John johnson football player 49ers
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In 1964, at 35, Johnson became at the time the oldest NFL player to rush for 1,000 yards in a season.
When Johnson retired at 37 following the 1966 season, he ranked fourth on the all-time rushing list. “That’s what got me. He was genuinely feared by his peers for his blocking.
“I was an aggressive player,” Johnson told Dave Newhouse, author of The Million Dollar Backfield.
“It took him a while to answer if you asked him something. His San Francisco teammate Joe Perry had died five weeks earlier, and with encouragement from Joe’s widow Donna, Kathy elected to donate her father’s brain to the UNITE Brain Bank.
Boston University researchers diagnosed Johnson with stage 4 CTE, the most advanced stage of the neurodegenerative disease.
“It kind of gave me some closure,” Kathy said.
The cause of death was complications from dementia, which he battled for almost 10 years. After his wife Leona died in 2002, Johnson returned to California to live with his daughter Kathy, the oldest of his six children. The Gaels’ touchdown came on a 90-yard kickoff return by Johnson to open the second half.
“The hero of the piece was John Henry Johnson, the 191-pound St.
Mary’s sophomore,” according to the report in the next morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. “My dad, at that point, didn’t really get a sense for how serious things were.”
Kathy said despite his struggles at home, John Henry looked forward to annual trips to Canton, Ohio for Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.
When he enrolled in Pittsburg Junior High School as a ninth grader in 1946, Johnson had never played organized sports. In a 2003 interview with Football Digest magazine, Perry said he faced even greater dangers on the field than did his baseball counterpart, Jackie Robinson.
“It was tough,” Perry said.
I had to be on guard at all times for something.”
Perry got the nickname "The Jet" from his first quarterback, Frankie Albert, who commented that Joe had gone past Albert twice on the same play like a jet. With a powerhouse fullback in the lineup, the 49ers’ offense exploded, gaining 2,498 yards with 60 TDs and ranking first offensively in 1954, Johnson's rookie season.
With a reputation as a punishing runner who preferred to run through rather than around would-be tacklers, Johnson’s relentless style became the template for the likes of Larry Csonka, in the generation following Johnson’s, and today in Brandon Jacobs and even, to a certain degree, in Adrian Peterson, who possesses an awe inspiring blend of Johnson’s power and Perry’s speed.
After two injury-riddled years, the 49ers traded Johnson to the Lions.
He gained 1,018 yards in 1953. His brain was donated to a Boston University facility for dementia research.
His running mate, fullback John Henry Johnson, died June 3, 2011 in Tracy, California at the age of 81. He retired as a player after the 1966 season, ranked fourth on the NFL’s all-time rushing list
After his playing career, Johnson settled in Pittsburgh, Pa.
and held several jobs before retiring in 1989, by which time his health had deteriorated noticeably. I didn’t know what it was.”
In 1989, with Johnson’s cognitive issues affecting his daily life, Leona enrolled Johnson in an Alzheimer’s disease study in Cleveland. The team’s preseason press brochure said, “His hip and knee action in open field is as graceful as a ballet dancer’s efforts…And makes him almost as hard to catch as a porpoise in the open sea.”
In his second varsity game, the Gaels were 31-point underdogs against the University of Georgia at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium.
Though he was 31, Johnson still had his best individual seasons ahead of him. In 1960 he signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers and set about proving all his doubters wrong.
He led the Steelers in rushing four straight years.