For starters, he was the middle son in a six pack of kids in a not-so-well-off family with the second most common surname in America. And, he was the shy, awkward, bookish one built like a Gumby, which doesn't help when you have this amazing older brother who's so outgoing and athletically perfect in every way that if being cool were a sport, he would have lettered in that, too.
But things started turning around for Johnson by the time he was 13. His path took an unexpected detour one Saturday morning when he got dragged along on one of his mom's dreaded grocery shopping marathons. Sitting dejected on a pile of dog food sacks as she went through the check-out line with two bulging carts in the days before barcodes and scanners, a small sign tacked to the store bulletin board caught his eye.
Hand-drawn on a 3-by-5 index card was his future: two swords, tip to tip, the word "Fencing," a date, a time and a place. Johnson looked right, then left, then snatched it off the board and stuffed it into his pocket.
In the years since, fencing has elevated him from klutz to world-class athlete. It's given him his highest highs and lowest lows, at times simultaneously. He twice made the U.S. Olympic fencing team. He twice didn't get to go for reasons beyond his control. Then, after giving it his all, he gave it up. Three years later, he gave up giving up fencing. He just couldn't let it go, and he's been fencing ever since.
Now 60 and devoted to teaching others, Johnson is head coach at the Fencing Center of Alaska, the school he and his fencing wife, Jacquie, founded in 2003. After teaching through the Boys and Girls Club, the center got a home of its own a year ago last spring in the former Alaska Dance Theatre building on Gambell between Fireweed and Northern Lights.
What Jacquie calls his obsession, he calls his mission -- passing along to the kids, teens and adults he teaches not only the physical and mental disciplines of the sport, but a whole new way of speaking.
"It's what we call conversation of the steel."
EN GARDE
There's a good reason fencing gets described as a chess match at 100 miles per hour. What happens, happens so fast the untrained eye has a hard time keeping up. It helps, Johnson says, to think of it as impressionist painting.
"When you look at an impressionist painting up close, it's just a lot of colors and blotches," he says. "But when you step back and look at it from a distance, it takes form and shape. And that's what you have to do with fencing. You need someone to teach you how to look at it and how to watch it, and all of the sudden it comes into focus."
But intricacies of the art form are not what first drew him to the sport. It was the clanging of swords. As a boy growing up in Fremont, Calif., he'd read Sabatini, Dumas, the legends of Roland and Siegfried, and all those sword-fighting classics. He'd made a foil out of his dad's old fishing rods. He'd swung wooden swords around in his backyard with his little brother.
Swords were cool.
Although fascinated with fencing, he started with no athletic ability whatsoever, he insists. He was gangly and uncoordinated and well on his way to the 6-foot-5 frame he operates in today. His nickname was Zipper; he wasn't too fond of it.
So the day his life intercepted that index card is carved into his memory as a turning point in his life. It announced fencing classes being held Wednesday nights at a school in the foothills above Fremont.
When that night rolled around, he finished his supper, and told his parents he was off for a bike ride. He hopped aboard the Schwinn he used for his paper route and pedaled across town, then started the long, steep climb up to the school. It took the better part of an hour to get there, and when he did, he parked his bike and sat on a bench where he could see the class in progress through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the school's multipurpose room.
He was way too shy to go in.
Two hours later class was over. The kids left, the instructor shut off the lights, and was headed to his car when he noticed Johnson sitting there in the dark.
"He stopped and he looked at me, and he said, 'You've been out here all night long. Are you waiting for someone?'
" 'No,' I said. 'I just came to watch.' "
"Watch?"
The guy's name was Hank Ruelas. He was a high school teacher who'd fenced in college. He gave Johnson a ride home that night, and arranged to pick him up the following week for fencing class. And the week after that, and the week after that. He even ended up buying him some of his gear.
If this high school teacher hadn't taken an interest in him, fencing never would have happened for Johnson. With six kids, his family didn't have money for such things. And his dad, whose attention he wanted most, thought fencing was kind of weird.
MENTOR TO MASTER
Now 76, Ruelas remembers those days as clearly as Johnson does, only he saw in that 13-year-old kid what Johnson couldn't see in himself -- a lot of potential, with his height and being a lefty offering great advantage.
