Last Saturday, I got a text from friend and brother-in-broadcasting Andy Skelton.
He shared a picture of Eric Johnson wearing his Marshall High School letter jacket, plus a picture of Eric, himself, and others at a game together. He was hurting over Eric’s death, and needed to share.
Eric Johnson haunts us. He’s been gone for over three years now, when he died of double organ failure. Sometimes, the passage of time helps. Not this time. Not much.
Skelly - Andy lets me call him “Skelly” - and I discussed the loss and how much we’d seen him grow; Skelly coached Eric in high school football, while I “coached” him as a broadcaster. We discussed our regrets in our final encounters with him, and how hard it is to forgive ourselves for our perceived failures of Eric, even though we know we must.
We’re coping. Or trying to.
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In March of 2016, Liberty High School from Frisco, Texas, made it to the state tournament for the first time. The tournament would take place at the Alamodome in San Antonio that year, and Frisco is north of Dallas, toward the northern edge of the Metroplex. John Frow’s Millennium Sports held the broadcast rights for Frisco ISD, and wanted a crew local to San Antonio to broadcast the game for the Frisco market. Frow hired Eric Johnson, the morning show helicopter-riding traffic reporter for WOAI and a 10 year veteran at the Texas Sports Radio Network, to do play-by-play for their tournament games. I was hired to do color commentary for him, partly because I had experience working with him, partly because I had experience broadcasting the state basketball tournament and was familiar with the potential challenges of covering games in that atmosphere. The Frisco Liberty Redhawks defeated Cedar Park Vista Ridge 62-52 in the state semifinal on Thursday, March 3rd. The win allowed Eric and me to broadcast their state championship game on Saturday, March 5th, which they lost to girls basketball powerhouse Canyon 41-34.
The Redhawks were a very young team; there were only two seniors on their roster and they didn’t play very much. It’s easy for young teams to play these games and lack urgency because they believe they’ll only get better with age, so they’ll certainly be back many times. I made the point that this is a natural but dangerous mindset, that you never know what the future holds, you never know if you’ll be back, so it’s imperative that you play like this will be your only opportunity in the state tournament, even if you’re one of the seven freshmen on the team.
John complimented me for making that point.
As it turned out, Frisco Liberty didn’t return to the state tournament until 2019. None of the juniors or sophomores from the 2016 team returned to the state tournament, and only six of the seven freshmen on the 2016 team were still on the roster for the 2019 tournament.
Although I was correct about the Redhawks, I should have listened more closely to myself when it came to the man seated to my left for the broadcasts.
Because March 5th, 2016, was the last day I saw Eric Johnson alive.
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On Saturday, March 25, 2017, I was in Laredo. I was at Laredo Community College broadcasting a baseball double header against Blinn for the Houston chapter of TSRN. In Junior College ball, that usually means 16 innings of baseball, so it’s important to manage the 30 minute break between games with efficiency.
I had a routine down, where I would go off the air with the first game, run to concessions (at LCC it was a card table) for between-games food and drink, then hurry back to the press box to update stats for the second game while chowing down.
After the first game, I noticed more than the usual traffic on my phone, including several texts I didn’t have time to read. What drew my attention was a phone call from Kerry Barboza, long-time friend and sportswriter for the Boerne Star. I never mind hearing from Kerry, but I thought a phone call on a Saturday in March was unusual. I called him as I walked to the concession table without checking texts or the voicemail Kerry left me first. He told me he’d gotten a text that Eric had died, and he was asking if I knew how it had happened.
I hadn’t seen the texts, so my conversation with Kerry was the first I’d heard about it. “He DIED?” I shouted. When I worked with him at the state basketball tournament, I knew he’d gained weight, and I was concerned, but admittedly hadn’t given it much thought since. I wouldn’t have time right then either, because I had another game to broadcast.
I fought through, robotically following my routine. I have the scorecards, so I know how those games went, but I remember nothing about the games that day. I do remember sitting in the car after packing my broadcast gear, catching up on texts and seeing that Bobby Stautzenberger had forwarded a text from Eric’s WOAI colleague Mike Garafalo with the shocking news. I do remember going home from Laredo to San Antonio, spending the three hour drive on the phone with friends, sharing the news with a couple, updating others, trying to work out what happened, trying to make sense out of it.
As you can tell from my conversation with Skelly, we’re still trying. We’re not close yet.
Eric was 31.
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The pictures I have of myself with Eric are from a playoff game we covered between MacArthur and Austin High in November of 2006. (Attached photo by John Bode.)
Virgil Peterson worked the game with me, and Eric was our statistician. The game was in Buda at Bob Shelton Stadium.
Normally, Craig Estabrook was our statistician in 2006. I had to think about why Eric did our stats that night… then I remembered we used him because he was living in San Marcos, which is a very short drive to Buda.
Eric was living in San Marcos because in 2006, he was still a student at Texas State.
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The remainder will be a recreation of the eulogy I was ready to give at his memorial service on March 30, 2017.
First of all, I’d like to thank the Johnson Family for having this service. Not everyone does this anymore. Sometimes, you get word that someone’s passed away, and there’s no funeral or memorial, no gathering to share memories and tears with others in grief – none of that. And I don’t mean to judge anyone else on how they cope with a loss; grief is a very individual thing. It’s just that I’ve learned not to take a funeral for granted anymore, and I thank the Johnson family for sharing this difficult time with us, because we all need this today. We need each other as we cope with losing Eric.
