Avery Johnson

1965—

Professional basketball coach, basketball player

In 2005, Avery Johnson became the eighth head coach of the Dallas Mavericks franchise in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Although he had no experience as a coach beyond youth basketball and was best known as an NBA player, he proved to be something of a prodigy. He took over as head coach during the 2004-05 season, and he steered the club to the finals of the NBA championship tournament during his first full season in 2005-06. Beyond his concrete measures of ability, Johnson also had intangible marks of charisma that were so important in marketing-heavy professional sports: simply put, Johnson was fun to watch. Amateur video-makers posted short films of his antics on the YouTube on-line video site, and video views of "The Little General" numbered as high as the hundreds of thousands.

From Substitute to Starter

A native of New Orleans, Avery Johnson was born on March 25, 1965, and the Louisiana accent that flavored his instructions to players became an integral part of his appeal. From the start, on the basketball court, he made up in hustle for what he lacked in stature. Attending St. Augustine High in New Orleans, he grew slowly; although he reached an adult height of five feet, eleven inches, he was only five feet three as a high school senior. "When you first saw him, you wondered if he could play basketball," St. Augustine coach Bernard Griffith told Lars Anderson of Sports Illustrated.

Johnson's high school career was anything but illustrious. "I was the 14th man on a 14-member team," he recalled to Anderson. "I was the backup to the backup's backup." Despite his meager average of 1.1 points per game, however, Johnson became part of the starting lineup when St. Augustine competed in and won the 1983 Louisiana state high school championships after the team's starting point guard was suspended. College scouts were in the crowd, and Johnson snared an athletic scholarship from New Mexico Junior College.

Playing for one season there, and for another at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma, Johnson won a scholarship back home in Louisiana, at Southern University in Baton Rouge, part of the Southwest Athletic Conference or SWAC. He grew over his college career from five feet three to five feet eleven, and his list of on-court accomplishments grew. In both of his two years as a guard at Southern, he led the National Collegiate Athletic Association in assists. His NCAA Division I records for most assists in a single game, highest single-season assist average, and highest career assist average still stood in 2007. Some of his greatest accomplishments, though, came in the area of leadership. "AJ kept all the kids straight," Southern coach Ben Jobe told Anderson. "When I had AJ, we never had guys breaking into Coke machines, breaking curfew. AJ is what you need if you want a guy who has character."

Trained for Success

Johnson was short for the NBA, even playing at the position of guard. His record as a shooter was modest, and he was not picked in the NBA draft after graduating from Southern with a degree in psychology in 1988. That was a setback that would have ended the careers of most players, but, he told Anderson, "I just wasn't ready to stop playing. If I wasn't good enough to be a pro, so be it, but I was going to find out myself." He began a gym routine that even at the end of his career would see him training for five hours every afternoon, and he signed on for the summer with the Palm Beach Stingrays of the United States Basketball League. That fall, he joined the Seattle SuperSonics as a free agent.

That began an NBA career that was spotty at times but that steadily built as Johnson worked on his game. He remained with the Supersonics, getting into games mostly as a substitute, and was traded in the fall of 1990 to the Denver Nuggets only to be dumped by Nuggets coach Paul Westhead in an airport on Christmas Eve. Another unkindly timed blow came in 1991, after he signed as a free agent with the San Antonio Spurs and agreed to serve as a groomsman at the wedding of teammates David Robinson. At the wedding reception, he was given the pink slip by San Antonio assistant coach Gregg Popovich. The news was a sour note in an otherwise good year; Johnson had gone home to New Orleans to marry his wife, Cassandra, earlier that year. The couple went on to raise two children, Christianne and Avery Jr.

Johnson bounced back with a free-agent signing in Houston, but the Rockets too dropped him at the end of the 1991-92 season. He spent another year with San Antonio in 1992-93. By this time Johnson seemed headed for the fate of an NBA journeyman who saw action only occasionally in the later stages of a game, but close observers, including Popovich (who had been promoted to San Antonio general manager), noticed that his hard work was beginning to pay off. With The Golden State Warriors in 1993-94, he cracked the starting lineup as a guard after an injury to star shooter Tim Hardaway, breaking into season double figures with an average of 10.9 points per game. His points-per-game average increased in each of his first seven seasons in the NBA, and his season field-goal percentage, at first an anemic 35 percent, hovered around the 50 percent mark by the mid-1990s.

Popovich brought Johnson back to San Antonio for the 1994-95 season, and Johnson remained there until 2001. The stability did his game good as he notched five more seasons with points-per-game averages in double digits. He narrowly missed that mark in 1999 with 9.7 points per game, but that year he had the satisfaction of making a shot that clinched the Spurs' first title in franchise history. The energetic Johnson acquired a fan base of his own and a nickname, "Taz," to go with it.

At a Glance …

Born on March 25, 1965, in New Orleans, LA; married Cassandra, 1991; children: Christianne, Avery Jr. Education: Attended New Mexico Junior College, 1984; attended Cameron University, Lawton, OK, 1985; Southern University, Baton Rouge, LA, BA, psychology, 1988. Religion: Missionary Baptist.

Career: Basketball player and coach; Palm Beach Stingrays, United States Basketball League, 1988; Seattle SuperSonics, National Basketball Association, guard, 1988-90; Denver Nuggets, NBA, 1990-91; Houston Rockets, NBA, 1991-92; Golden State Warriors, NBA, 1993-94; San Antonio Spurs, NBA, 1994-2001; Dallas Mavericks, NBA, 2002-03; Golden State Warriors, 2003-04; Dallas Mavericks, assistant coach, 2004-05; Dallas Mavericks, head coach, 2005-.

