Inside the life of LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson: The star guard, rapper, and trailblazer
· Yahoo Sports
BATON ROUGE, La. — It’s nearly pitch-black outside, around 10 at night, when Flau’jae Johnson drives her black Nissan around the concourse of the PMAC, the basketball arena where she and her LSU teammates play. She parks close to the entrance, creating a makeshift spot, and hurries inside.
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The arena is completely empty. Quiet, still. There are no cameras. Dressed in a simple gray tee, mesh shorts and purple Kobes, she is not here to be seen — but to seek peace.
“I needed to feel the ball,” Johnson says.
Never mind that it is the eve of the Tigers’ NCAA Tournament opener. She has already had team practice earlier, and should probably be asleep, but she felt compelled to return to the court. Bouncing the ball harder between her legs, she drills midrange elbow jumper after jumper. Then, she bricks a free throw. Upset with herself, she sprints up and down the court as punishment.
Here, the senior guard blocks out everything: Expectation. Doubt. Critics who claim she isn’t as dedicated to basketball as she is to her other passion, music. Johnson is a rapper who is signed to Roc Nation, the label founded by Jay-Z. But she is equally passionate about hoops. Her coaches often have to pull her off the court. For most of her collegiate career, she has worked out four times a day.
With dual careers in hoops and music, and a bulging NIL portfolio, she has redefined what it means to be a college student-athlete. She is one of many women’s basketball stars to earn NIL deals, including Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and former LSU teammate Angel Reese. But Kim Mulkey, her LSU coach, says Johnson’s profile is such that “I don’t even think people know her last name. You just know — that’s Flau’jae.”
This is Johnson’s last weekend competing in Baton Rouge, and emotions are high. She’s embarking on a final national-championship quest after helping the Tigers win one as a freshman in 2023. Johnson is the team’s heart and soul. Her leadership, her pick-up-anyone-anytime energy is as integral to the team as her ability to score in the lane and set up others for a shot — her favorite pastime. She has flourished in the No. 2 seed Tigers’ first two NCAA Tournament wins, scoring 24 points in a 101-47 second-round victory over Texas Tech. The Tigers are now in Sacramento and will face No. 3 seed Duke in the Sweet 16 Friday.
Johnson is on the brink of enormous change, expected to be selected in the WNBA Draft on April 13. The WNBA is in transition, too, having agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement last week that will allow players to earn more money than ever. “I came at the right time,” says Johnson, who is well-positioned to navigate this uncharted territory, as she did when NIL was legalized shortly before she entered college. She has created a blueprint for the next generation of multi-dimensional athletes.
But she has faced difficulties that few realize. At times, she is the subject of intense vitriol online. LSU has had to bring three security guards on road trips as she attracts throngs of fans after games. And yet, she keeps a smile on her face, refusing to shrink. To choose between hoops and rap. To be put into one box. Her mother, Kia J. Brooks, who is also her manager, has told her since she was a young girl: “People put ceilings on themselves, and you will not be one of those people.”
Johnson took that message to heart. “A lot of us — and I’ve been guilty of it before — try to dim our light to make other people feel comfortable,” Johnson says. “But you have to let your light shine, because you know somebody else got that in them, too, and you will give them permission to let their lights on. And then? Everybody’s glowing.”
She smiles brightly, envisioning her next chapter. She is finally stepping into her power.
I made somebody else believe in they dream ‘cause they seen mine.
(“6-foot-7 freestyle,” Flau’jae)
“That’s one of my favorite things I’ve written,” she says, sinking into her couch inside her apartment in Baton Rouge. She had just taken Champ, her bearded dragon, out of his cage. “He’s my spirit animal,” she says, letting him claw at her shirt. She isn’t scared; she genuinely wanted to take her senior pictures alongside LSU’s actual tiger mascot, Mike, in his cage complex near the stadium.
Johnson opens a stack of journals on her coffee table. She writes to understand. To feel connected. Her life moves so fast sometimes she can’t always take a second to breathe: “It makes me calm. Makes me feel like I got stuff in control.”
A whiteboard says: “DREAM BIGGER.” A print of Kendrick Lamar’s “good kid, m.A.A.d city” album cover sits on a shelf. A poster of the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris commemorating its 1977 opening hangs on the wall. Framed photos of her late father, Jason Johnson, a rapper known by his stage name, Camoflauge, are nearby. He was murdered in 2003 at age 21, just six months before Flau’jae was born. He is her biggest inspiration and the reason she began rapping as a child.
Books fill her living room shelves, especially business books to help her prepare for the future: “The Psychology of Money,” “Why Should White Guys Have All The Fun?” among many others. She highlights and jots notes in the margins. “She doesn’t just read books,” says Bob Starkey, LSU associate head coach, “she absorbs them.”