Eric joined us as a Texas State student; he had aspirations for broadcasting even when he was a student at Marshall High School. Although he studied Communications at Texas State, when he sought an opening to broadcast sports, he chose TSRN over Texas State College Radio. He reached out to TSRN through his coach Andy Skelton, as well as Betty Stautzenberger, one of his teachers at Marshall and the mother of TSRN Executive Producer Bobby Stautzenberger.
Texas State radio, along with their own games, also covers San Marcos high school football. One night, Eric and I worked on a game between San Marcos and Steele at the old Lehnhoff Stadium press box, where both broadcast crews shared space, and each crew could overhear parts of the other’s broadcast. This offered Eric a terrific opportunity to compare where he could have been to where he was.
After the game, Eric told me how he had a choice between working at the campus radio station and working for TSRN. When he chose TSRN, he said his family wondered why he decided to work with a bunch of men in their 40s instead of his buddies in college. But after that game, Eric told me he was glad he chose TSRN.
Eric, we’re glad too.
We got to watch Eric as he went from crackerjack statistician, to switching back and forth from stats to color as needed, to becoming a terrific color analyst, to doing play-by-play on Boerne ISD football. For many of us who might have grown to see a broadcast as a chore, Eric offered invigorating enthusiasm from the start. Then he grew from a rookie who would do Whatever Was Asked into a man who could assert himself and say, “wait, guys, that’s not fair. I deserve this job.” (And when he said so, he was always right.)
Eric was always dependable. Beyond that, he was someone who could assess a challenging situation and find a way to contribute, setting up his co-workers for a situation even better than they could have expected.
In November 12, 2011, a Saturday in the football playoffs, I had a broadcast of East Central versus Stevens at Gustafson Stadium with Gabe Farias in the afternoon, then El Paso Cathedral vs Holy Cross at Harlandale Memorial Stadium that night. I had a quick turnaround between the games, so for the second game, I knew I needed someone who could improvise and manage a fire drill to get the second game on the air. I chose Eric. After the first game, I hurried to the Tejeda Sports Complex, where Harlandale Memorial Stadium resides. I scampered up the bleachers to the broadcast booth and while I was scrambling to assemble the gear, Eric came into the booth, with body language exuding confidence, and firmly placed his recorder on the counter, saying:
“Here are the coach’s interviews for the pregame show.”
I hadn’t asked him to do that; he didn’t need for me to. That was half an hour I no longer had to worry about, a trip up and down the bleachers I no longer had to worry about, and a concise assurance that this was so. Eric was a pro, through and through.
Another of our adventures was a game between Floresville and Brackenridge at the SAISD Sports Complex in 2013. Historically, when we’d broadcast there, we had to string a 150 foot cable from the press box of one of the baseball fields to the press box on the visiting side of the stadium, which was a lot of work and would have left us facing the sunset during the first quarter. Eric said, “why don’t we just check if there’s a live phone line on the home side?” I was skeptical, but Eric pushed for it. I finally caved… and it turned out they DID have a live phone line for us. Eric had saved us a lot of stringing, a lot of spooling, and a lot of squinting.
Me, I had to eat some crow, but crow goes great with ketchup.
Then we divvied up the pregame interviews, and I asked Eric which coach he’d like to talk with. He chose the Brackenridge coach, so I said, “Okay, then let me tell you about Willie Hall.…” The point being, Willie Hall is a nice guy and a fine coach, but when you record a conversation him before a game, he’s strictly name, rank, and serial number. Undeterred, Eric didn’t shrink from the challenge. One of Eric’s questions was “tell us about some of the players who’ve emerged as leaders on your team.” That seemed like a good way to draw fresh information and perspective out of a coach. Hall said, “well, we have players who we expected to be leaders on the team, and those players have stepped up.”
Eric was fishing for names, and Hall didn’t give any.
I’ll never forget Eric responding “o-KAAAAY”, and moving on the next subject.
Of course, Eric worked many games apart from me. (He even wrote journal entries about his broadcast of Central Catholic at the Harlingen Marine Military Academy, and I REALLY hope those survived, because that was a doozy of an adventure….) But the true breakthrough for Eric came on September 24th of 2015.
Eric and Kerry Barboza were broadcasting a football game with Boerne hosting Sonora. I was in a hotel room somewhere in South Texas, preparing for my own broadcast the next day, when I got a text from Bobby Stautzenberger. It said: “You ought to turn on the Boerne game; Eric’s doing a great job!”
So I checked it out… and Eric WAS great. He was enthusiastic. He was setting the scene. He was on top of the action. He had all the names of the players. He was bantering with Kerry. No allowances, no grading on a curve here, he was TERRIFIC! I was proud of him.
Thankfully, I told him so. Dear Lord, I’m thankful I told him so.
Of course, all our memories of Eric come with a sharp reminder that he passed away so young. We regret his lost years for his sake, but truly, much of mourning is our own loss.
I have these memories, and many more, to cherish. I wish I had more, but what I have is bountiful.
I was allowed to know Eric Johnson for 12 years. What an honor. What a blessing.
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