Member Spotlight on Ray Johnson
This is an exert from the Providence Journal, with permission from the writer, Bill Reynolds
He is a name from another time, but to see Ray Johnson work out in the South County YMCA most mornings you would think it’s back there in 1970 or so, back when Johnson was playing basketball for Providence College, one of the few local kids of his era to ever play for the Friars.
He is 6-foot-7, all muscle, in unbelievable shape for a man who just turned 60, someone who has worked out religiously virtually every day of his life since seventh grade.
Then again, Johnson always was a little different, the kid who literally grew up on Narragansett Beach where his father was the caretaker at the Dunes Club; a kid, who then went on to become the most dominant Rhode Island high school player in my lifetime, leading tiny South Kingstown to back-to-back state titles in the mid-60’s.
“I look good on the outside, but I’m falling apart on the inside,” he says with a rueful smile.
Ray Johnson needs a kidney.
“I’m already hooked up for dialysis,” he says, on this morning where we are sitting outside the South County “Y”.
He has something called polycystic kidneys, something he’s been treated for since he discovered a rash on his back while on vacation in April.
“My father had them,” he says, “but we never knew he did until he died about 20 years ago. He was one of those guys who never went to a doctor. He was old school. He lived with the pain.”
He says that polycystic kidneys are hereditary, but it’s something he never really thought about until last April, because “I never had any problem with it,” outside of taking blood pressure medication.
Instead, he lived his life.
He has worked as a teacher and a counselor, and for the last 18 years he’s worked nights at the R.I.Training School. In the summers he also would work construction for a friend during the day, pouring cement, forever telling friends that if they really thought they were in shape they should try hanging with him for a couple of hours. He’s always worked hard, for he saw his father work two jobs. He’s always liked to do physical things, a lesson he learned in the seventh grade when he began lifting weights. No one lifted weights back there in the late ‘50’s. Ray Johnson did.
And he’s lifted them ever since.
“There are a lot of guys my age in better shape than me,” he says, before pausing a beat. “But I haven’t seen them.”
Then he laughs.
And he didn’t begin lifting weights as a kid to be a basketball player. Basketball players weren’t supposed to lift weights in those days. Nor did he ever think basketball was going to take him anywhere back there in high school. It was not an era where kids grew up with their heads full of NBA dreams. Basketball was just something he did in the winter.
He was big in his time, though, no question about it. He played two years of high school basketball, and never lost a game as South Kingstown became the first Class C team in the history of the Interscholastic League to win a state basketball title. South County was much more isolated then than it is now, and within that insular little world Johnson was content. Everyone knew him, blacks and whites got along in South Kingstown High School, and he lived in the gate house of the Dunes Club, virtually on Narragansett Beach, where his neighbor was Royal Little, the founder of Textron.
In fact, it was Little who arranged for him to go the prep school in Maine for his senior year of high school, a move that ultimately got him to PC, where he was a three-year starter in those years just before Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin Barnes got there. On the wall of his Narragansett condo there’s a photograph of him guarding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a game in Madison Square Garden in December, 1968.
When his PC career ended, Johnson walked away from the game.
“I didn’t ever love basketball,” he said a couple of years ago. “Not like the others did.”
But he always loved working out.
In fact, he used to lift weights during his time at PC, to the consternation of the coaching staff.
“Dave Gavitt used to say that it would hurt my shot,” he says.
He pauses a beat.
“He was right.”
So the basketball world went on without him, and Johnson went back to the gym.
He also became a road runner. The Blessing of the Fleet. The Block Island Road Race. He did them all, calling himself a “running nut” for about 15 years.
“I’ve always felt weird if I didn’t work out,” he says.
So imagine his reaction when one of his doctors told him that he might think about not lifting weights for a month.
“Sorry, Doc,” he said. “Three days.”
He expects to start dialysis within a couple of months. The plan is three days a week, four hours a day, while he waits for a new kidney. He says his kidneys now operate at about 30-percent efficiency, which makes him feel sluggish, not himself.
“So this has been a strange summer?” I ask.
“Not really,” Johnson says. ”I just keep working. I haven’t changed my routine.”
He’s come to accept that this is something he has little control over. It took him a couple of days to get over the shock of his situation, then came to the realization that it’s “out of my hands, and that’s OK.” He has seen friends die, has come to know that when you are 60 years old the rules change, that there are no guarantees about anything, not even for someone who still looks like he could go into a college basketball game and still hold his own, a man who, on the outside anyway, is in remarkable physical shape.
“You can’t worry about things you have no control over,” he says simply.
Most of all, he waits.
He gets up to go into the “Y”.
“You coming in?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” says Ray Johnson. “I’ll do a couple of extra pull-ups for you.”