‘He’s a bad guy. And he’s a fraud.’
Flashback time. It was 2003, early in the season. I’m sitting in the front passenger seat of Keyshawn Johnson’s car, parked outside the Tampa Bay Buccaneers complex that players call “One Buc Place.”
We talked for roughly an hour after practice, in what was at the time, largely an off-the-record conversation. The star receiver on a team defending a Super Bowl championship, Johnson vented hard about his relationship with his coach, Jon Gruden, and told me that he had reached a point of no return.
He wanted out. Johnson had just put his house on the market, despite having several years remaining on the eight-year, $56 million extension that made him the NFL’s highest-paid receiver.
He summed up his beef with Gruden that day as follows: I want to strangle him.
This was a few years after the NBA suspended Warriors guard Latrell Sprewell for a year after attacking his coach, P.J. Carlesimo, during an altercation at practice.
“Yeah, I wanted to strangle that (expletive),” Johnson told USA TODAY Sports this week, reflecting in the aftermath of Gruden’s resignation from the Raiders. “That (expletive) tried to make people think I was a true problem, man. That (stuff) was crazy to me. It was like he went out of his way at times to make people have a certain narrative about who I was.
“It’s almost like he deliberately thought he was going to take the love of the game away from me … like that was his mission, to try to hurt me and ruin my career. That’s what it felt like he was really trying to do. That wasn’t going to happen. He (messed) with the wrong dude.”
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Johnson’s tenure with the Bucs ended when Gruden deactivated him (with pay) for the final seven games of the 2003 season and the new GM, Bruce Allen, who at the time succeeded Rich…
Source : yahoo
