his grandparents raised him down to earth. if y'all recall he had a economical car when the condoms was found and he had a primetime like prenup with the metal miner.
great story!
Chad Johnson's Comeback: A Year After His Career Imploded, Orcas and Instagram Fill the Void
By
Michael E. Miller Thursday, Aug 15 2013
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-0...loded-orcas-and-instagram-fill-the-void/full/
Three decades after he learned the game on the streets of Liberty City, football is still the only structure in Johnson's life. He wakes up every morning at 5 a.m. to lift weights in his million-dollar Davie mansion and then works out again just four hours later. From 2003 to 2009, this dedication helped make him the most explosive player in the NFL. He earned five
Pro Bowl selections and nearly $9 million a year.
It was Flowers who raised Johnson after everyone else abandoned him. His father was a drug dealer who was locked up shortly after Chad was born. His mother had her own demons, which drove her to disappear when he was 5 years old.
Flowers remembers coming home from her job as a Miami Beach elementary school teacher to discover that her daughter had left for Los Angeles. Paula Johnson had taken Chad's younger brother, Chauncy, and would have taken Chad too if James Flowers hadn't intervened. "My husband wasn't going to let him go," Bessie Mae says. "He felt she wasn't going to take care of him."
Instead, Chad grew up calling his grandparents mommy and daddy. To this day, he hardly speaks to his mother.
She is the reason a player with a party-boy reputation has never had an alcoholic drink in his life.
"The drugs, the cocaine, the heroin. She's a full-fledged Lindsay Lohan," he says of his mother. "That's why she wasn't able to raise me."