As his new team travels to compete against his old team, the Rams en route to Green Bay to play the Packers, Johnathan Franklin won’t be leaving Los Angeles.
Perhaps there could have been a version of this story in which Franklin returned to Lambeau Field toward the end of a productive NFL career, a final trip to where it all started. But that’s not what life had in store for him.
Instead, Franklin will be going to a correctional facility with a former Rams player for a watch party he organized in his role as director of social justice and football development.
A role he could not have imagined a decade ago, when he played his last football game.
Dark days
It was October 2013 as the Packers geared up to play the Browns. When Franklin got hit on his second carry of that game, his mind did not go to his body. Instead, it focused on the fumbled football.
Two earlier lost fumbles had cost Franklin a role early in his rookie season and resulted in the former UCLA and Dorsey High standout receiving three carries in the previous two weeks. The Browns game represented his second chance, and here he was with a dreadful sense of déjà vu.
But when Franklin went to reach for the ball at the bottom of a pile of bodies, an even worse realization hit him.
“I literally couldn’t move an inch,” said the Bruins’ all-time rushing leader. “It was fear, nervousness, fear of what’s next. How did this happen, how did I get here?”
He lay on the field for a few moments, and a tingly feeling returned to his fingers and shoulders. He got up, walked off the field and into the locker room. The initial diagnosis was a concussion, and he expected to miss a game at worse.
But an MRI during the week revealed a spot on his spinal cord. The hope was it would heal with time, but it kept showing up with each subsequent test, and the fourth-round draft pick was put on injured reserve to end his rookie year.
Franklin spent the offseason training as if he would play again in 2014. But when he underwent a physical after reporting to OTAs, the spot was still on his spinal cord.
He went to see a specialist in Chicago, who told him he couldn’t play football again without the risk of permanent paralysis. Franklin didn’t believe it, and scheduled another appointment with another doctor in New York. When he received the same message, he returned to UCLA to meet another specialist, but with the same result.
All the while, he continued to participate in the Packers’ OTAs. But after one practice, team doctors asked to speak with him.
They told Franklin he was not cleared to play football. He would have to medically retire, and the Packers would have to release him.
Since the morning of his first Pop Warner game, when he brought his helmet with him to the breakfast table, Franklin had made every decision in his life because of football. It had allowed him to go to college. It had provided the foundation of his relationship with his family. And in a moment, it was all taken away.
When his younger brother visited in Green Bay the next week, Franklin hid the news, afraid of letting his brother down.
“When I heard the news, I was depressed, I was lost. From an identity perspective, who’s the man in the mirror? Will my family still believe in me?” Franklin recalled, his voice accelerating as he continued. “I began to question everything, because from 10 years old until 22 when I got injured, I was Johnathan the football player. It took a couple of years.”
Packers president Mark Murphy offered Franklin a rotational internship. It allowed him to stay busy, trying his hand at different front-office tasks, but also kept him within arm’s reach of the dream that had abandoned him so recently.
“I could hear in his voice – I don’t want to be as dramatic as life was leaving – but I could feel him going to a sorrow,” his mother, Pamela Andrews, said. “And he would not allow me to go down there. It was just him going through it by himself, and that broke my heart.”
“I was going in the locker room and not being a player. I was parking in a different parking lot, I wasn’t going through the tunnel,” Franklin added. “I’m here, but I’m not where I want to be and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Six months after taking a job at Notre Dame in student welfare and development in 2015, his boss called him in for a meeting and asked what was wrong. Franklin, once known at UCLA as “The Mayor” because of his outsized personality, had withdrawn into himself and was in a dark mood.
Franklin thought he might get fired, but instead was encouraged to see a therapist. He took that advice and went to a session.
“I kinda shared vulnerably really about my emotions and my pain for the first time in my life,” Franklin said. “And I realized there was a power in sharing the brokenness.”
That was Franklin’s one and only appointment; he decided therapy wasn’t for him. But he began to open up again, leaning on his friends and mentors, praying with his mother.
Later that year, he put on a leadership academy for the captains of all of Notre Dame’s different sports. The student-athletes were asked to map out the five most important things in their life, and why they held so much importance to them.
As he taught the players, he completed the exercise himself. Reflecting on his priorities allowed him to learn what truly motivated him.
“To recognize that although football has departed my life, I can still create change and create a new pathway and I can still purpose and meaning and worth and value,” Franklin said. “As I look back, the worst moment has honestly been the biggest blessing for me.”
A new path
Franklin, 34, has spent the past seven years with the Rams. These days, he is finding ways to create access to football for different communities. Sometimes it looks like his watch party Sunday, other times it’s facilitating a mentorship program between high schoolers and Rams staff members to create connections and career pathways.
And he’s working to spread football throughout Los Angeles, both by teaching safety in youth tackle football and growing girls flag football.
“When I look back on my life and what football has meant to me, to now level the playing field and now girls can have an opportunity to further their education,” Franklin said, “to develop those transferrable life skills and become leaders in this sport.”
It’s not the life Franklin imagined when he left UCLA for the draft in 2013. But it’s one in which Franklin has found new meaning.
“I’m incredibly grateful, and there’s some pride in it, too,” Franklin said. “To be a part of an organization, still a part of the game, that’s creating change in the city that raised me, that has given me so much and I can now return the favor, I get excited about it.”
