Roger Johnson died last week in Phoenix. He was 79. His obituary said, simply "rising from humble beginnings … he was ever stoic and a man of few words."
What it didn't say was that Roger Johnson might have been the greatest athlete in UA history.
Across a 32-day period in the winter of 1950-51, Johnson led the Arizona basketball team to victories over defending NCAA champion City College of New York, No.2 Long Island and No. 19 West Virginia.
It was at the time, and for many years thereafter, stretching into the 1980s, the most notable collection of victories, any sport, in UA history. It was almost inconceivable for a dusty little school from the Border Conference to beat even one of those teams.
The papers sometimes referred to Johnson by a single name - "Rajah" - and treated him with the reverence given a man who long-jumped 23 feet (in his baseball uniform) and became the only two-sport All-American in school history.
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When I asked Johnson about those games a few years ago he was silent for an awkward period and then changed the subject.
"The day I got home from that trip, from playing CCNY in Madison Square Garden, I received a notice from the draft board telling me to report for a physical," he said. "I loved sports, but I knew from that moment I had no future playing ball."
And so he never did. He became an Air Force pilot, sacrificing opportunities to play for the Boston Red Sox and for the NBA's old Milwaukee Hawks.
By 1968, Roger Johnson was bombing North Vietnam. When he returned to Tucson that year, he revealed that he had flown 121 missions and sometimes had difficulty believing he had not been killed.
"I was lucky; I never got hit. There were many times I could hear the shells whizzing past the canopy," he told the Star. "But I've got a lot of friends in the Hanoi Hilton (prison camp). I hope this will lead to their release and end the fighting."
In 1978, Johnson retired as a colonel from the Air Force. He then worked in the private sector, first in Tucson and for the last 30 years in Phoenix. He was one of 11 original inductees into the UA Sports Hall of Fame and, if you choose, you could make a case that the 6-foot-3-inch athlete from Tucson High School, Class of 1948, was the most accomplished Tucson athlete of the 20th century.
In 1947, Johnson, an outfielder, and pitchers Brad Tolson and Jim Starkey of Tucson High were chosen to the Arizona Republic's All-State baseball team. They would later play on UA teams that went a combined 56-10.
"Roger was our 'Splendid Splinter,'" said Starkey, who is retired from private business and living in Tucson. "If he had been able to concentrate on baseball, there's no telling how far he could've gone."
Johnson was a second-team baseball All-American in 1951 and a third-team choice in 1952. But it was his selection to the Helms Foundation All-American basketball third team in 1951 that raised eyebrows.
Nobody from this part of the country, a small-college, had ever drawn that type of national basketball acclaim.
"In baseball, Roger could cover the outfield like nobody else," said Tolson, retired in Tucson after a career in the irrigation industry. "In basketball, he could take off at the foul line and get all the way to the basket. You couldn't dunk then, but, oh my, he could do things the other guys couldn't dream of."
In 1948, Johnson was the MVP of Arizona high school basketball, leading the Tucson Badgers to a 28-0 season and the state championship.
Johnson's name has long been conspicuous by its absence from the Ring of Honor in the McKale Center rafters. The first man so honored is Bob Elliott, who played from 1974 to 1978. It's as if Fred Enke's epic teams of the late '40s and early '50s didn't exist.
"Because Roger played 60 years ago, the memories have faded," said retired Marana postmaster Bob Honea, the team's leading scorer in 1951. "But I'd put his name up against any of those fellows."
Johnson doesn't technically qualify for the Ring of Honor, which does not allow for sentiment or for a loophole entry. To join those such as Damon Stoudamire and Mike Bibby in the rafters, one must have been the league's player (or freshman) of the year, a 10-year NBA veteran, an Olympian, or a career leader in three statistical categories for at least five years.
Unfortunately, the Border Conference didn't select players of the year 60 years ago, and Johnson wasn't a prolific scorer (career average: 10.5) in the days that Arizona didn't average 70 points a game for the first time until 1956.
Athletically, he will be remembered by his induction into the inaugural class of the UA Sports Hall of Fame, which is a unique distinction for Wildcat legends.
"He was one of the nicest people I ever met, a guy who treated people well," Starkey remembers. "I think Roger, he would be as proud of that as any of his awards in sports."
Contact Greg Hansen at 573-4362 or ghansen@azstarnet.com
