Overview:
Orlando Johnson led the Gauchos to the only back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances in school history (2010 and 2011) while setting the school’s all-time scoring record of 1,825 points
Orlando Johnson began his farewell to professional basketball last month with the words, “From 1484 dreams to the world stage …”
Something profound inspired the number that led off the Facebook message announcing his retirement.
I learned the backstory to “1484” nearly 15 years ago — mere hours before OJ led UC Santa Barbara into its 2010 NCAA Tournament game against Ohio State.
It was the street number of his childhood home in Seaside, near Monterey — 1484 Sonoma Ave. — where the tragedy of personal loss and triumph of family love formed the genesis of a remarkable journey.
I’d caught OJ at a vulnerable moment during our 2010 interview in the lobby of a Milwaukee hotel.
His mind was still swimming from the final examination he’d just taken — proctored by the Gauchos’ academic adviser — and by the monstrous challenge the fifth-ranked Buckeyes were about to provide.
He was perhaps too young and respectful to turn me down. He was only a sophomore, having transferred to UCSB from Loyola Marymount just a year earlier.
But OJ already had become the Gauchos’ unquestioned star: a powerfully built, 6-foot-5 guard who had just won Big West Conference Player of the Year honors while leading UCSB to its first NCAA Tournament in eight years.
He took the Gauchos to the NCAAs again in 2011 and set the school scoring record of 1,825 points by the time he graduated in 2012.
That résumé earned him a second-round selection in the NBA draft and a guaranteed, two-year contract from the Indiana Pacers.
Pacers executive Donnie Walsh said NBA legend Larry Bird, the team’s president of basketball operations at the time, traded up in the draft specifically to get OJ.
“He’s an extremely mature kid,” Walsh explained. “He doesn’t get up or down. He never reacts. He just plays.”
And plays … and then plays some more.
His two NBA seasons with Indiana were followed by parts of another with Sacramento, Phoenix and New Orleans … And then 10 more years of basketball in a dozen countries that spanned four continents.
“Every time we stepped on the floor, we ran it up,” OJ said in his retirement message. “The highs, the lows, the injuries — we turned dreams into reality … At 35, I can say I made it and then some.
“I’ve been living my dream my whole life.”
All in the Family
The first thing I asked OJ in our 2010 interview was about what fueled his incredibly high motor as a player.
He paused, sizing me up through glassy eyes, before asking, “You mean from when I was a kid?”
I nodded, figuring that he’d credit some superstar like Michael Jordan for providing inspiration.
OJ spoke instead about the family that rallied to him during the most difficult times of his life.
He never met his father. His mother, Vicki Johnson, was murdered when he was a toddler — a crime that went unsolved until a Monterey County District Attorney’s Office task force conducted a DNA check in 2023.
OJ’s own life would have ended in a house fire at age 7 if he hadn’t been visiting his older brother, Robbie.
The blaze killed his great-grandmother, an aunt and two cousins.
Tragedy found him again at age 11. He sensed it coming when he was unexpectedly summoned home from middle school.
“I saw all these cars in front of my house, so I knew there was something wrong,” he said.
The loving grandmother who had raised him, Virginia Jackson, had died of a heart attack.
“I remember that last day, telling her that I loved her,” OJ said. “I kissed her goodbye.”
Her death also could’ve meant kissing his future goodbye.
But both of his brothers, Robbie Johnson and Jamell Damon, whisked OJ into a room as soon as he got home. They told him not to worry. They were going to raise him.
They said it firmly enough for him to believe it.
“They both embraced me,” OJ recalled. “They knew how close I was to my grandma … My grandma was my mom, and it took a lot out of me.
“And that’s when they stepped up to become the father figures that I really needed.”
Brotherly Love
Robbie and Jamell went to great lengths to keep him off the mean streets of Salinas. They drove him to basketball practice. They even dressed him for his high school prom.
“Everything you see in me is a living image of Jamell and Robbie,” OJ told me. “They instilled all of this into me.
“I mean, I put in the hard work and stuff, and worked on becoming the person that I wanted to become, but they’re the ones who made me believe.
“They put me on the path to be successful. I just … Man, I’m going to start crying here …”
Robbie, the eldest brother, and Jamell, four years younger, had taken little OJ under their wings even before the death of his grandmother.
She was a nurse who took extra jobs to feed and clothe the 11 children that she’d taken into her home.
“We had a triple bunk bed,” OJ recalled. “We used to slide another piece of wood in the middle and throw a bed on top so we could all fit.
“I was always the biggest, so they always put me on the bottom. My cousin was in the middle, and I had a girl cousin on the top bunk.
“We’d also take another bed and just throw in on the floor, because we had others living in that room with us.”
Robbie kept his little brother close, even if it meant bringing him to his high school.
“Jamell was in middle school at the time, about 12 or 13, and he’d pick me up from Rob’s high school and take me on the bus with him back home,” OJ said. “I was always around them.
“My grandma was always working at the hospital, and they had to really balance their lives to be around me.”
A Sporting Chance
Robbie, who had played basketball at Weber State, began tutoring OJ in the sport when he was only 4 years old.
Jamell had played football at St. Mary’s, and he got him interested in his sport, as well.
