Fueled by doubt and hate, C.J. Gardner-Johnson ready to 'bring a championship to Detroit'

As free agency heated up this spring and his phone stayed quiet, C.J. Gardner-Johnson found himself in a dark place, wondering not if he was done with football but if football was done with him.

Gardner-Johnson tied for the NFL lead with six interceptions last season despite missing five games with a lacerated kidney. He returned to help the Philadelphia Eagles reach the Super Bowl, and it was during practice in the buildup to that game that Gardner-Johnson said someone in the Eagles front office — he declined to say who — told him they wouldn’t be bringing him back in 2023.

“(My) DB coach even know why I was pissed off that whole week,” Gardner-Johnson told the Free Press in the first of two sit-down interviews this summer. “I got the front office telling me they’re not going to pay me. And I’m not trying to think about money, I’m just trying to think about ball, but when you just throw a subliminal out of nowhere … ‘Play your hardest, we’re not going to pay you.’ … Well, all right, what does that come from?”

The Eagles lost to the Kansas City Chiefs, 38-35, in a championship game for the ages, and Gardner-Johnson spent most of the next month hunkered down in his Philadelphia-area home.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the Eagles made Gardner-Johnson a multi-year offer early in free agency that he turned down, but Gardner-Johnson insists he never got a real offer from the team.

As free agency opened with tepid interest from a handful of suitors — the Detroit Lions, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens, with whom former Eagles defensive backs coach Dennard Wilson had taken a job as an assistant — Gardner-Johnson went into seclusion.

He stayed inside. He stopped answering his mother’s phone calls. And when he did talk to his mom or his marketing manager, Clinton Reyes, the conversation ended in tears.

Discarded by his second NFL team in seven months despite being, by most accounts, one of the best young safeties in the league, Gardner-Johnson stewed in a mix of raw emotion.

Confusion. Anger. Betrayal. Abandonment. Distrust. Doubt. Uncertainty.

If no one wanted him after the best season of his career, maybe no one wanted him at all.

“How that picture’s black and white right now,” Gardner-Johnson said, pointing to an old photograph of Billy Sims hanging on a wall in the Lions’ Allen Park practice facility. “That’s how shit looked to me. That shit was no color to my life at that point. It was just, get to the highest point, get knocked down, and everybody said, you ain’t shit and you ain’t done nothing, your name ain’t gonna hold weight, you’re sorry, you troublemaker. Can’t put it together 'cause you can’t figure out where you went wrong. For real, I never went wrong, I just ain’t played the position long enough for them to respect me.”

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More than four days into free agency — an eternity for frontline players in the NFL — and nearly a week after the negotiating period began, Gardner-Johnson signed a one-year deal with the Lions worth up to $8 million.

It was hardly the windfall he hoped for, and exactly the kind of humbling some fans felt he deserved.

But for the baddest, brashest, most misunderstood player in the NFL, it was the tank of propane he needed to fuel the fire that has long coursed through his veins.

“What has Chauncey Gardner-Johnson done to affect front offices, affect fans besides play football?” Gardner-Johnson asked. “Like, I’m tired of the narrative that’s untrue. The reason I didn’t get paid in Nola was because I’m a passionate guy, I said that. The reason I didn’t get paid in Philly was because they wanted to see me play safety another year. That’s respectable, but it’s not respectable because, shit, it’s football, bro. I’m on some shit like, I’m just tired of trying to prove people wrong.”

Like mother, like son

Raised by a single mother the first five years of his life, Gardner-Johnson has inherited many of his mom’s personality traits.

Del Johnson played basketball and ran track growing up in Cocoa, Florida, where she won way more than she lost. She was tough and athletic, fiercely competitive and not shy about letting her opponents know how good she was.

“I’m small,” Johnson said. “I’m 5-4, 135 pounds soaking wet. I didn’t mind getting in your chest and saying how I felt, speaking my mind, because one of two things are going to happen. … You’re going to shut me up and beat me or I’m going to beat you and still talk crap.”

Johnson said she was raised by drug-addicted parents and was physically, sexually and mentally abused at an early age.

She grew up in child welfare, has gone on to become a successful businesswoman and published a book about her experiences. The trauma she endured as a child heightened her survival instincts and lowered her tolerance for strife.

