Game days are the toughest days for Wesley Johnson.

It’s tough during the away games, because he sits in his apartment watching Syracuse on television. It’s tough during the home games, because he wears street clothes on the bench, and he can feel the fans wondering aloud, ‘Oh, who is that skinny kid?’

It’s tough because Johnson made it so, because he left a promising situation at Iowa State practically in the middle of the night, catching his coach by surprise just two months after starting 25 games for the Cyclones, just a year after making the Big 12 All-Rookie team.

‘If he didn’t leave Iowa State, I think he’d be in the (NBA) Draft this year,’ said Tony Johnson, his AAU coach with the Dallas Mustangs.

It’s tough because many people had said he wasn’t tough – too thin to play big-time college basketball and too quiet to attract attention from a small, football-centric town in Texas.

Johnson, a transfer who must sit out this season as per NCAA regulations, just smiles at his situation now, for it wasn’t too long ago he was in Detroit working at Foot Locker, waiting for a college – any college – to call. This, after committing and de-committing from a small Louisiana college, then attending two prep schools in one year. Now he’s a key member of the Syracuse men’s basketball team – not just for the future but in the present. And he hasn’t played a single minute.

He’s key as a practice force, a test dummy, a long, athletic wing who has been schooling Paul Harris and Kris Joseph every day since the summer. In preseason he jumped a 40-inch vertical with a stress fracture in his foot. In practice he took off from just inside the free-throw line and flushed a dunk. In Iowa he went point-for-point with Kevin Durant. In high school he started on AAU teams with McDonald’s All-American point guard Byron Eaton, New York Yankees baseball prospect Austin Jackson and Texas Tech wide receiver Michael Crabtree.

And in early March 2004, in his first game with the Mustangs, he had a two-handed dunk over future Kansas center C.J. Miles that still reverberates in parts near Dallas. ‘Everybody was like, ‘Oh, who is that skinny kid?” Tony Johnson said.

That’s also what Harris was saying when he first met Johnson this summer.

‘But when I saw him play, I was like, ‘man, this guy’s legit,” Harris said. ‘He’s athletic, like more athletic than me, he’s taller than me, and he’s fast. So that’s a tough match for me.’

As a freshman at ISU, Johnson had 11 double-doubles, led the Big 12 in offensive rebounding, and led the team in blocked shots. As a sophomore, he averaged a team-high 12.4 points per game. It’s his shooting range, though, for a 6-foot-7 forward, that helped Johnson make waves in the conference and garner attention all across the country when he re-opened his recruitment in May.

After his sophomore year of high school, Johnson spent the summer in Detroit visiting his older brother, Craig. When he returned home to Corsicana, Texas, he had grown 7 inches.

‘He came back and a couple of the kids called me and wanted to know if I’d seen Wes,’ said Andy Dotson, head coach at Corsicana (Texas) High School. ‘I opened up the gym and I was like, ‘Holy cow, look at this guy.”

Sitting 45 minutes south of Dallas, along Highway 45, Corsicana, Texas, hasn’t had too many basketball players like Johnson. Like much of the state, it’s a football town. The high school football stadium seats over 10,000 (the town population is around 25,000). For Friday night football games, Dotson said, you better leave early or you won’t get in.

So when Johnson sprouted to 6 feet 6 inches as a high school junior, Dotson knew he had found a new attraction to fill the 2,500-seat Tigers gym.

‘The people around here just ate it up because it was something they weren’t used to seeing,’ he said.

Johnson was also the first Corsicana product to play for the Mustangs, an elite AAU team with NBA alumni Sean Williams and Anthony Randolph. Tony Johnson hadn’t heard about Wesley until a referee called him one night and told him he needed to come check the 6-foot-6 Johnson out.

‘And I was like, ‘Oh, Okay,” Tony Johnson said. ‘By the time the game was over I was trying to get all the information about him I could.’

But regardless of his height, Johnson didn’t weigh more than 150 pounds and was barely 17 years old as a high school senior. Schools were wary of his size and maturity. Dotson said Oklahoma and Michigan State showed some late signs of interest. But Johnson made a rash decision to sign with Louisiana-Monroe of the Sun Belt Conference.

He regretted it immediately and decided to opt out. He hopped to Patterson (N.C.) School, a prep school known for basketball, and played alongside Southern California’s Davon Jefferson, Seton Hall’s Jeremy Hazell and Arizona’s Jordan Hill for the 2005-06 season. Then he hopped again, to Eldon Academy in Petoskey, Mich.

Less than two months after Johnson arrived, Eldon was shut down for academic reasons. Johnson was left on his own. He stayed with his brother in Detroit, worked at Foot Locker, played pick-up basketball at local gyms and waited for a phone call from any college willing to sign him.

He got it one day several months later from Jean Prioleau, a former Wichita State assistant that recruited him in Texas, who was an assistant at Iowa State. Johnson enrolled with the Cyclones shortly thereafter.

Prioleau, now a coach at Texas Christian, declined to comment for this story.

After two seasons in Ames, Iowa, – and after playing most of last season on a stress fracture in his foot – Johnson was on the move again. He won’t go into much of why he decided to transfer from Iowa State, saying mostly the relationship between him and head coach Greg McDermott ‘went south.’

‘My second year it just wasn’t clicking like I thought it should,’ Johnson said. ‘It was just as far as how I was being treated and how I felt. I didn’t feel good about it.’

McDermott and his coaching staff at ISU declined to comment for this story. McDermott said in a press release in May: ‘Shocked would be the best way to describe my reaction.’

Syracuse assistant coach Rob Murphy got a call from a friend in Detroit informing him of Johnson’s decision. By then, schools across the country – including Villanova, Kentucky, Pittsburgh and Connecticut – were jumping at the news.

‘There wasn’t a certain clip (that caught my eye), it was just really how he was able to come off screens and catch-and-shoot, catch-and-shoot, catch-and-shoot,’ Murphy said. ‘So taking away all the athleticism and the rebounding, he was able to shoot. And everything else is just a plus.’

Johnson knew he wanted to attend a Big East school. Syracuse fit.

‘Obviously I played two years so I knew what I wanted,’ Johnson said. ‘So I was like, ‘This will be a good fit for me.”

Finally, a home for Johnson to settle down in. Finally, a chance to earn some recognition.

But he’s not playing. NCAA rules force a transfer to sit out a year. Johnson’s riding the coattails of a Top 10 team. He’s a spectator as Harris and Jonny Flynn dominate the floor. Johnson’s No. 4 jersey only sees action during weekday afternoons, running wind sprints in the Carrier Dome and checking up as a ‘B’-team wing.

‘It’s the worst,’ Johnson said. ‘I’m used to playing, so it’s new to me, this sitting out. I’m just taking it day by day, just trying to stay positive as much as I can.’

Murphy said having him as a practice utility, though, has been incredible. He gives pointers to Joseph, his roommate, even as he’s guarding him. He’s been a tough match for Harris because of his lankiness and range. And, once in a while, he’ll put on a show with his dunking ability after practice.

Most of all, Johnson’s whetting the palette of Syracuse’s coaching staff for next season, when he’s not relegated to street clothes on game day. When game days aren’t so tough anymore, because everybody can see him contribute. When fans can do more than wonder how long, and how far, he’s come to play.

Zach Schonbrun is the sports columnist for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear every Wednesday. He can be reached at zsschonb@syr.edu.

Published on January 20, 2009 at 12:00 pm