On April 2, 1990, Patrick Johnson sat next to his father in their Atlanta home and watched UNLV destroy Duke 103-73 in the NCAA Championship game. He was six years old. His father Michael Johnson, Duke '78, partner in an Atlanta law firm, was the family's basketball-loving Dukie. The Runnin' Rebels' Larry Johnson had 31 points and 11 rebounds that night against Christian Laettner and the rest of Krzyzewski's first-Final-Four team. Duke's 30-point loss in the title game was the largest margin of defeat in NCAA championship-game history. Patrick and Michael watched it together. The grief was a basketball grief. The family, and the boy, had two more months to live as a five-person Duke-loving Atlanta family.
In June 1990, Michael Johnson and his wife Susan, along with another couple from Duke Law School in the back seat, were driving down Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, returning home from a birthday party. A drunk driver hit their Mazda head on. Michael Johnson was killed. The other couple was killed. Patrick's mother Susan was the only survivor. Patrick, age 7, lost his father in an instant.
What Patrick Johnson would tell a Greensboro News & Record reporter, Jim Schrage, twelve years later in a January 2003 feature on his Duke walk-on tryout: "You don't ever get over it."
His mother Susan Brooks (Duke '78) eventually remarried — her second husband was Tom Daniel, who became Patrick's stepfather. The Brooks-Johnson Duke pedigree stretched across generations: maternal grandfather John Brooks ('48), maternal grandmother Jane Brooks ('48), mother Susan Brooks ('78), biological father Michael Johnson ('78). Four Duke alumni in his immediate family. The Duke family loyalty was one of the things, alongside loss and basketball, that Patrick Johnson would inherit.
He attended Henry W. Grady High School in Atlanta — the academically rigorous magnet school in midtown Atlanta whose grounds sat across the park from his family home, and whose name has, since 2021, been changed to Midtown High School in a community-led decision to drop the namesake of the segregationist editor. (For Patrick's class, the school was Grady; the renaming happened sixteen years after he graduated.) As a sophomore at Grady, Johnson injured his left knee. Arthroscopic surgery followed. The doctor told him he would risk arthritis if he played basketball again. So Johnson became something else: a star pitcher and first baseman on the Grady baseball team. Over four varsity seasons, he was named to the All-City Team his junior and senior years, was named a top-10 metro professional prospect during his senior year, and participated in an Atlanta Braves scouting camp. He grew six inches between sophomore and junior year. By senior year, he was 6'9".
The academic record was elite. He was a four-year member of the National Honor Society. He worked on the Grady high-school newspaper his junior and senior years. He participated in the debate club. He carried a 3.8 GPA and a 1400 SAT score. Multiple SEC and ACC programs offered him baseball scholarships. He chose Duke — the family alma mater, his late father's school, his grandparents' school, his mother's school.
He arrived at Duke in fall 2001 to walk onto the baseball team. He spent a week with the team in his freshman fall semester, then quit. "I made the choice to spend my freshman year as a student instead," he would later tell The Next Prospect in a 2019 interview.
The next semester, in spring 2002, Patrick Johnson camped outside Cameron Indoor Stadium with his friends — tenting in K-ville to get into the Duke-Maryland game. Sitting in the cold of a North Carolina February night, waiting for tipoff, watching Krzyzewski's national-championship-defending team prepare to play Maryland the next day, he realized he'd rather be playing the game than watching it. In pickup games at the Duke YMCA his knee felt fine. No rec player could stay with him. "After a while, it wasn't boring, but I just kind of felt out of place, just being that tall," he told the Greensboro News & Record. "It seemed like I should be at a higher level."
He spent the summer of 2002 training obsessively in Atlanta — running around the Grady High School track every morning, playing pickup at the YMCA. His Atlanta neighbors and church friends all heard about the ambition. His mother Susan and his stepfather Tom practiced their condolence speeches for the inevitable heartbroken phone call after Krzyzewski cut him from the tryout. "We were delirious," Susan Brooks would later tell the Greensboro News & Record.
On October 7, 2002, Mike Krzyzewski approved a jersey (No. 51) and a locker nameplate for Patrick Johnson. The condolence speeches were never used.