The Game of Life

There is nothing romantic about a gym. Oh, maybe the nineteen state-championship banners hanging over Wyandotte High School's court -- in honor of the third-winningest program in the country -- are sexy to basketball purists. Proud alums say: If you don't have game, you won't play here.

Teenage girls don't care about banners. Most of the girls who showed up at the gym in the late '90s were there to watch Nate Johnson. Eighteen years old. Smooth in his baggy, white shorts. They couldn't catch him.

"I didn't really date a lot of girls," Johnson says. "I just hung out with a lot of girls."

Keasha Cannon didn't go to Wyandotte, didn't feel like putting in nearly as much effort or wearing half as much lip gloss to catch a guy's attention. She just played ball. She sat cool in the stands one day when Wyandotte played Washington, her high school. Johnson looked up. She smiled.

Basketballs flew, shots clanged, the girl got into his head. Johnson stopped shooting and tapped his buddy Victor Williams on the shoulder.

"Watch this," Johnson told Williams. "She's going to be my sweetheart before it's all said and done."

By the time it was all said and done, though, Johnson and Cannon had traveled far beyond a high school gym in Wyandotte County.

By early indications, Nate Johnson should've been a gymnast. At eight, he'd do cartwheels and fly around the YMCA on Eighth Street and Armstrong while his stepdad, Darryl Johnson, coached hoops.

Later, though, he'd go home and find anything round, nail it to the house and practice dunking. Bicycle rims, plastic Nerf hoops, trash cans -- Johnson didn't care. He'd spin, like they did on TV, and slam-dunk just like Mike. By the time he was in sixth grade, 6-foot-5-inch men were asking him to play pickup ball. You want Nate? He's way too little, his stepdad would tell them.

"I didn't even know he could play as well as he did," Darryl Johnson says now. But Nate would tell everybody that someday, they'd see him in the NBA.

He would stay outside long after dark, tossing his hopes into the sky.

Though Johnson's biological father lived just blocks away, near Wyandotte High School, he was out of the picture by the time his son was born, Mary Johnson, his mother, says. Nate invited his dad to basketball games, but the old man never showed up.

Nate Johnson grew up near 17th Street and Minnesota Avenue, a place where small businesses went to die. Police cars crawled at a watchful pace past boarded-up houses and apartment buildings with ripped-out doors and giant chunks of roof lying on stairwells. There was a thrift store on every block. Bars lined half the windows.

"We both grew up in a neighborhood where a lot of people didn't have the same aspirations and goals for life as we had," Williams says. "Guys around us always had the best clothes, the best cars. We didn't have any of that, because we weren't selling drugs. We were probably two of the few guys who really wanted to get out of the inner city, to make a means for ourselves. We wanted to play basketball."

Johnson and Williams hung out at the JFK Rec Center on Tenth Street, talking about girls and jump shots. Johnson was the shooting guard, the guy with the smooth touch. Williams was the point guard, the one who dished his buddy the ball. Friends say Johnson and Williams were like Starsky and Hutch. They did everything together. They pledged to earn another banner for Wyandotte's gym.

But by the time they reached high school, Johnson's life had started to get complicated. He had a quick temper. He questioned authority. His life away from the court was about drinking and smoking pot.

Johnson was never a bad kid, his coaches would say. He just hung around the wrong people. A car horn would honk, and he'd fly out the door to meet his friends. There wasn't a lot his mother or stepfather could do to stop him. "We're not like the Huxtables or any TV families," Darryl Johnson tells the Pitch. "We're real."

Trouble found Johnson when he tried to pawn stolen stereo equipment and got caught his junior year. His court case dangled for almost a year, and eventually Johnson was charged as an accessory to burglary. He felt guilty when his mom had to sell her jewelry to pay for the lawyer.

At the same time, though, there was this girl he'd just met. She had shown up one day at the JFK Rec Center. Thought she could hang with the guys. The boys never really talked to Keasha Cannon, other than maybe the occasional blurts of "Foul!" or "Traveling!" But Johnson wanted to be the one who guarded her.

One day after a pickup game, Cannon tracked down a friend who went to Wyandotte High School. Could she get Johnson's phone number?

So when Wyandotte played Washington, Cannon was in the stands, catching Johnson's eye during warmups. Johnson heard she had his number but didn't think she'd call. And when the phone rang after the game that night, he went from cocky to wobbly. "Sparks just flew," Johnson recalls.