“I want to be so big in the business world and impact people that I’ll never meet,” Johnson says. “My goal is to have a big corporation building in New York City and have all my companies run under it. … (If) your end goal is just to be the richest man on Earth, then I feel like you’re doing it wrong. What are you doing it for? That’s not impacting people. … I want to impact people.”
Johnson picks up “Forty Million Dollar Slaves” by William C. Rhoden: “This is when I started thinking about NIL deals differently.” It caused her to think more about the economics and power dynamics at play. “These schools been getting all this money, all these years. Billions and billions of dollars.” Sometimes she sees comments on social media: Flau’jae is only chasing a bag. But money isn’t her motivation. “It’s a lot of misconceptions,” she says. “I think people think it’s about just collecting a check, and that’s it. But me, I take it serious on all aspects.” She aspires to be as philanthropic as she can. Her publicist challenged her to give NIL a new definition, and the two have been thinking: “Notable, Impact and Legacy.”
“I have more than enough,” she says. “(NIL) has set my family up for a long time, so it’s like, how do I help other people?” Every brand she partners with agrees to participate in her non-profit efforts, either in activation or donation. She helped renovate the locker room at her alma mater, Sprayberry High School. She is in the process of building her own recreational center in her hometown of Savannah, Ga. “I always say, use these four years to set up your next 40 years,” she says.
She thinks a lot about her charitable goals, such as helping end homelessness. She’s interested in building resource centers for women in crisis — spaces that provide support, stability and access to opportunities. And she often thinks about where she came from, about how hard her mother worked as a surgical dental assistant, finishing a shift and then staying up until 3 a.m. working other jobs such as catering or driving clients.
“I wasn’t supposed to be here,” Johnson says. “I’m a young girl. A young Black girl from Savannah, Georgia. Born without a dad. Like, I’m supposed to be a statistic. For real, for real. I’m still supposed to be in Savannah working fast food or something.
“I’m not doing it for validation,” she says. “If I was doing it for validation, I should have been done.”
It’s a Wednesday afternoon, two days before the start of the NCAA Tournament, and Johnson arrives at a local high school for a video shoot. She introduces herself to each member of the six-person crew, as if they don’t know who she is. She doesn’t act big-time. Mulkey certainly won’t allow it. “She cussed me out this morning!” Johnson says, laughing. A giant light hovers nearby, casting a glow on her near-back-length flowy hair. Soon, she’s asked to film a video for one sponsor, then review one for another. “She’s a pro’s pro,” says James Parlow, her basketball trainer. She has three calendars, each moment meticulously planned.
Adjusting to her fame has taken time. Freshman year, she felt overwhelmed by the attention. Once, she was mobbed while picking up food from Chipotle. She escaped to her car and cried. And the more success she had on the court, helping turn LSU into a powerhouse, and in the booth, working with legends such as Public Enemy and Lil Wayne, she’d constantly be asked the same question: “Would you rather win a national championship, or a Grammy?” The question always felt limiting. Sometimes, underneath was the suggestion that she had to be more devoted to one over the other. “Sometimes people put their fears on you,” Johnson says. “Just because they can’t do it, they feel like you can’t.”
“That’s why fear is so lame,” she says. “It’ll scare you into not doing something.”
She knows firsthand. In early February, she wanted to post on social media about new music she was excited to release. But then she hesitated. It was a strange feeling — fear. She worried what people would think; that she wasn’t dedicated enough to basketball. The Tigers were about to play South Carolina: “I just didn’t want people to be like, ‘She needs to focus, or she ain’t this.’”
“I felt trapped,” Johnson says, “with other people’s opinions of me. … I felt like I wasn’t me. And then I was like, ‘How am I gonna tell my message?’ My message is to tell little boys and little girls to go chase your dreams, be who you are. I can’t say that, and then I’m scared to do it.”
She realized she had to be herself — fully. No ceilings. A confident person, she was learning, could have moments of doubt. That didn’t diminish her strength; it made her more resilient.
That has been an ongoing lesson. Around last December, she was putting too much pressure on herself. “I almost did lose my joy a little bit,” she says. “Because everything started to feel more like pressure in the business, more than just playing the game that I love. … There’s so many critics. … It starts seeping into your mind.”
She turned to her journals, to her music. “Trying to figure out how to get myself out of a hole,” she says. A close friend helped her realize that social media is just noise; these strangers don’t know her. “This is why I stopped giving a f—, for real,” she says. She has been off social media for three months. She also began to see a sports psychologist. She leaned into her gratitude practice, appreciating tiny joys: sweet-scented candles, eating blue crabs on her porch, biking to school each day.
Soon, she felt herself taking back her power. “It was all just me realizing that I was in control.” Power, to her, meant: “To be able to live freely in a world where everybody’s mind is trapped by outside things. That’s real freedom.”