She has not talked to her older sister, someone she revered growing up, since 2016 because of a family dispute, or her younger sister since 2012. She once went nearly two years without speaking to Gardner-Johnson, even blocking him on her phone because of an argument she said turned disrespectful.

“I don’t deal with a lot of people so if I let you in my space, you have earned that space,” she said. “But if you cross me, I will never talk to you again. And that’s (C.J.). So he is every bit of me.”

Gardner-Johnson was a star athlete as a youth, running track, playing AAU basketball and shining on the football field. He won 100- and 200-meter state championships in track as a senior at Cocoa High, after losing badly his junior year and sobbing all the way through the 2½-hour ride home. He promised his mom in the car that day, “I’m going back next year and I’m winning.”

Gardner-Johnson began playing football at 4 years old and quickly fell in love with the game. When his younger brother, Brandon, collapsed on the field and had to be taken to the hospital one day — Brandon was diagnosed with a rare condition called Chiari Malformation and has since undergone six brain surgeries — Gardner-Johnson, unfazed, stayed to play in his game.

“I don’t know if my brother was dead or alive, that’s how much I love football,” he said. “They left the little league field to take my little brother to go bring him back to life, damn near, and I stayed out there to play football and win the game. I scored seven touchdowns in little league that day. I remember that day. Tore their ass up.”

Primarily a quarterback and running back in little league, Gardner-Johnson moved to defense in middle school when he didn’t make his league’s weight limit to carry the ball. He ran stadium steps in his underwear and wrapped himself in a garbage bag to try and drop the few pounds he needed to play a skill position. When that didn’t work, his coach put a green stripe on his helmet and made him a defensive lineman.

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When players on another team taunted Gardner-Johnson, calling him, “Fat (expletive),” Gardner-Johnson took it out on them. He laid a player out with a hard tackle, then stood over the player talking trash.

“That’s when he realized he could hit people and talk crap and not get in trouble,” Johnson said. “He’s always been very super-competitive, so he would talk crap to you even when he was on a softball mound. He would talk crap to you when you were going across the monkey bars.”

Show some respect

One of the NFL’s premier trash-talkers, Gardner-Johnson got more than his gift of gab from his mom.

Johnson has worked with troubled youth most of her adult life and currently owns two group homes in central Florida, Del B Angels, that house six girls each, aged 12-17. Before getting into foster care, she provided respite care for at-risk youth, hosting kids at her house when they needed time away from their parents or guardians.

Gardner-Johnson bonded with many of the youth that made their way through his doors. Some of the kids came to his football games and track meets, and he begged his mother not to let them leave.

Their experiences and insecurities rubbed off on him and shaped the lens through which he views the world.

“My momma would go and help kids that’s not mentally there or attitude’s not there, and just it stuck with me,” Gardner-Johnson said. “I think that’s the problem. I adapted so many personalities from being (around) all those type of kids that people don’t understand.”

Seeing his mom’s outreach rubbed off on Gardner-Johnson in a positive way, too.

Though his charitable work has largely gone unnoticed in the NFL, he took foster kids on shopping sprees in New Orleans and footed the $40,000 bill to buy his old high school rings when it won a Florida state championship last year. In Detroit, he made two donations this spring to fund new football equipment at Detroit Cass Tech and Detroit King high schools and he’s been a regular in the office of Moe Pearson, the Lions' manager of player and alumni relations, begging for opportunities to work with local youth.

In the coming weeks, he plans to host a bike and bookbag giveaway for inner-city Detroit kids.

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Gardner-Johnson said his two biggest goals with the Lions were to be voted a team captain and win the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, the NFL’s tribute to community service.

Though he was not named a captain this week, both goals center around the one thing he has chased most of his life and is still in search of — respect.

“Don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m just a shit talker,’” Gardner-Johnson said. “Nah. At least promote something I’m doing good. Like I got so many articles out right now, I’m the oddball, I’m gonna get cut, or I’m gonna this. (Expletive) y’all. You feel me?”

Tragedy strikes

As a kid, Gardner-Johnson loved watching "SpongeBob SquarePants," devoured fruit snacks and sucked his thumb.

He still has an innocence to him in some ways, expressing disbelief at the business side of football, though he knows how cutthroat it can be.

