Induction. It’s an end to yet another long journey for Johnson, who was at first passed over for a HOF spot.
Murray’s Hall of Fame talked to Johnson four years ago, but another was chosen and it quite honestly, upset Johnson. Shortly after a few calls to some of Johnson’s friends of the program and a phone rally by the people of East Prairie, Johnson got his second call in March of last year. He’ll be the 44th football player to go into Murray’s Hall.
“When he announced it to me I cried like a baby,” Johnson said. “The best way I can put it, I do believe in God and what happened in my life was exactly what God wanted to happen. Many people are pretty disappointed and mad at Murray State because everything was there and I should have been in 40 years ago. But, like the old saying goes, God doesn’t come when you want him to but He’s always on time. It’s been 40 years and I can honestly tell you, now is the time for me to go in. I understand that and I see it.”
Johnson expects to see many familiar faces when he takes his spot into college history. Not only was coach Nichols an irreplaceable figure during his childhood, families like Mr. and Mrs. Donald Dick, Mr. and Mrs. Ron Carter, Mr. and Mrs. Steve Hodges, Mr. and Mrs. Ronnie Wallace and Miss LaWanda Douglas, nearly drew tears to his eyes when Johnson spoke of how much they helped him throughout his life.
Those are the families, five very special families, I mean, even the away games at Murray State, they went,” Johnson said. “I just want to say thank you to the whole town of East Prairie for being in my lifelong journey.
“I went to Murray State and I ran into another five families there that are special to me,” Johnson added. “What are the chances of that happening? And they was white. Color made them no difference. They went by my character. God had to have a hand in all of this, especially in East Prairie with the way race was here. Those five families got behind me. A lot of those people, those who are still alive, are coming over to the Hall of Fame.”