Inside story behind how Steve Johnson saved his career during the 2007 season
He looked destined to be one of the AFL’s great underachievers. However, something clicked in Steve Johnson during the 2007 season. And it all started with him secretly shaving one week off his suspension.
Geelong
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Steve Johnson had started chipping away weeks earlier. Every time he was in one of the coaches’ offices, he kept reminding them that he’d be ready to go in Round 6.
The past four months had been the toughest of his life but also the most rewarding.
He was a different person, a different athlete and a different footballer from the one who had been arrested for public drunkenness in his hometown of Wangaratta the previous Christmas Eve.
It had proven to be the final straw for the Cats who suspended him indefinitely and banished their problem child from training with the senior team.
They told him the ban wouldn’t be reviewed until Round 6. To Johnson, 23, that meant he would be returning to play in the AFL in Round 6.
“I was originally suspended for the first six games of 2007 and I was playing in the VFL,” Johnson recalled this week.
“I was playing in the VFL and I played through the midfield to get some extra fitness and I played at a pretty good level.
“Through that period I was hinting to the coaches, saying ‘Round 6, Round 6, Round 6’. I kept telling them that’s when I’m back even though I think originally it was meant to be a six-game suspension.”
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Fortunately for Johnson, things weren’t going according to plan without him. The Cats had started the year indifferently and slumped to 2-3 after losing to North Melbourne at Kardinia Park in Round 5.
The natives were restless as were the players and coaches with a crisis meeting called.
Over the summer Geelong CEO Brian Cook had conducted a major review of the club, coach Mark ‘Bomber’ Thompson had just survived while a new captain Tom Harley had been installed.
But the ordinary start to the season had everyone wondering if anything had changed.
“It got to Round 6, they’d just lost to North Melbourne and had a big meeting,” Johnson says. “I went into the Bomber’s office and said, ‘It’s now Round 6’. He didn’t need too much convincing.
“So I skimmed them a week because things were getting pretty desperate and my form had been good enough to get a call-back, to go straight back in.”
THE RETURN
IT was a simple philosophy but one which Johnson needed to hear.
“When I got back into the main training with the AFL squad I was basically given a clean slate,” he recalls.
“They said what’s happened in the past is history, we’re judging you from what you’re going to do from this point on which is exactly what I wanted.
“I wanted to lose the baggage and focus on what I was going to bring to the table going forward.”
The mercurial forward knew how he would win back the respect of his teammates and it was at the forefront of his mind when he ran out onto Telstra Dome for his return game against Richmond on Sunday May 6.
“I was just so keen to be the best team player I could be from that point on and I remember there were a couple of times in the Richmond game where I had an opportunity to shoot for goal which I probably would have taken in the past.
“But I decided to pull it back, square it up and put it to someone in a better spot. I remember my teammates getting around me and just gave me this huge buzz.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is what it’s all about’. That was a massive turnaround for me.”
Johnson kicked two goals from 21 touches in his comeback which quickly turned into something a lot bigger than the return of the Cats bad boy.
In one of the most stunning results of the modern era Geelong won by an extraordinary 157 points — 35.12.222 to 9.11.65.
Assistant coach Ken Hinkley knew he’d witnessed something special that afternoon but at the top of a long list of enjoyable moments for him was the sight of the No. 20 running around again.
“The one thing everyone knew about Stevie was that he was desperate to play footy,” Hinkley says. “He just had to find that point of real desperation as to what he wanted to do and what was important to him.
“If there was a thought that football was going to be taken away, Stevie would do whatever he needed to play football … he just had to realise the importance I think.
“He was incredibly confident about his football ability all the way through and that’s probably got in the way sometimes for him, his football confidence got mixed up with what he could do off the field.
“He was such a talented player on the field and he just needed to value being on the field more.”
THE BODY
IN Johnson’s chequered past one of his more famous indiscretions was breaking both of his ankles when he jumped off the roof of the Torquay pub in 2003.
The impact of the silly act continued for years with his training and playing hindered by ongoing ankle issues.
During his suspension, the penny dropped. He could no longer use the dodgy ankles as an excuse so he turned to boxing and cycling to overhaul his body.
“I was hell bent on getting the best out of myself, going from a player whose form was patchy and body was not holding up to the rigours of week in and week out football to being able to back it up,” Johnson said.
“It was then about turning my mindset around to being as professional as I could be and during that period where I was suspended, I trained my arse off.
