Larry Johnson Exonerated; The Pro-L.J. A.A. Reaction

Throw your diamonds up (look, even Tom Cruise is doing it!) — whole Larry Johnson rap witch hunt is over, folks. And, yes, I’m going to brag and boast a little about calling this earlier today. Why? Because I’m one of a select few who always has L.J.’s back. Because I’m sick of all the L.J. bashing that goes on amongst a good percentage of Chiefs fans. And because I”m sick of the media’s portrayal of him. I’ll get to all of that in a second. First, here’s SBL‘s statement that exonerates L.J. and reveals the song as a fake, from the rap group’s MySpace page:

“The L.J. Track that has been posted and reported through the news radio and tv is in fact a fake. We used this to gain publicity for SBL & Basement Entertainment, and the CD to be put out in Dec. We want to apologize, first and foremost to L.J. & Joe Hall, but also to the Chiefs Football Team, for any problems or harm that may have been caused by our actions.”

Now that we know the song’s a fake, I want to move on to the media and some Chiefs fans. The media and quite a few Chiefs message board frequenters had already decided L.J. was guilty the second this thing started circulating. Shame on you. Jared Allen can drive around like a drunken Kurt Russell from Death Proof, and Priest Holmes can spread his seeds like he was Travis Henry hawked up on Viagra, and you don’t hear a peep from Chiefs fans. But when L.J. blows his nose wrong everybody jumps all over him. It’s getting old. This is not the way to treat a franchise player.

You know what, other than one domestic violence incident a long time ago, Larry has been pretty much a model citizen. Is his demeanor always Trent Greenesque. No, but he’s a smashmouth running back. Guys like Earl Campbell and Jim Brown carried themselves the same way. They wanted the ball on every play and they wanted to hurt people. He’s an intimidator, that’s part of his game. He has to play the part.

As far as the rap song, people need to smarten up. I could go and punch myself in throat 17 times and put out a fake DMX track admitting that he fought dogs with Michael Vick tomorrow if I wanted to. Hell, seeing what this did for SBL, it would help our traffic out. Anyway, the fact that L.J. has never rapped and is pretty much BFFs with the self-professed “greatest rapper alive” was a sure-fire sign that this was a phony. SBL knew about his relationship with Jay-Z, mocked L.J.’s voice and threw him on an old Jigga beat, and pretty much the whole world bit on it worse than our ’03 defense bit on those play-action Jake Plummer bootlegs. I’m not hating on SBL at all, especially since they apologized before there was any serious heat being applied to 2-7, but this was an obvious publicity stunt. Hey, we all gotta do what we gotta do to eat, right?

Here’s my challenge to Chiefs fans and the rest of the media: Give Larry Johnson both a break and a chance. To me, and I don’t know him (yet!), I think he’s a pretty cool cat in real life. I think he’s just misunderstood with a capital “M” (thanks, Dick Vermeil). If he keeps getting this treatment, then I won’t blame him if he eventually bounces to another city and another team. I can tell you this — L.T. and Shaun Alexander don’t get this kind of treatment in San Diego and Grunge City.