But he lost his naivete years ago, along with his best friend in life.

On May 15, 2012, Tonya Thomas, a Florida mother, killed her four children, shooting them 18 times before turning the gun on herself. Gardner-Johnson and Thomas’ oldest son, Jaxs, one of the victims, started daycare together when they were 3. They ran track together and played on the same basketball and football teams, and Jaxs stayed at Gardner-Johnson’s house for days before the murders. Johnson still has a pair of Jaxs’ shoes and a baggie of his clothes from the days-long sleepover at her house in C.J.’s room.

Gardner-Johnson declined to talk about Jaxs’ death, but “he still struggles with that,” his mom said.

“Because the morning that Jaxs was killed, C.J. and I dropped him off the night before,” she said. “So he still holds onto, ‘Mom, what if he would have just stayed another night?’ ”

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Gardner-Johnson lost another friend to an accidental shooting growing up and this offseason one of his closest friends from the music industry was killed. Asked about that death this summer, Gardner-Johnson teared up, paused 10 seconds and wiped his eyes.

“That’s why I don’t think I’ll ever put (music) down, like I don’t put football down until they tell me to,” he said. “This is the truth, I won’t put music down until I make a million dollars in it. My brother was close, until he died. My brother was real close till he died.”

Gardner-Johnson, who raps under the name SOG Ceedy, has been involved with music almost as long as he has played football. He started singing in the youth choir at his church when he was 6, and his mother recalls teachers sending notes home complaining about Gardner-Johnson making beats at his desk with a pencil.

Like football, rap is an outlet, and a place to let his alter ego fly.

“I got like two different people living in me, football and life,” Gardner-Johnson said. “Life, I’m just chilling. Football, that’s a whole different person. People call me Ceedy on the football field, or Ducey. In life, they call me C.J. or Chauncey.”

‘I ain’t no (expletive) robot’

Alex Goins, who coached Gardner-Johnson for most of his youth football career and is now a city councilmember in Cocoa, compared Johnson and his alter egos to Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders’ and his on-field persona Primetime.

“I remember one interview he had where he said, ‘Do you want to talk to Deion or do you want to talk to Prime? The question you’re asking me, which one do you want, cause I got two different people,’ ” Goins said. “And that’s Chauncey. He’s able to be Chauncey, C.J., Duce. He’s able to be those people and depending on what you want, you got to be careful what you wish for.”

Gardner-Johnson finished high school with a 3.7 grade-point average and his pick of colleges. He went to Florida, played three seasons and declared early for the NFL draft a month before his 21st birthday.

He thought he’d be a first- or second-round pick after intercepting nine passes in 37 college games; instead, he didn’t come off the board until pick No. 105, in the fourth round.

Johnson considered that a sign from God. Maybe her son wasn’t mature enough to handle the fame and riches that came with being a first-round pick; the NFL, after all, was his first job. By dropping in the draft and going to New Orleans, he would be humbled and get to reunite with Drew Brees and Aaron Glenn, a quarterback and coach he first met on the seven-on-seven and recruiting circuits in high school.

Gardner-Johnson didn’t see it that way and seethed.

“That’s some bullshit,” he said this summer. “I got drafted fourth round cause my character. Never been on the ESPN ticker, never been in trouble, never had a DUI, never had a felony, never had no assault. Never no misconduct. Not even no team issues, I just get like this bad rap.”

What scouts missed, he said, is the same thing NFL teams have missed for years.

“They’re scared of guys who love football,” he said. “The league want people who robots. I ain’t no (expletive) robot. Like, I’m going to do this shit the professional way that I know how to get shit done and I’m going to respect people who do it and that’s why I never got in no trouble. And I’m not saying that’s cause I’m slick, no. I’m sneaky, nah. I walk the line how a professional football player’s supposed to walk the line. I don’t step out that line.”

Gardner-Johnson emerged as one of the best slot cornerbacks in the NFL in his three seasons in New Orleans, when he built a reputation for luring other players across that line. His infectious energy endeared him to Glenn, then the Saints secondary coach and now the Lions’ defensive coordinator, and his incessant needling of Tom Brady made him a favorite of Saints fans.

