Before Mitch Johnson became the head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, before he inherited the bench from the legendary Gregg Popovich and took charge of one of basketball’s most storied franchises, there were two people whose influence shaped everything about him.
His father, John Johnson, was a Black man from the streets of Milwaukee who carved out a place in NBA history through sheer will and talent, and his mother, Jenny Redman, was a competitive athlete in her own right who played tennis at the University of Washington.
Together, they gave Mitch what he once called “the double competitive gene.”
A Milwaukee Legend and a Champion’s Blood
John Johnson grew up in Milwaukee at a time when Black athletes in America had to fight for recognition at every turn.
He played his early basketball at Lapham and Red Arrow parks, the kind of outdoor courts that produced tough, fundamentally sound players who understood the game not from coaching manuals but from survival.
He enrolled at St. Benedict the Moor before financial pressures shut the school down, eventually landing at Messmer High School, where his reputation grew alongside that of his close friend, the legendary “Downtown” Freddie Brown.
The two Milwaukee natives, both Black men navigating a mostly white professional sports landscape, became one of the most enduring partnerships in Wisconsin basketball history.
They reunited at the University of Iowa, helped the Hawkeyes to an undefeated Big Ten season, and then found each other again years later on the Seattle SuperSonics, where they won the NBA championship in 1979.
John Johnson was, by most accounts, one of the first true point forwards the game had ever seen. Lenny Wilkens, his coach in Seattle, recognized it immediately.
But behind the championships and the accolades, John carried the weight of being a Black man in America in ways that stayed with him long after his playing days ended.
He once described himself as a Buffalo Soldier, a man who woke up every morning knowing there were things he would have to overcome. That mindset served him on the court but also masked a struggle with alcohol that grew quietly for years after his career ended.
Jenny Redman, Mitch’s mother, had her own athletic identity separate from John. A tennis player at Washington, she brought a different kind of discipline and competitive spirit into the household. Though John and Jenny eventually divorced, the dual athletic background they gave their son was undeniable and lasting.
A Son Who Never Quit on His Father
Mitch was born in Seattle in 1986, the child of a champion father and a college athlete mother. From nearly the first moment he could hold a basketball, John was teaching him.
The fundamentals, always the fundamentals. John was hard on his son in the gym, exacting and precise, and Mitch absorbed it all without resentment. He internalized his father’s standards until they became his own.
When Mitch was a freshman at Stanford, he made one of the hardest decisions of his young life. He saw his father’s drinking worsening and organized an intervention. Former Sonics teammates came.
Coaches who had known John for decades came. It was an act of courage from a son who refused to abandon his father the way his father had never abandoned him in the gym.
John entered rehabilitation, moved to the Bay Area to be closer to Mitch, and rebuilt himself. He lived to see his son become a respected NBA coach before passing away in 2016 at the age of 68.
The San Antonio Spurs now have a head coach who carries Milwaukee’s Black basketball history, a mother’s athletic grit, a father’s vision of the game, and the quiet strength of a son who once saved his dad’s life.
