Everyone remembers the Rocky film series with the title character portrayed by Sylvester Stallone. Heck new ones are still being made, so it shouldn’t be hard to forget, really. Here is a quick synopsis for those that haven’t seen the movies: Rocky Balboa is just a street boxer from Philadelphia. He rose from nothing and became (sorry, spoiler alert) the world heavyweight champion. That’s a really condensed way of glossing over both Rocky I and Rocky II, but hey we don’t have all day.
Rocky went from nothing to being the champion, and in the third installment of the film series, you know it. Rocky is rich and famous and may have lost his edge and before I go any further you might be wondering how this all ties to Pitt basketball.
“Sometimes when you have success, it can make you lose your edge or what you perceive as success,” Jeff Capel said as his team knocked off Monmouth 63-50 on Monday evening. That specific quote is about his star point guard Xavier Johnson.
Johnson was an all-ACC freshman a year ago. He set the Pitt freshman scoring record by averaging 15.5 points per game along with 4.5 assists. Johnson was a bit of a nobody when he got to Pitt. He was the 42nd ranked point guard in the class of 2018 according to Rivals.com. Johnson went from sort of an upstart nobody to being one of the better point guards in the country, a slight parallel to the character Rocky Balboa.
Success breeds expectations and Johnson's freshman season put him on the map for all of the preseason watch lists for various awards and honors. He’s been mentioned as a possible NBA draft pick. Heck, Pitt was picked as a surprise team by some, mainly because of how he was supposed to play this season. Knocking off Florida State on opening night likely only furthered those expectations.
Things then came to a screeching halt as Pitt lost to Nicholls State just days later. Less than a week after that, rival West Virginia embarrassed Pitt on its home floor. Johnson was averaging just 8.5 points and four turnovers a game as Pitt was sitting with a 2-2 recording heading into Monday, certainly not the start the team or Johnson had hoped for all offseason.
The noise was starting to get to him.
“I cut off social media,” Johnson said on Monday. “I cut twitter off because I was reading what other people were saying about me. It was bad. I was getting really upset about it. I was thinking too much about it. My teammates and my coaching staff were all in my corner telling me not to worry about it and to keep playing.”
Capel knows that the internet in this day and age can be an issue for his players, or for anyone really.
“And with the way things are now, especially for young people, there are more avenues for them to see the things, for them to hear these things and as much as you tell them to not pay attention to it, it’s hard to,” he said. “It’s hard for adults not to pay attention to it, so it’s something we have to continue to teach them.”
Capel just wants Xavier Johnson to be Xavier Johnson again. He wants his point guard to be the guy that played with a chip on his shoulder again. So he told him the story of Rocky, specifically about the movie Rocky III following the loss to West Virginia.
Now remember, that movie was released in 1982, and Johnson was born in 1999. Did he even know what his coach was talking about?
“He said he was, but I don’t know if he was, but he said he was,” Capel responded to if Johnson was familiar with the movies.
“He broke the freshman scoring record,” Capel said of Johnson’s accomplishments. “He was a guy last year that was incredibly hungry, because nobody knew who the heck he was - there was no expectation for him. All of the sudden, you have a good year individually and so there’s an expectation of, ‘Well I could be a pro, something I’ve dreamed about and maybe it’s close.’
“Success can make you soft sometimes and so we talked about that."
After a slow start on Monday against Monmouth, Johnson started to look like himself in the second half. Capel even sat him in the first half after a few bad turnovers, and rather than let it get to him, Johnson was able to take something from it.
“It calmed me down,” Johnson said. "I had three turnovers in the first couple possessions and I was thinking too much. I needed to just play. When I sit on the bench, I just close my eyes and meditate to myself. I am not used to sitting on the bench a lot and not playing, so I was just thinking to myself. I was in a deep struggle, I still am, but I am trying to break out of it.”
Johnson finished with 15 points, 9 assists, and 3 rebounds. After some early issues with turnovers, he was steady in the second half. While there is a lot of basketball yet to be played in this season, Johnson took the right steps to finding that hunger that drove him to success last season.
“I saw it in the second half,” Capel said of Johnson's drive and desire. “Like I told him, it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s not. You have to build that back because these are habits, man. All of us know as adults, habits are hard to break. If you have a great habit, that’s hard to break, too. So he has to get back to being that hungry dude from Northern Virginia, that nobody really knew about and that came here with something to prove. He’s got to get back to being that, and we have to be that as a group.”
Johnson’s story might not be a perfect mirror to Rocky Balboa, but he’s a player that had something and he lost it, and he’s on the redemption trail of trying to find it again.
