DEL.ICIO.USNBA Playoffs
TNT’s Ernie Johnson does more than put up with Barkley
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Most people looking at the Weavers simply would have seen a nice couple. Two people who’d traveled from Los Angeles to get behind the scenes of Atlanta’s “NBA on TNT” show, after buying the opportunity at a charity auction.
But Charles Barkley, the resident magpie on TNT’s popular, long-running show, saw an audience.
RICH ADDICKS/raddicks@ajc.com
TNT’s Ernie Johnson behind the scenes of Inside the NBA.
“You came all this way to hang out with boring ol’ Ernie Johnson?” Barkley, the former NBA star and most outspoken basketball analyst on the tube, said loud enough to be heard by the Weavers. And by Johnson, sitting nearby trying to finish a salad. And possibly by any professor working the underwater acoustics tank at nearby Georgia Tech. Yes, Barkley’s loud.
“Oh, we want to hang out with you and [visiting former player] Chris Webber,” answered Charisse Weaver.
Barely audible, between bites of spring mix, Johnson emitted the perfectly timed, bemused, “Thanks.”
There it is, Ernie Johnson Jr.’s professional life in summary.
For the 19th year, Johnson is reprising his award-winning role of anchor on Turner’s NBA telecasts, an Ozzie Nelson-plays-the-Apollo kind of gig that is recognized as one of the best in the business. He has a shiny Emmy Award to prove it.
As part of TNT’s NBA package, the studio show breaks down issues and action during pre-game, halftime and post-game segments. Barkley and Kenny Smith are the one-time players who bring the big opinions. Johnson is the temperate voice, in charge of such mundane stuff as facts and reason. Someone has to be the tether at the Macy’s parade, the broom at Mardi Gras.
Johnson has another way to depict his role on a set that is particularly hectic during these endless weeks of playoffs:
“To the viewing public, yeah, I’m the guy with the big forehead that Charles always makes fun of on TV. But there’s a little more to it than that.”
That “little more” consists partly of a wife with a calendar full of causes, a family that is a three-continent quilt and one long, intimate conversation with mortality.
Step back from the flat-screen image and look at the other dimensions of a television straight man. Then you find the NBA playoffs are hardly the only place where amazing happens.
The girl at the bank
There was but a little light lifting to do Monday night on the TNT set, just one game instead of the typical doubleheader. And that involved only the dismissal of the Hawks. “Like a vacation,” Johnson said.
Meanwhile, up the road at the opposite end of the importance spectrum, Cheryl DeLuca-Johnson was at Gainesville College, rallying students to the fight against sexual exploitation of children.
The broadcaster and the crusader met in the late 1970s in Macon. He was just beginning, having the ideals he learned at the Grady College of Journalism at Georgia tested at the small-market level. By night he’d anchor the car crash and fire stories. By day, he’d cut commercials for Tommy’s Recaps.
She was working her way through Mercer from behind a bank’s drive-through window.
“I had been going there for months,” Ernie said. “I was like, ‘This girl is pretty cute, but I’ve only seen her from the waist up.’ I didn’t know what to expect from the waist down. Do you take that leap? That was the only question.”
Leap taken. He’s now 52, she’s 49 and they have been married since 1982, when Ernie came home to work as a reporter for WSB-TV.
Cheryl DeLuca-Johnson turned out to be a force of nature. With four children at home, she committed to commuting from their home in Braselton to Athens in pursuit of a master’s degree. With that in hand, she became a counselor dealing with women’s addiction issues. She also now directs Street Grace, a church alliance dedicated to shedding light on the shame of child prostitution, specifically in the Atlanta area.
Ernie did not marry much of a sports fan. Instead, what he got was an inspiration.
“I can’t see myself being the one saying, hey, we have to go to Romania and adopt a kid. We need to go to Paraguay and adopt another. We need to be involved in this cause or that cause. She’s the one,” he said.
Boy in the wheelchair
One night 18 years ago, Johnson came home and innocently asked his wife, “What are we going to do?”
“I think he meant what are we going to do for dinner,” Cheryl said. Instead, having just read about the horrors of overseas orphanages, she replied: “We have to go to Romania and adopt a child.”
For two months, while Ernie stayed home with their children Eric (now 24) and Maggie (22), Cheryl searched the bleak orphanages of Eastern Europe.
No matter where she went, her mind kept going back to the first child she had seen, the physically and mentally challenged 3-year-old boy no one wanted. The one so profoundly damaged that he couldn’t chew solid food, who’d never spent a moment outside.
“I don’t know that I can live and wonder what happened to him,” she told her husband.
“Then bring him home,” Ernie said.
Michael, now 20, is one of two children still at the Johnson home these days. The other is Carmen, 16, the bright, musically gifted girl the family adopted in Paraguay.
Michael made so much progress. “[At the orphanage] they said he wouldn’t walk, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t bond with people. He has done all those things,” Cheryl said.
But his muscular dystrophy is insurmountable, the progressive condition confining him to a wheelchair for most of his life.
“Michael has given our children an appreciation for the fact that we’re not all wired the same and you can’t judge anyone by the fact he’s in a wheelchair or has trouble speaking. It’s all in the heart,” Ernie said. “We’ve been blessed far beyond anything we’ve done for Michael.”
Learning to cope would come in handy when Ernie took sick.
The swollen node
Impossible as it was, Johnson intended to keep the diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to himself. But as swelling around his face became more visible, he felt the need to explain to his audience.
Not trusting himself to handle his emotions live, Johnson taped a brief segment before a February 2006 broadcast. I’m going to finish the season and then begin chemo, he announced. Reach out to someone who needs you, he implored.
“We will continue to deal with this the one way we know how. We trust God. Period,” he concluded.
On the normally carefree TNT set, reality intruded. “We were all scared,” said the other former player who is a studio regular, Kenny Smith.
Watching back home, “I bawled,” said Cheryl. “He was very vulnerable. It wasn’t that he was without fear, but he walked through it anyway.
“During that time, we obviously had some pretty deep talks. We prayed and I told [the kids] this is not about how you deal with it or I deal with it. This is about how we deal with this. We all have to pitch in and help one another out through this, and they did. They were great.”
The TV guy lost his hair, the family video recorder rolling as Cheryl shaved the last of it from Ernie’s head. He missed TNT assignments anchoring coverage from golf’s British Open and PGA Championship. Then the next NBA season he was back, a little thinner but his role unchanged.
“We didn’t cut him any slack,” Smith said.
Now, Johnson is more than 2 1/2 years in remission. The work schedule — the golf and the baseball postseason following the NBA — is at full tilt. He is a convert to the work-out, eat-right thing.
“Seriously, I’ve never felt better. Go figure,” Johnson said.
Man in the middle
What would TNT’s NBA studio show be without Ernie Johnson?
“More fun,” Barkley said.
“Better looking,” Smith said.
When Johnson and the TNT Players assemble on a flashing set that would blind a Vegas pit boss, he is the one who keeps an intentionally loose show somewhat on the tracks.
“He’s the Angelo Dundee to our Ali,” Smith said. “When we’re cut, he knows how to stop the bleeding.”
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