Evan Johnson shares a household with his wife Dallis and son Maverick.
Should one jump to conclusions, then, and presume that the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ right guard is an especially dedicated devotee of the Dallas Mavericks?
“Dallis and Maverick is a fun possibility for an NBA fan, but I realized that after the fact,” Johnson says from his home in Saskatoon.
“He’s named mostly for Top Gun.”
Evan and Dallis are inarguably top guns from the Saskatoon Valkyries’ perspective.
Last year, the Johnsons made a donation to the Western Women’s Canadian Football League team to cover the fees for one player.
“We intend to donate again this year,” Evan says. “We also donate to the Huskies, starting last year.
“We’re just trying to give back, whenever we can.”
Toward that end, Dallis served as a Valkyries board member in 2020 and 2021. She played for the team from 2017 to 2020, a period in which Evan helped out as a coach.
Evan played for the University of Saskatchewan Huskies after graduating from Campbell Collegiate.
So the athletic genes bode especially well for little Maverick, who turns two in July.
He has already been seen sporting a Roughriders jersey that bears his father’s familiar No. 64.
“He has at least three of them — a newborn one and a couple of toddler ones,’’ Maverick’s proud father says with a chuckle.
Maverick should be quite conspicuous when main training camp begins on May 14 in Saskatoon.
“I’m looking forward to bringing him out on to the field so I can run around with him and introduce him to all the different guys,” Johnson says.
“That’s something I’m really looking forward to as he grows up and as I continue my career in Saskatchewan and just continue making awesome memories.”
Some of Johnson’s earliest football-related recollections relate to his current employer.
“I grew up as a fan of the Roughriders,” he recalls. “It was always an exciting time, a special time, to be able to get to go watch the games and to watch them play on TV, too, when I was unable to make it.
“I remember getting together with the guys in elementary school and high school and watching them play ball, whether that was in the regular season or in the Grey Cups that they were in at that time.”
Johnson has already played in one Grey Cup — the 2018 version, in which he suited up for the Ottawa REDBLACKS against the victorious Calgary Stampeders.
He was chosen by Ottawa in the first round (ninth overall) of the 2017 CFL Draft. After three seasons with the REDBLACKS, he signed with the hometown Roughriders as a free agent on Feb. 9, 2021.
“It’s beyond a dream come true,” says Johnson, who turns 29 on Aug. 21. “The fact that I’m still playing football is awesome, because not everyone gets a chance to keep playing football at this age and for this long.
“And to be able to be in Saskatchewan and playing for the Roughriders, who I grew up watching, it doesn’t get much better from that perspective.”
While growing up and attending Marion McVeety Elementary School, Johnson immersed himself in an array of sports — an exception being the one he has played professionally since 2017.
“I didn’t start to play football until Grade 9,” notes Johnson, who took up tackle football as a defensive lineman with Regina Minor Football’s Mounties before joining the Campbell Tartans and moving to the offensive side in Grade 10.
“I wanted to play a lot earlier than I did, but my size was a limiting factor for that. I was quite a big kid, so with the way RMF is structured, if you’re heavier than a certain threshold, then you’re playing with the older kids.
“It was a big deterrent for my parents — my mom, mostly. They didn’t want me playing with the older kids and figured they were going to be a little too rough.”
There were rough days ahead for linemen who had to line up opposite of Johnson, who quickly developed an aptitude for the sport.
After excelling for the Regina Intercollegiate Football League’s Tartans under head coach Ron Cherkas — a former Roughriders defensive lineman and assistant coach — Johnson joined the Huskies in 2013.
“There were a couple of motivating factors,” he says. “I did get recruited by the U of R and a couple of other schools as well, but the U of S offered civil engineering, which was what I wanted to study.
“It’s a nice campus, with a good football team, and it was away from home but not too far away from home. I felt I was ready to kind of move out and take on life on my own a little bit, but I wasn’t too far away from Mom and Dad if anything happened.
“It was the perfect blend of a lot of different things.”
All these years later, he is still blending.
Johnson manages to juggle family life and football-related commitments while establishing a firm foundation for life after the CFL.
A 2018 graduate of the U of S, Johnson has been working for the past few off-seasons with Saskatoon-based Pinter & Associates Ltd., which provides a wide range of engineering services.
“They’ve helped me out a lot, being able to give me a little bit of engineering experience, and they’ve been really supportive of the football schedule, too,” an appreciative Johnson says.
“It’s really important to me because, as everyone knows, you can’t play football forever, even though we’d love to.
“The biggest thing is to not lose all your knowledge and all your competencies in the field. It’s important to build that experience and build those contacts and network a little bit and to be able to set yourself up for after football, whenever that comes.”
That day is hardly nigh for Johnson, who signed a second contract with the Roughriders — an extension — in December of 2021.
It was an astute transaction from a football and ticket-selling perspective, considering that his parents (Marlon and Laurie) are Roughriders season-ticket holders.
Long gone are the days when Johnson would sit — or stand, depending on the impulses of the surrounding patrons — with Mom, Dad and assorted friends in what was once dubbed the university section at historic Mosaic Stadium.
Once Evan ascended to the university and college ranks, his parents continued to attend his games whenever the logistics were even remotely negotiable.
Marlon and Laurie typically travelled to Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton when Evan and the REDBLACKS played in those cities.
Now it is much more convenient — and certainly less expensive — for them to watch their son play professional football.
“This,” he marvels, “is beyond what a Grade 9 Evan Johnson could have dreamed of.”
