Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis put up with a lot when he was coaching Chad Johnson, but he was also an amazing father figure for Johnson.
During a conversation with CBSSports.com, Lewis said that he warned Johnson back while chad was still a Bengal about the perils of marriage.
Johnson’s life is now in somewhat of a tailspin, and Lewis says “he feels sorry for his former star wide receiver.”
“I just feel sorry for him,” Lewis said Wednesday. “It’s a shame because I heard that the attorney said something about, ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’ It was just a natural reaction.
“I know when Chad’s being a clown. And that wasn’t it. He didn’t do what he did to get anyone to laugh. That was just a natural reaction from Chad, and it’s a shame.”
Lewis told the story of his conversation with Johnson informed him that he was getting married.
“I said, ‘You better come talk to me,’ ” Lewis said. “Then I go downstairs during the lunch break, and he had professed to the world he was getting married. I went out to him during stretching and said, ‘Chad, this is no joke. You don’t play with this.’ “
Lewis acknowledge that Johnson had the opportunity to get a job at ESPN, but that Chad continued to not take things seriously.
“I tried to tell him that earlier,” Lewis said, “because he had an opportunity at ESPN. I tried to explain to him that you can’t be a clown anymore. You can’t do the things you do because not everybody knows you.
“People didn’t know him when he did some of this stuff [this week]. Some people thought it was malicious. Some of them thought it was funny. And some who knew him thought it was his way of getting attention.”