But last summer, Gardner-Johnson staged a hold-in — sitting out practices while spending training camp with the team — looking for a new contract. The Saints, unwilling to meet his contractual demands, traded him to the Eagles for multiple late-round draft picks.

Gardner-Johnson said one Saints coach — again, he declined to name the coach — told him he couldn’t cut it as a safety before the team sent him home from the building to work out a trade.

"New Orleans did me dirty," he said.

‘Keep it pushing’

As real as he is, Gardner-Johnson’s in-your-face style is off-putting to some. But Glenn, who once benched Gardner-Johnson for not running a coverage when he coached him at the Nike’s The Opening recruiting showcase, swears by the defensive back he helped lure to Detroit.

“I know what he brings to the table, I know where his heart’s at and I know how much he loves football and I know how much he loves winning, so those things stand out to me first and foremost,” Glenn said. “He really endears himself to his teammates, even though he can be a little challenging, and the reason why, because he challenges his teammates. Man, no one wants to win more than that guy, and I’ve been around a lot of them. But that one, no one wants to win more than him.”

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Lions linebacker Alex Anzalone, who played with Gardner-Johnson at Florida and in New Orleans, called Gardner-Johnson “my little bro,” describing him as “a good dude” who “means well” and is “just about ball.”

“I’ve seen fights, but I’m not going to (talk about that),” Anzalone said. “I think (Saints receiver) Mike Thomas got suspended for a game (for starting a fight with Gardner-Johnson in practice). He didn’t start it, he just finished it. … It’s a certain way of doing things. It’s not for everyone. It’s for him. It works.”

But playing with such passion — letting teams into his space, to use his mother’s terms — has amplified the hurt he feels when things have fallen apart.

Johnson said C.J. called her the day he was traded to Philadelphia “and just started crying.”

It didn’t take long for Gardner-Johnson to get over the trade and embrace his new city and new team. He dyed the tips of his dreadlocks Eagles green, moved to safety full-time and played well enough that he thought he’d get a long-term deal where he wanted to stay in Philadelphia.

When that didn’t happen, Gardner-Johnson phoned his mom again and said, “I’m done. … I failed.”

“(Expletive) Philly,” Gardner-Johnson said. “It ain’t (expletive) the fans, it ain’t (expletive) the players. I don’t give a shit about the front office, how they run that shit.”

Because of the way things ended with the Saints and Eagles, Gardner-Johnson has a complex view of his current situation and his future in Detroit.

He’s playing safety for the second straight season, back with a coordinator he trusts in Glenn and part of a secondary he said is better than the one he thrived in last season. The Lions are set up for a playoff run that he’ll surely be a big part of, but Gardner-Johnson is dubious that whatever he does will be enough to convince the Lions to sign him long-term.

“Man, truthfully to be honest with you, bro, and I don’t care if this go in the media or not, I feel like, truthfully I feel like they’re just using me for what they want me for,” he said. “I mean, regardless of playing and all this shit, I just feel like every team just want to use me for who I am, so I get under people’s skin and just let me go next year when they don’t make it. Like, that’s a scary feeling.”

Playing on a one-year deal, Gardner-Johnson said he is in “the same position I was in last year,” a mercenary subject to the whims of the team with no long-term security for him and his three kids, the most important people in his life.

He’s open to staying in Detroit if that’s how things work out, but cognizant of the fact “there’s a couple guys that need to get paid before me.” Jared Goff, Jonah Jackson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Penei Sewell and Jerry Jacobs are among the Lions starters in line for possible new contracts or extensions in the next 12 months.

“I’m gonna bring a championship to Detroit and I’m gonna get the (expletive) on,” he said. “That’s the only thing they want you for. So I’m going to do my job and bring me a championship. As long as I’m here, I’m going to try to bring one and I’m going to go.”

With 31 other NFL teams, there are plenty of places to go if need be, though after all he's been through and done, Gardner-Johnson's plans are bigger than that.

“Man, listen, my life, there’s a lot of shit that’s moving around in it, but my main focus is bringing a championship here and get the (expletive) on,” he said. “And get the (expletive) on don’t necessarily mean leave Detroit, just like, keep it pushing. There’s more out there.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions' C.J. Gardner-Johnson: Most misunderstood man in the NFL