PHILADELPHIA _ Josh Johnson, the Bengals' 40-year-old quarterback who averages it out with his 60-year-old mind and 20-year-old legs he credits to "Ghetto Aerobics," takes another spin through this fantastic voyage of a career when he leads the Bengals into Friday night's preseason finale (8 p.m.-Cincinnati's Local 12) against the Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field.
He'll be sharing snaps with Sean Clifford, the junior partner in the Bengals' Museum of History quarterback room featuring Johnson, the 29-year-old Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow, and 41-year-old Super Bowl MVP Joe Flacco.
It was Clifford, the 28-year-old all-time Penn State passing leader out of the quarterback factory of Cincinnati's St. Xavier High School, who approached Johnson early in camp before a practice as the quarterbacks limbered up.
Have you ever done this? Clifford asked as he showed Johnson a step.
Johnson, eyes twinkling, told Clifford, "Hey, I learned to throw in the hood," before he showed him what he knew.
And what doesn't Josh Javon Johnson know?
"He's a quarterback through and through. He's someone I feel everybody looks up to. Similar to Flacco," Clifford says. "It's not about being older. It's the day-to-day process with him. It's very impressive.
"It's been a good back-and-forth. Good conversation about everything. Mechanics. But that's the whole quarterback room. We talk about everything under the sun. Philosophies. Situations."
It got Clifford to thinking about what his college coach, James Franklin once said.
"That's the greatest thing about a locker room," Clifford says. "It's a melting pot."
The 49ers were king while Johnson grew up just over the bay in West Oakland, so he taught himself to throw watching Joe Montana. Not to mention Jeff Blake and Dan Marino and Randall Cunningham "on TV when you had to watch the whole game because there were no highlights.
"I would just try different throwing styles. I was infatuated with how their arms were moving, and when we played in the street, I just mimicked it. Nobody really knew what I was doing, but I knew what I was doing."
His high school head coach at Oakland Tech knew if he couldn't show Johnson how to play quarterback, Jeff Tedford, the head man down the road at Cal in Berkeley, could. Soon he was watching tape of Aaron Rodgers and Joey Harrington.
"You have to be resourceful in the hood," Johnson says. "If you want to know how I improved, you have to say 'Ghetto Aerobics.' If you didn't have a tackling dummy, you put a pillow under your shirt and tackled in the house. if you didn't have a basketball hoop, you cut out the bottoms of crates."
There is always more to learn. He did it playing for one Harbaugh in college (Jim) and then playing for the other (John) in the league. He's been soaking it up, from backing up Josh Freeman to backing up Jayden Daniels.
When he was with Andy Dalton as a Bengal 13 years ago, Dalton sent him to quarterback guru Tom House and changed his life.
"I've reinvented myself a few times. I'm a different quarterback than when I was here last time," says Johnson, easing into a Paycor Stadium couch this week after yet another walkthrough. "Fundamentally throwing the ball, I've got a way more compact release. Use my legs a lot more. My release is still pretty similar, but it's way more compact now."
Not only did he get House's number from Dalton, digits that transformed him on and off the field, Johnson got a valuable ball from him, too.
Johnson never threw out of the shotgun at the University of San Diego until third down and never did the quick game until he got to the NFL. Johnson, so used to taking the snap from under center, had trouble with the snap in the gun and transferring it quickly to the laces to throw.
He noticed that Dalton was so good and easy at getting it out fast. Turns out Dalton warmed up with a ball with no laces, and would just catch it and throw.
No laces?
"That's the beauty of my journey, though. I had to learn how to teach myself and just kind of go off-field," Johnson says. "Then you start learning from people, and then just feeling your way through it. I can say I've been exposed to so many different styles. So I tell the younger guys I work out with, 'Hey, I can't really define one way to do it. What I can do is try to help you become a better version of yourself.' That's what kind of helped me."
Johnson looked like a pretty good version of anybody the other night with a 113-plus passer rater clinic in the win over the Bears. He's told his father he'll keep going "until the flame in there goes away."
"I'm more than what people may think," Johnson says. "You bounce around so much, you don't know what people think. I can just go by what they tell me, and what they tell me sometimes doesn't make sense.
"Oh, you're going to get hurt." But I don't get hurt. "Oh, I don't know if you're going to get better,' but I keep getting better. I've heard things like, "Oh, you're just older.' It doesn't ever show up on the field. That's all I can say. I got out of the business of trying to dissect why people say what they say."
What they say back in West Oakland, or as Johnson calls it, "Ghost Town," ("I never got the full story from the OGs on the name") is that he never forgets where the NFL's self-made quarterback began learning.