"Right off the bat, I could see it," he said from Hayward, Calif..
Eventually, Ruelas started taking him to different fencing clubs in San Francisco, where certified fencing master Dr. William O'Brien at the Letterman Fencers Club became his next teacher and mentor.
Fencing has since taken Johnson all over the world. Among other highlights, he represented the United States in the World University Games in 1973. And in 1976, he became a member of the U.S. Olympic fencing team.
Now comes his first of several tales of woe.
In a training match with John Moreau, just before the final Olympic trials at Princeton University, Johnson's foot caught on a metal strip that had come loose from the floor. He sustained a compression fracture and massive tissue damage to his dominant foot.
"What's the use of you going to the trials," his coach asked.
"I'm going," Johnson said.
"So I got on the plane, went to Princeton, and in my hotel room the night before I cut off the cast and taped my ankle -- heavily taped it. All I had to do was clear the first round, and I would make the Olympic team. In those days, I was an attacking fencer, very aggressive. And I couldn't put any weight on that foot at all."
Not only did he clear the first round, he cleared the second, and more than made the team fencing on a bum foot. And that was doing nothing but defense.
But the reality was, the Montreal Olympics were three weeks away, and there was no way he was going to be 100 percent by then. The team doctor wouldn't sign off on him. So he got pulled and replaced with an alternate.
Johnson spent the next four years training even harder for his next shot at the Olympics, and easily made the team. That was 1980, the year President Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
That's why he keeps the photo of himself with Jimmy Carter hanging in his office at the fencing center.
"I keep it there to remind me that when much is at stake, there are always things outside your control. It's something you have to plan and prepare yourself for. And I hadn't."
Soon after, Johnson gave it up, threw his fencing gear in a closet and shut the door. But three years later, his old mentor, Dr. O'Brien, talked him into dusting it off and coming back.
EXERCISE OF THE MIND
More woe brought him to Alaska. A divorce. His former wife was from here, and when she moved back up, he followed to be closer to their son.
After working a while in Valdez, he moved to Anchorage in 1991 and got involved with the Anchorage Fencing Club while working in the cabinet trade. That's how he met Jacquie, who fenced with the Eagle River Fencing Club. They met at a competition, swords drawn.
He beat her 5 to 1 that day, and she wasn't happy about it. But she knew nothing of his background. When her coach filled her in, she felt quite a bit better having at least scored a hit.
Through the years, Johnson has seen interest in fencing grow in Alaska. Enough so that, as a guy who likes running his own ship, he was able to open his own center and teach full time, along with two other part-time coaches. He currently has about 65 students of his own, not counting the classes he'll be teaching for the University of Alaska Anchorage next semester.
"There are very few sports that require the kind of range of motion, strength and flexibility that fencing does," he says.
It's an exercise of the mind, as well.
"The way I describe it to my (students), it's like you have to put your conscious self out and above watching, almost out of body. You have to be reacting in an almost detached way because emotion, that's your enemy. And your hand is your voice; that's the thing that expresses your thoughts."
To this day Johnson gets goose bumps thinking about the passing of tradition, how he learned from his mentors, who learned from their mentors, who learned from theirs.
"It's an unbroken chain that goes back as long as fencing has been around. To me that's a powerful draw.
"I've been blessed with people in my life who gave me tremendous time and effort to teach me. And that's one of the reasons I teach to this day. I feel like I have a tremendous debt to pay back."
Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney or call 257-4465.
Fencing lessons are available in Alaska through some high schools, the University of Alaska, and a variety of organizations, including:
• Anchorage Fencing Club, www.anchoragefencingclub.com
• Eagle River Fencing Club, http://eagleriverfencingclub.com
• Fairbanks Fencing Club, www.fencinginfairbanks.com
• Fencing Center of Alaska, www.fencingcenterof alaska.com
• Kenai Peninsula Fencing Club, Homer Community Schools, 235-6090
• Soldotna Fencing Club, KenaiFencingClub@aol.comFencing opportunities in Alaska
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