Dublin, Ohio football mom Debbie Johnson is between big thresholds at
this moment. Her oldest son Jay became a starting defensive end with the
Oakland Raiders last fall and D.J.’s middle boy, Joshua, is getting set to
head off to Kansas University, where he’s earned a full scholarship to play linebacker next fall.

Even at this relative ebb, Johnson — or Mama D.J. as multitudes of Ohio
State players, coaches and fans call the 50-year old retired professor —
stays busy. Team Mom to one of America’s most high profile football
programs, she’s fully knowledgeable that full-contact parenting is a
year-round job.

“We had “30,000 out for a spring practice the other night. A Monday night
practice,” D.J. told me during a telephone interview that ended at 8 p.m.
Pacific Standard Time. “There is no downtime.”

If you’re a parent up there in those stands, either at the Dublin high
school
stadium or up in those pricier seats in Columbus and Oakland, it can be
an emotional jungle out there in the stands. You befriend parents whose
kids your own son is competing against. Which means you have friends
who might benefit from your boy getting hurt. Or vice versa. It’s crazy
up there. But Deb’s whole trip is to make the parents’ ride a bit less
zany.

Back in 2003 Jay was a freshman climbing the depth-chart depths. With no
previous experience in the vagaries of big-time college football. She felt
lost, in terms of camaraderie and just the general stream of fame and
physical risk that is the firmament of the game. Frankly, she’s begun to
feel at sea a season earlier, when recruiting letters began flooding the
Dublin mailbox. But between supporting her Jay’s efforts to make headway
on the ball field and keep a balance in the classroom, she noticed a lot of
players and parents shared issues. That first season, a half-dozen or so
parents joined up for a group that Johnson admits that had nebulous
intentions to support at first.

Then college football parenting’s challenges revealed themselves to her.

“Through
the process of building a parent organization, I would hear the
stories,” she said. Deb Johnson could no glimpse sick athletes. She
gained a vantage point where she could see the stranded teen jock with
no dough when most people couldn’t look past the autographs and newspaper coverage. Johnson, mother of an all-star hot-shot recruit bore witness to the players who fell through the cracks.

“I’d hate to be a parent of a walk-on player," she says. "I hate to use the word,
but they’re disenfranchised.”


It wasn’t just the kids who paid their own way who suffered.

Mama DJ reminds me that boys don’t talk a lot. “Men are not sharers,” she
says. “Out of the 105, maybe 20 call their parents all the time.” There
are 105 young men on an OSU football team. Deb Johnson says that the
parent organization she started in 2003 is a largely self-sustaining conduit which now consists of 90 families.

The
year before Mama D.J. and her boy started at OSU, freshman sensation
Maurice Clarett led the Buckeyes to a national championship, it’s first
in more than two decades. Clarett got manhandled in the media, made his
own problems with academia and then tried his hand at joining the NFL
early by taking the league to
court in an unprecedented legal case. After that great first year, it was all downhill.

I
tell Deb Johnson, who has taught in Ohio State’s African-American
studies department and served in the Peace Corps after college, that I
the Clarett saga soured me on OSU football and that I don't root for
the team like I used to. If this offends arguably the Buckeyes' biggest
fan, she sure doesn't say. In fact, D.J. expresses mad empathy for my
position.

“He was a very talented young man. He was such a bigger than life player,
but
he was a kid always looking out for attention,” Johnson says. She
remembers that the running back’s mother was involved in Clarett’s
football life, but that his father had checked out fully when the boy
was younger. “I remember him telling me that football was his way of
working through that frustration.”

Clarett's Fiesta Bowl
performance is the last football game he played. Now 24, Clarett is
locked up in a Toledo correctional facility where he closing in on the
minimum of three-and-a-half years he must serve on a 2006  weapons
conviction.

Boys don’t talk. They sometimes act only on gut instinct, like a running back hitting a whole.

“He
was borrowing against his future that didn’t happen," Johnson
continued. "No matter how big a player you were at Ohio State, you weren’t gonna take on the National Football League
and win. That’s a business. I thought it was a sad thing. “I just felt
like everyone wanted something from Maurice, rather than providing a
foundation.”

Perhaps
only Michael Vick could have used a team mom more. It seems the growth
of Mama DJ’s program is in part the result of the shortcomings she saw
in the Clarett experience. At least, parents saw how badly things could
go. And they let their families lean on her, along with her husband

“It’s like I told [Coach Jim] Tressell, they could call me and I'd take the burden
off of him.”


In a short time Johnson has seen a lot. She has looked deep into game-day
faces, as the first woman ever to give an Ohio State Buckeye chapel
speech. She’s seen that player who’s had to cope with cancer.

They
love football in Ohio, and Debbie Johnson seems to love the game as
much as any Buckeye. Regardless, whether she's handing out hugs to the
freshman third-string long-snapper
or prepping of Jay's younger brother Josh for dorm life in Lawrence,
Kansas, it feels like she's been drafted into a shadow game of her own.

“As a parent you are surrendering your child to the sport,” she says. “As a parent   you have to roll with the punches."

Donnell Alexander is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Sports & Fitness. He posts Mondays and Thursdays.