Calvin Johnson
I hope I can be as good of a father to my son as my dad was to me.Collection: Hope
I have always been like this. I take after my father. I'm just chill.
We all understand it's a privilege just to be playing in this league.
That's what everybody calls me, 'Cheat Code,' because they just throw the ball up to me.
Some days I wouldn't even go to class. I'd sit in the room and play video games with my friends and eat powdered mashed potatoes.
I'm just a worker.
I gotta go through, like, a little routine when I wake up in the morning to get everything functioning and ready to go. But, the only thing is everything just goes back to gridlock so fast once I sit down, 'cause you know you go to work again.
When you're in the game, you're still in the moment.
I know where my body's at, know how it feels, you know.
Be real with yourself in whatever area of your life and your game that you need improvement on. Once you figure that out, you just have to go out and work on it. For me, it's footwork. I constantly work on it, and it's a never-ending process.
For me, to just have my own shoe is unbelievable. As a kid, you see Jordans and wonder what that feels like to have your own shoe, and the fact that I have one is really surreal.
I'm a Southern guy, so Jeezy, T.I., and Outkast are always playing on my iPod.
I was a baseball guy. Mom wouldn't let me play football when I was little because she was scared I'd get hurt. So, I finally convinced her to let me play in 7th grade.
It wasn't really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don't know what happened; baseball just got boring to me, I guess.
I have my own people that make my clothes because it's hard for me to find stuff that fits.
I like to dress up every now and then.
I've been a Madden guy since I was little.
As NFL players, we have such a platform to spread the Word of God. And that is an area I don't mind speaking out on at all. As far as talking about my football skills, however, I will let my abilities and actions speak for themselves.
During the season, I dodge the media, kind of. It's not that I'm trying to avoid them, but I know if they get a hold of me, there's going to be, like, 10 people around me, and I'm going to have to answer question after question, where in that time, after practice, I need to be taking care of my body and recovering.
I don't feel like sitting around doing nothing would benefit me.
You know what's funny? There's times when you catch a ball and really didn't even see that ball. You're like, 'That couldn't have been all me.'
If I was to keep playing, I had to play in Detroit, and it just wasn't for me anymore.
Concussions happen. If not on every play, then they happen like every other, every third play, you know.
It's simple to get a concussion, you know. I don't know how many I've had over my career, you know, but I've definitely had my fair share.
The team doctor, the team trainers, they work for the team. And I love 'em, you know. They're some good people, you know. They want to see you do good. But at the same time, they work for the team, you know. They're trying to do whatever they can to get you back on the field and make your team look good.
I had fun while I did it, and I left it all out there on the field. I'm tapped out.
I'm not coming back to play.
I got stuff that's going to hurt for the rest of my life.
I got a finger that's literally bone-on-bone. This bad boy, it gets smaller. The more and more I do, it grinds bone-on-bone.
I got chronic stuff that everybody has when they're done playing football for any length of time. So the good thing is I'm able to walk. I feel good. I'm able to spend more time with the fam.
The thing I don't miss is waking up in the morning, hurting, the grind of the game.
I don't even like to talk Lions too much just because the way our relationship ended.
Guys get concussions, they don't tell the coaches. It happens.
The team needs me out there on the field. And sometimes you allow that to jeopardize yourself, but that's just the nature of the world.
I don't want to dog the NFL.
My biggest regret is that I wasn't able to help give our fans a championship.
I'm on 'Dancing with the Stars' because I want to prove my sister wrong. My sister literally told the world that I could not dance, so I have to redeem myself.
I've got a lot of miles on my legs.
I've got a lot of other things I want to do.
That's everybody's goal, when they come to the league, is to win a Super Bowl. That's the ultimate goal.
I'm an honest guy.
I've got nothing to be ashamed of.
I feel fine as long I'm not running around.
You love the game, but it's hard to do the things you do when you're feeling like you're a leg down all the time, literally. Or you're always beat up, even coming into the season. So it's just not as fun when you're down, and you got to work your way up. And you can't really get there because you're so beat up.
Retired life's good, man.
If you feel like you've got a concussion, if you don't know, if you take the test whatever, if you feel like you've got a concussion, the biggest thing is rest, man. Cause you usually compound your injury so much if you go back out there, and we all know that now.
Each year, you've got to talk about it more and more, you've got to have programs. You're doing these camps, you've got to talk about concussion awareness.
All of us growing up, if you're a professional player or a college player, you're molding your game after guys. You see guys, you see things guys do. Like Randy Moss, I'm a Randy Moss guy.
It's a part of football, you get concussed, you gotta keep on playing. You can't get afraid to go across the middle any more than you were at the beginning.
When I first came into the league, my first three, four years, I had a teammate from college win a Super Bowl.