To listen to Ian Johnson is to understand that his craft is all about sequencing and consistency, patience and picking spots, and filling holes as they appear. It's a little like a geometry problem on a mental blackboard. It's a lot like music. The great ones, they just find a way to flow through it.
Or, as college football's most touchdown-prolific running back says: "It's definitely a focus task that takes a lot of hand-eye coordination. You've got to know what you're doing. It's a very mathematical kind of thing." Ian Johnson crochets. You got a problem with that?
Yes, Johnson crochets, and we've barely begun to hand you the setups to all the punch lines. He also works as a plumber's assistant ("Actually, I'm an apprentice's helper"), and he has eaten nine bananas in an afternoon, and he plays home games on a not-a-color-innature blue field, and sometimes, while he is in the middle of a four- or five-touchdown afternoon, he finds himself adding the uniform numbers of different players—just, you know, to pass the time and smooth out. "I tend to get a little hyper," he says with an easy smile.
He pays the mortgage on the house he owns in Boise by working that plumbing job and selling crocheted pieces as fast as he makes them. He isn't really comfortable when his hands are doing nothing, which explains why, if you're in his neighborhood at 7 in the morning—Johnson needs only five hours of sleep a night—from inside his house, you may hear a vacuum running or the dulcet blares of a trombone. (Yeah, he does that, too. Took it up when he was a kid.)
For all of his quirks, though, Johnson is the player without whom Boise State does not go. His 1,317 yards and 20 touchdowns in the undefeated Broncos' first nine games are the reason people in the Gem State are holding BCS conversations and crunching numbers to debunk the computers and the humans who program them. And it is Ian Johnson who has allowed a first-year head coach to transform a once-pass-nutty team into the kind of outfit that can run all over a Pac-10 entry like, say, Oregon State. "We felt he could do good things," says that coach, Chris Petersen. "But no one—no one—saw him coming like this." "This" being the surprise Heisman whisper of the season.
Johnson will beat you to the punch line with one-liners about his unusual lifestyle, and the way he handles the needling has made him a handsdown locker room favorite. "I'll do anything for IJ," says Jadon Dailey, a senior offensive lineman.
Does that include learning to crochet? "No," Dailey replies immediately. "I don't want to get beat up around the locker room, you know what I mean?"
IT BEGAN during one of those rare Southern California cold snaps. Johnson was living in San Dimas, in the San Gabriel Valley east of LA, when he decided that what he really wanted was a goodlooking scarf to wear around the campus of Damien High. His mom saw through the request like it was vapor—just another impulse need that was going to cost her money.
"You want a scarf?" she said. "I'll teach you to make one."
Colleen Johnson crocheted all the time, and after her second son stumbled through a couple of flawed productions, he realized he had a knack for the process too. The way each hook-threaded fisherman's knot had to follow the last one just so appealed to his neat and ordered math mind.
Even now, at the end of another football day, Johnson crochets for an hour or two, or more, to clear his head. He crochets while he watches a movie or talks with his girlfriend, Christine Popadics. He doesn't need to look at the needle now to know he's doing it right.
The finished product is money in the bank. Johnson's wares—beanies mostly, some scarves—sell so well among his teammates that he says he has back orders in the hundreds. When the demand first began to grow exponentially, Boise State officials found themselves asking the NCAA a question they had never before pondered: Could one of their players crochet for money without breaking any rules? (Answer: No problem, so long as he doesn't advertise his services.)
Still-unnamed teammates tried to give Johnson some free pub by ratting out his hobby to The Idaho Statesman when he was a redshirt freshman, in 2004. "First time I'm ever asked for an interview," Johnson says, "and it's about crocheting."
His hobby was also mentioned during a national telecast in 2005, but it didn't go fully viral until this past Sept. 7, when ESPN's Erin Andrews modeled one of his beanies during the Oregon State game, while Johnson was busy running for 240 yards and five touchdowns. The fallout was epic.
"Knit-wit—that's one name I got called," Johnson says with a laugh. "Crochet Boy. My teammates had a good time with it. 'Hey, Ian, you need some more socks? Why don't you crochet yourself a pair?' It was all in fun, and I laughed."
That was before Johnson began to make a weekly habit of sidestepping defenders and piling up yardage as he took BSU national—and before most of those teammates actually got a look at their running back's salable merchandise. "Now it's like, 'Uh, hey, man, my mom would like a scarf,' " he says. "I'm raising the price in exchange for the jokes."
The money is put to good use. Johnson's parents helped him buy his current home, but the kid wanted to make the mortgage payments himself. Even in Boise, though, crocheting hats and scarves doesn't pay all the bills, so with basic plumbing knowledge on his résumé and a lifetime of turning wrenches on cars with his father, Johnson took a job with a local plumbing company. He logs 20 hours a week at DeBest Plumbing during football season, cutting pipes and digging trenches between morning classes and afternoon practice. With no time to take the courses required of an apprentice, Johnson will stay an apprentice's helper for now.
In any case, don't expect him to make this job his career. "I'm studying for a degree in entrepreneurial management," Johnson says.
You think?
His teammates still don't see how all of Johnson's interconnected pursuits relate to football. In fact, it wasn't until Johnson realized how much the game was like his other interests that his exploits began to get noticed. Playing behind a line that lost two projected starters to injury, Johnson has come to understand the beauty of being patient, letting things fall into place, waiting for those holes to open and only then going through.