“I’d always be running around and throwing the ball,” Johnson said.
“Jamell would tell me, ‘Man, you’ve got the ability to be a good football player … You’ve got the genes.’”
OJ started at quarterback for North Salinas High School as just a sophomore. He was converted into a wide receiver when he transferred to Palma High as a junior.
Division I college coaches were soon making scholarship offers.
The Palma football coach advised him to give up basketball to enhance his opportunities.
Few scouts were giving OJ a look during his junior season of basketball.
He quit football instead.
“Football was probably my first love,” OJ admitted, “but I started playing basketball and I just wanted to prove a lot of people wrong.
“Many people didn’t think I could do it.”
He worked so hard at it that he averaged 25.6 points and 12.1 rebounds as a center to lead Palma to a 27-3 record and a CIF Central Coast Section championship.
Most Division I colleges still wrote him off as too short to play a post position in college.
Loyola Marymount coach Randy Tention saw the passion, however, and decided to give him a chance as a perimeter player.
OJ set LMU’s freshman scoring record of 12.4 points per game in 2008 … and then decided to transfer when the school fired Tention after a losing season.
“He was very committed to coach Tention, so it was hard on him when he was let go,” said former UCSB coach Bob Williams.
“When Orlando made his decision to leave, it was at a time when maybe he was a little bit leery of the process.”
Robbie and Jamell guided their brother through his second round of recruiting. They found a safe haven at UCSB when Williams offered a scholarship.
“They saw that coach Williams had a stable foundation there,” OJ said. “They didn’t want me to keep bouncing around or have my coach end up leaving or getting fired.
“They wanted me to have stability, and we all felt that Santa Barbara was a great choice for that. They put a lot of trust in coach Williams.”
A New Family
The Gaucho players — senior James Powell in particular — embraced OJ like long-lost kin.
“I’ve felt a part of it ever since I first stepped on campus,” he said. “James Powell became like the older brother that you wish you could hang around all the time … and tell him stuff.”
There was a lot for him to tell.
OJ’s big heart came through loud and clear to the entire team.
Coach Williams marveled at how a player could average 19.6 points for his Gaucho career — second only to Raymond Tutt’s 21.5 (1996-1998) — and also be “such a team player.”
“He’s used to sharing,” Williams said. “He’s used to caring about other people.”
He swears that OJ never let the team have a bad workout during his three seasons with the Gauchos.
“If we were having a down practice, he was the one who changed that, he was the one who set the tone,” Williams said. “And that’s what kept that group alive and allowed them to achieve back-to-back NCAA appearances.
“When we got to the stage of the Big West tournament, other coaches in the league would talk about how Orlando’s eyes would light up when he got it going.”
When OJ told Donnell Dixon about his childhood dream of playing in the NBA, the Thunderdome’s public events manager handed him a key to the arena door.
“When they call your name in New York, and you get drafted in the NBA, you give me that key back,” Dixon said.
“That’s a promise,” OJ said as he shook Dixon’s hand.
He spent many late nights in that empty arena, honing a shooting touch that would eventually make 41.1% of his three-point attempts. The mark still ranks sixth all-time in UCSB’s record books.
OJ showed up at Dixon’s door with key in hand a few years later, just a few weeks after the 2012 NBA draft.
“All he says is, ‘Here you go,’” Dixon recalled.
World Tour
Nothing lasts forever, as much as OJ tried to make that happen.
He had some impactful games with the Pacers in 2013. He averaged 13.3 points over the course of four games — all victories — against Detroit, Minnesota, Atlanta and Dallas.
But the team had to cut a guard when it found itself short of front-court players the following February. They obtained Evan Turner and Lavoy Allen in a two-for-one trade with the Philadelphia 76ers … and waived OJ.
Bird took no pleasure in the move.
“Orlando is a great kid,” he said. “We appreciate everything he’s done for us and hope he has a long and successful career.”
That he did, beginning with the short-term NBA contracts he secured from Sacramento, Phoenix and New Orleans.
OJ shuttled back and forth from there to the NBA’s Development League — now known as the G League — before taking his game overseas.
His 10-year odyssey took him from Spain in 2014 all the way to Mongolia in 2024. In between were two stints each in the Philippines, China and Russia.
OJ also played in Lebanon, Bosnia, Taiwan, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela.
The dream he realized by making the NBA morphed into something else: the joy of just playing the game he loved so much.
He explained it when he was toiling in the Philippines, averaging 33 points and 11 rebounds for a team called Barangay Ginebra San Miguel.
“I want to be part of something special,” OJ said.
I had already realized his ambition for that a week before our interview in Milwaukee.
A large group of spectators were taking their turns to hug OJ just moments after UCSB’s victory over Long Beach State in the 2010 Big West Conference final.
I struggled mightily to pick my way through them to interview the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.
“Who are all those people?” I asked when I finally got to OJ’s side.
“My brothers … and my sister … and her mom and stepdad,” he began. “My nieces and nephews, too … And also my uncle and his wife … and her mom and their kids.”
He had to take a breath before adding, “Oh, yeah, and my cousins, too.”
An entire family was celebrating the good times. They’d endured enough of the bad.