“I had never really been able to do it because of the ankles and the knees. The more I trained with the boxing and the bike, I shed some weight and then my joints were able to absorb the load that was going through.
“So once I got back to playing I felt like a different person.
“I was doing everything I could to make sure my body was feeling its best, recovery-wise I obviously didn’t have a drink for the whole year.”
Johnson and Geelong then got on a roll that no-one would have predicted possible a couple of weeks earlier.
They didn’t lose another game until Round 21 when Port Adelaide’s Domenic Cassisi kicked the winning goal with three seconds remaining.
Johnson had flourished, kicking a goal in every game as he headed towards 40 plus for the season.
His brilliance and consistency made him a lock for the half-forward flank in the All-Australian team and he admitted to being surprisingly emotional when his name was read out.
“It was a massive buzz getting my first All-Australian,” he recalls. “We had a big table because there were 10 or 11 of us who had got nominated.
“It was just emotional because of just how far I’d come in that 12-month period. That was probably the point where I really knew the work had paid off.
“Obviously there was still bigger fish to fry but it was an emotional moment because as a player it’s something you do want to tick off, there’s no doubt about that.”
THE BIG TIME
VICE-CAPTAIN Cameron Ling had watched with pride how his teammate had responded to nearly having his career taken away.
“This might be with hindsight but you could have done that with a couple of other people and it might not have ended up as such a great story,” Ling said.
“He was a very mentally strong person Steve and really resilient, extremely competitive and had this steeliness of ‘I’m going to show that I can still be a great player’.
“The ego may have got clipped with what happened but he still never lost that inner belief.
“He never lost that deep down belief that when it came down to big games he was going to be there and he was going to be a big part of why the team was winning big games.
“Even through all of what went on, he always held that belief that in the big stuff he would be there.”
Geelong rolled through the opening week of the finals, tossing aside North Melbourne by 106 points with Johnson kicking one goal from 21 touches.
He then played a crucial role in the cutthroat preliminary final against Collingwood, kicking three goals in the Cats thrilling five-point victory.
“That was probably the best game I have ever been a part of aside from the grand final wins,” Johnson says. “The noise at the MCG that night was something I have never heard before.”
On the Monday night Geelong’s Jimmy Bartel won the Brownlow Medal but by grand final day he was sharing top billing for storyline of the week with the Steve Johnson resurrection.
CALL ME NORM
NOTHING Stevie J did ever surprised Ken Hinkley and he certainly wasn’t let down on the biggest day on the football calendar.
In the warm-up before the grand final against Port Adelaide he approached Johnson to check out how he was handling the occasion.
“This is why God put air in my lungs for days like these,” was Johnson’s reply.
There was a better line to come a couple of hours later.
Johnson recalls being relaxed in the build-up and remembering some advice he was given at the start of his career.
“I didn’t want to play the game in my own head, that was one bit of advice I got early in my career, ‘Don’t play the game in your head because it just never turns out that way’.”
The Cats were on from the start and Johnson was in the thick of it, kicking two goals in the first quarter.
“I remember coming off in that quarter and feeling like I had blood in my throat,” he says. “I could taste blood in my throat and it was because I had been running so hard. I’ve since read it’s a reaction runners have.
“My lungs had been pumping so hard because I’d just been running up and down the ground as I was just so excited about the grand final.”
At halftime he had three goals and the Cats lead had blown out to 52 points.
It was at 90 points when Johnson walked into the three-quarter time huddle where Hinkley was waiting for him.
“He said ‘Stevie come over here’. I pretended I didn’t hear him even though I was only about a metre-and-a-half from him. He came closer and I turned around and said: “Call me Norm”. He just smiled and shook his head.”
He had a few mates in contention for the Norm Smith Medal but another goal in the final quarter saw Johnson finish with 23 possessions and 4.2 goals in the 119-point victory.
It was the fairytale result to a fairytale premiership with Geelong breaking a 44-year drought by an AFL record winning margin.
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“It was the resurrection of a player and a club really,” Hinkley said.
Johnson was blown away by the honour and still is to this day.
When asked to rate that 2007 season, he says he played better in 2009 before getting injured midway through the season.
In 2013 he moved into the midfield and got within three votes of winning the Brownlow Medal despite missing six games but there’s no doubt 2007 is his favourite.
“It was a dream partly because of how we played as a team, how I went as an individual and probably just because of the turnaround, the transformation I was able to make as a player.
“From being just an average player to the player I wanted to be.”
Originally published as Inside story behind how Steve Johnson saved his career during the 2007 season