"At first, he just wanted to hit the hole and hit it hard," Dailey says. "Now he just has to see the way he wants it to go. And that's all him. He makes a couple of guys miss every time."
Johnson's running has brought renown to an aspect of Boise State football that was mothballed years ago. Under former coach Dan Hawkins and his predecessor, Dirk Koetter, the Broncos established themselves as a pass-first, ask-about-the-run-later team. Behind quarterbacks Ryan Dinwiddie and Jared Zabransky, they reeled off four straight bowl appearances before Hawkins left for Colorado this past off-season.
Despite being Hawkins' offensive coordinator for five seasons and still having Zabransky behind center, Petersen changed playbooks when he became head man. He has so definitively reestablished the run that he sometimes thinks the team is now in danger of becoming lopsided on that end. "When you can run the ball, it's an easy game," Petersen says. "We've gone a little bit extreme with it this season because we can."
Last year, Johnson ground out 663 yards as a member of a four-man tailback committee, as Boise State fell from a BCS-courting 11—1 to a glad-to-behere, 9—4 MPC Computers Bowl team. After his team got outmuscled by Boston College 27-21 in that game, Petersen knew he had to tweak the system. And Johnson seemed the right back to do it with.
Two scores and 89 yards in a season-opening 45-0 rout of 1-AA Sacramento State was a respectable warm-up, but Johnson's performance the following week against Oregon State affirmed what Petersen had begun to suspect: His reconstituted offensive line was coming together ahead of schedule, and Johnson was right in step.
"My dad always told me to respect linemen," says Johnson, whose father, Sterling, played up front for Cal State Northridge. "Those guys suffer so much and work so hard. We rush for yards. I don't rush for anything."
Sounds hokey, yet Johnson is a true believer. Written on his helmet visor are the numbers of the offensive linemen, Pete Cavender and Ryan Keating, who are out for the year. "He is a little different, but I love the guy," says junior lineman Jeff Cavender, Pete's twin. "He's the most sincere person I've ever met. As an offensive line, we're having a pretty good year, but you look at the film, and a lot of those runs have been IJ, and IJ alone. Lots of times when we didn't give him much, he still made something happen."
Same story, different team. The phone didn't ring during or after Johnson's junior season at Damien High, when he was first-team all-league and named to the Los Angeles Times' all-area team. Johnson figured he wasn't good enough. Not until coach Mark Pasquarella left, after the season, did school officials find a box of unopened recruiting letters in the coach's office with Johnson's name on them. (Johnson says the coach didn't like him, but Pasquarella says he recalls Johnson fondly and denies holding back correspondence.) Johnson and his mother spent the summer and much of the fall trying to catch up, but it was too late: Most of the Pac-10 schools already had zeroed in on their scholarship candidates. "You're one of four," Johnson kept hearing. "You need to wait."
In stepped then-BSU assistant Robert Prince, who had seen Johnson almost accidentally when he
was watching tape of a defender he was recruiting. Johnson and his mom made a visit to the campus in Idaho, where, he says, "being from California, you have this question: How are they going to react to black people? We absolutely didn't know. We had a huge misconception about it."
Johnson felt welcome immediately, both as a black man in Idaho and as a running back at a passing school. He committed even without knowing if the offense would change. Of course, Boise State didn't yet know enough about Johnson.
What Petersen loves about his star is the way he sees the game unfold. It is, Johnson says, "like a chess match out there. I don't see violence; I see moves. If I move here, then he's going to move
So much of his life is out of his hands. He met his girlfriend, Christine, almost by accident, during the team's trip to Hawaii last year. "I talked to her all night while I was out with my teammates, got on the plane the next day, and she was sitting three rows in front of me. It turned out she was the cheerleading captain."
And he doesn't fret over BSU's outsider status with the BCS, which comes close but never quite close enough to deeming the Broncos worthy.Most of the time, I'm thinking three moves ahead, which sometimes catches up to me. But I think I know where my line is going to go."
Johnson makes it a habit not to worry much and to roll with whatever comes his way. When he found himself dozing off during repetitive summer meetings, he turned to bananas as a way of creating energy. The genial taunts that accompanied one particular multiple-banana afternoon didn't dissuade him from continuing to do what worked. As Boise's win total mounted this season, Petersen sat on the team, trying to keep them focused on the next Saturday and not on a hypothetical discussion about a system they could not control. With Johnson, at least, he needn't have worried. Despite a swirl of noise about the Heisman, the NFL and the BCS, Johnson stands firm.
"If you're thinking about all that, you can overlook so many things about the game," he says. "I enjoy what I do. If I complicate it, who knows if I'll still enjoy it?"
One thing he is always up on is the numbers. He knows his yardage total at any given point in a game because a math mind can't help but track that sort of thing. And math is not unlike music, which has a little in common with football, which is not altogether different from plumbing, which requires careful hands and an attentive mind, which brings us back to youknow-what.
"In high school," says Dailey, "I wouldn't say I ever thought, Yeah, I'm gonna play for a great team and a running back who crochets."
Ian Johnson watches a play unfurl like the most intricate scarf or some elaborate equation of so many uniform numbers, waiting, waiting for the hole to open along the line. He can see the result developing. It is worth the price of patience. "I'm not saying I know what's going to happen," Johnson says, "but I have an idea. That allows me to trust, calms me down, and that's how I perform best."
Nothing remotely knit-witted about it.