She started feeling like herself on the court again, too: full of joy, bouncing around, hyping up her teammates. “I got back to my positive, my confident self,” she says. “Look at ‘The Alchemist,’” she says, picking up her all-time favorite book. She reads a quote from the novel: “What’s the world’s greatest lie? … At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
After her video shoot, Johnson drives to Barracuda Taco Stand. She’s excited to eat on the patio. She usually can’t do that, given the crowds that follow her, but decides to take a chance tonight. This is her last weekend playing in Baton Rouge, after all. She orders three beef tacos — no onions. “Gas!” she says. “So fire.”
Then a young man introduces himself. He says he makes beats and wonders if she’d listen to them. Johnson is kind and gives her assistant his number. A few minutes later, two older Black women approach. “Is it my lucky day!?” one of them gushes. “May I have your autograph, Flau’jae?”
“Of course,” Johnson says, leaning in for a photo. Her friend is overjoyed: “This will be bragging rights with my middle school kids!”
It’s a beautiful night. The muggy Louisiana heat has cooled. Fireflies circle. It occurs to Johnson how much she will miss all of this. How it will all one day become memory.
I like to tell ′em that my story had started before I was born
I came in a family, it already was torn
My momma couldn′t smile when she had me, she had to mourn
They killed my pop while I was in her womb, I wasn’t even formed
(“Remember When,” Flau’jae)
Writing, rapping about her father helped Johnson process her pain. She came to know him through his words. She often thinks of his song, “No Love”: It’s too late to save us, but we got to save these kids. “That’s when I realized what kind of person he was,” Johnson says.
At the time of his death, Brooks couldn’t wallow in her grief; she had to raise her children and keep things together. “That was really a vulnerable moment for me but I knew that God gave me that job for a reason and I had to make sure that she understood that her story was to help others be great and that she had to fulfill this,” Brooks says.
Somehow, Johnson knew what she wanted to do from an early age. Brooks remembers Flau’jae’s first ballet recital at age 4. “Everybody was smiling except for Flau’jae.” She remembers Johnson bursting into tears and saying afterward: “I don’t want to do this. I want to play basketball!”
Flau’jae became a contestant on the Lifetime reality series “The Rap Game” at 12, and then on “America’s Got Talent” at 14. “I felt like I couldn’t fail,” she says. “I always felt like I was battling something different. Like my father. I never got to meet him, and continuing his legacy was something that I always felt strongly about. It’s deep within my soul. And so, I felt like I never could fail. And I felt my mom had put so much into it.”
Honing her style, she listened to women rappers who inspired her, such as Lauryn Hill. “Her being a Black woman — and a dark-skinned woman — just being so soulful and so powerful. She’s a trailblazer and she moves at the beat of her own drum.” (Johnson coincidentally spent time with Wyclef Jean, Hill’s bandmate with the Fugees.)
One of the reasons Johnson came to LSU was because Mulkey was supportive of her music. Some other college recruiters weren’t as welcoming. Johnson had worked her way up from a lesser-known hoops prospect to a McDonald’s All-American.
As soon as she stepped on campus, she made her mark on the team, starting as a freshman. But her biggest struggle was learning how to rest: “I used to work myself to death.” “She was worried if she was resting,” Starkey says, “somebody wasn’t, and they’d pass her up.” Starkey would tell her: “If you keep cutting and cutting and cutting, the blade’s going to go dull and not be as effective.”
She prioritizes recovery much more these days. But even with a long day the night before this year’s NCAA Tournament opener, including an accounting exam, she insisted on attending Miracle League, a baseball league for special needs kids that she was introduced to last year. She has quietly come back on her own — no cameras. One of the kids, Max, came to LSU’s Selection Sunday event. “I have a game this Thursday,” he told her. “You better come!”
When she showed up, the kids screamed “Big 4!!!!” She went out to the mound, and her competitive juices kicked in. “We here!” “Make a play at third!” Max stepped up to the plate, hitting a homer. “YEAHHHHHH, BRUH!!!” Johnson screamed, chest-bumping him. “LET’S GO MAX! TURN ME UP, MAX!!!!”
This is when she is happiest: cheering for others, all lost in the same glow.
Later that night, Johnson returns to her apartment. She enters her studio in a back room. There is her mic and other recording equipment. Her jerseys from high school and college hang on the walls. She wonders which WNBA jersey she’ll hang in her future home.
“This is all getting packed up,” she says, a trace of sadness in her voice.
She turns to a canvas in the front of the room. Painted are her lyrics:
My chocolate is beautiful,
I’m rockin’ it per usual.
It’s from her 2022 freestyle “Ready or Not,” a sample of the Fugees classic.
It’s getting late. She grabs her backpack to return to campus for one last workout.
Finally understand my power,
my presence is essence …
… Ready or not
Here I come.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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