More what people think? And then some.
Jeff Cotton, who switched nine-year-old Josh Johnson from the line to quarterback and was rewarded with four touchdown passes one day, recalls the moment when Johnson could go into his wallet it in that NFL debut year of 2009, he did it. He donated uniforms to the youth team Oakland Dynamites.
He's still giving. A few years back, after a scary season of some gunshots during their games, the Dynamites went to suburban Denver to play, and Johnson invited everyone to training camp when he was with the Broncos.
That cut close to the bone for Johnson. When he was in seventh grade and playing tag at Oakland Tech, the high school, there had been some kids jeering outside the fence. Words were said. A half-hour later, the kids came back. The unsuspecting Johnson, leaning on the fence, first guy there, had a gun waved in his face.
"Just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know what they mean when they say you see your life flash before your eyes," Johnson says. "I just tried to make sure not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You've got to read the room well because it can go down at any moment, and you've got to know when to get up out of there.
Kind of like quarterbacking."
Johnson gives you that twinkle he gave Clifford.
"He always comes back and works with kids and never asks for a dime," Cotton says.
That's just not how it's done in what he calls the hood, and Johnson uses the term with love and devotion.
"Like everything else you learned to do in the hood, watch somebody else and go mimic it," Johnson says. "I used to hold the ball by my ear, stand straight up, no rhyme or reason to what I'm doing now that I'm a professional quarterback, and I learned like the real fundamentals of quarterbacking, pretty much the total opposite of what I was doing."
He had plenty of help along the way, one of the many good things about growing up in Oakland, he says. He had so many cousins, he says he stopped counting in high school. One of them, very famously, is Marshawn Lynch, the NFL's all-decade running back in the same 2010s Josh traveled the league learning the quarterback trade.
Johnson's mother, Rosemary Whisenton, is the G.O.A.T. at his high school, Oakland Tech, coaching everything from volleyball to cheerleading, and administrating it all from treasurer to security chief since long before he was born.
Not only that, she ran camps for park and rec, while also working at Toys R Us before it closed and then delivering packages for FedEx.
"Mom's always moving," he says and the same could be said for his dad Gordon Johnson, "big in the basketball world." His parents met playing Slo-Pitch softball, and it must have been a fast brand because at one time Gordon was rated the No. 1 softball player in the military. Even now he goes over to Tech to help Rosemary coach the softball team.
After eight years in the service, Gordon Johnson emerged as a Bay basketball luminary coaching at St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in the East Bay. He became inseparable in the legend of Jason Kidd, one of the Bay Area's greats, and Kidd took him along to the NBA, from assisting the Bucks in the summer league, to simply going over tape from every game, exchanging ideas, as Gordon juggled the head coaching job at Cal-Santa Cruz.
"I was self-taught, too," says Gordon, who grew up in East Oakland. "My father died when I was five and I had two brothers in the military. The thing with Josh is he's always working his ass off. He went to my basketball camps for a few years, and even now when his son works out with me, he's there, too."
When Gordon Johnson was growing up, it became casual fare in the neighborhood to run into a Bill Russell, or a Paul Silas, who were either living a few doors down or had relatives who did. Or a Curt Flood, who was around the corner.
"They'd take us out and play ball with us, and these guys were icons, but they showed us how to play," Gordon says.
Josh Johnson grew up in the same tradition. He would see Rickey Henderson in passing. Leon Powe Jr., the future Celtic NBA champ. Now Johnson has to put his own daughter on the brushes with greatness list. As tall as her 6-4 dad, Jhai Johnson is a two-time Oakland Athletic League Most Valuable Player committed to the Vanderbilt women's basketball team after logging 47 career double-doubles for Oakland Tech.
"I always looked at trying to find the positives out of my environment, and I did that, and I saw that we had a hustling mentality," Josh Johnson says. "Everybody always focuses on the bad, but for me, it was a lot of great because it was a no-excuse policy in order to get to where you want to get to in life, and so I'm grateful for that."
The fantastic voyage keeps going. His second NFL start came in Philly in 2009 for the Bucs, when he threw two touchdowns to tight end Kellen Winslow Jr. He comes back six days after making a preseason start he threw a touchdown pass in stride to rookie wide receiver Colbie Young, all of seven years old when Johnson made that first junket here.
"It's always little things," says Johnson, still reading the room after all these years. "Whether it be the trajectory of a throw, body alignment for a throw, footwork, timing, how a guy gets from one read to another read. What are the little things that they doing? I'm always studying that."