Selected awards: USA Weekend magazine, Caring Athlete Award; Nonprofit Resource Center of Texas, Spirit of Philanthropy Award, 1999; Home Team Community Service Award, Fannie Mae Foundation; NBA Coach of the Month Award, 2005; NBA All-Star Team Coach, 2006; NBA Coach of the Year Award, 2006.

Addresses: Office—Dallas Mavericks, Head Coach, The Pavilion, 2909 Taylor St., Dallas, TX 75226.

A popular figure in the San Antonio community, Johnson participated in many charitable activities and won the Spirit of Philanthropy Award from the Nonprofit Resource Center of Texas in 1999, as well as USA Weekend magazine's Most Caring Athlete award. He had a standing group of 25 tickets for Spurs games that he donated to underprivileged area children. Many of Johnson's off-court activities were motivated by his Christian faith, and he liked to say that the perfect day involved two "B's"—Bible study and biking. A member of Antioch Baptist Church in San Antonio, he played a role in efforts to construct a new church school there.

Developed Leadership Qualities

On the court, Johnson began to develop leadership qualities—and they were of an unorthodox kind. He was famous among his teammates for pre-game pep talks that combined basketball and Scripture in roughly equal proportions. One, delivered before a game against Golden State during the successful 1998-99 campaign, delved into the military conflicts described in the Old Testament Book of Joshua. Joshua, Johnson related, sent only a small part of his Israelite army to attack the small town of Ai, thinking it would be easily conquered. "Do you know what happened?" Johnson warned (according to Anderson). "They got busted in the mouth!"

After he left the Spurs in 2001, Johnson's playing career wound down. He spent part of the 2001-02 season with the Denver Nuggets and then moved to the Dallas Mavericks in a mid-season trade in February of 2002. Traded to Golden State, he spent the 2003-04 season there and then signed with Dallas as a free agent once again in September 9, 2004. He did not take the field for the 2004-05 season, retiring as a player in October of that year with an average of 8.4 points per game over 1,054 games. He was the all-time leader in assists among Spurs players and ranks 28th in NBA history in assists.

From the time he joined the team, however, the Mavericks had other things in mind for Johnson than just some late-game sub slots. Having already assisted the club's coaching staff during playoff runs in 2002 and 2003, he was hired as an assistant coach for the 2004-05 season. The high-powered but somewhat unfocused Mavericks offense entertained fans but failed to propel the Mavericks to a coveted NBA finals spot. Johnson, as assistant coach, brought a new intensity to the Mavericks' game. "Suddenly," assistant coach Del Harris told Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated, "we had this guy with all this energy running up and down the court with the guys, hooting and hollering on every play. Nellie [head coach Don Nelson] and I would just fill in the blanks whenever we had to. Avery's voice became the voice the players knew."

So it came as no surprise when, on March 19, 2005, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban elevated Johnson to the position of head coach after Nelson's resignation. What was a surprise was how quickly the novice coach succeeded. The Mavericks under Johnson closed out the 2004-05 seasons by winning 16 of their last 18 games. The following season showed that the performance was no fluke as the Mavericks advanced to the NBA finals for the first time in team history and nearly won the championship, going out to a 2-0 lead before falling to the Miami Heat. Johnson won 66 of his first 82 games as head coach, demolishing the previous record over that stretch by a four-win margin.

Johnson attributed his success to the long period of hard knocks he had endured as a player. Not particularly popular among Mavericks players, he was credited with sharpening the games of several of them, in particular center Dirk Nowitzki. "You know, in this situation, everybody feels that I got this job so suddenly," Johnson observed to David Aldridge of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "But this is my 18th year in the NBA, so whether it's as a player or a coach or combined, you know, this is 18 years in basketball, after playing a thousand and something games, when I wasn't necessarily invited to the party, all right? I had to kind of come in through the back door."

Johnson was named NBA Coach of the Year for 2005-06. In the 2006 NBA All-Star Game, he was named coach of the Western Conference Squad. He brought the Mavericks to the playoffs once again in 2006-07, but the team was shocked in the first round as the Golden State Warriors defeated the Mavericks in six games. Fans still found the charisma of the hard-driving Johnson, dubbed the "Little General," an endless source of fascination. Amateur video of Johnson surfaced frequently on YouTube and other Internet sites, with a short clip of Johnson inadvertently (and obliviously) elbowing forward Josh Howard in the groin while signaling officials for a quick substitution garnered more than 250,00 viewings on YouTube as of mid-2007. The Mavericks, under their new coach, looked like consistent championship contenders, and, noted McCallum, "in a sporting culture desperate for the unvarnished and the unexpected, he was a frequent, high-pitched source of both. Rest assured there are more Avery Moments to come."

Sources

Books

Reach Beyond the Break: The Avery Johnson Story, A&D Communications, 2002.

Periodicals

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 29, 2007.

Houston Chronicle, April 21, 2007, p. 7.

Men's Health, May 2007, pp. 164-170.

Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 2006.

Sporting News, May 6, 2005, p. 14.

Sports Illustrated, July 7, 1999, p. 44; December 25, 2006, p. 78.

On-line

"Avery Johnson," Dallas Mavericks Official Website,www.nba.com/coachfile/avery_johnson/index.html?nav=page (July 6, 2007).

"Family Never Far from Johnson's Mind," Dallas Morning News,www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spt/basketball/mavs/stories/050107dnspoavery.3896ea3.html (June 12, 2007).

"Player Profile: Avery Johnson," National Basketball Association,www.nba.com (April 28, 2007).