What if you planned a party to honor a special person in your life and they refused to show up? That was almost the case last fall when the Houston Texans chose Andre Johnson as their first inductee into the franchise’s Ring of Honor.
Johnson, speaking on a podcast hosted by former teammate Arian Foster, recently said that his reservations were motivated by owner Bob McNair’s now infamous comments at the fall NFL owners’ meeting about player national anthem protests: “We can’t have inmates running the prison.”
“I wouldn’t say it surprised me, but I just didn’t like it,” Johnson said. “To know you did so much for a franchise and to have him come out and say something like that. At the end of the day, you don’t make the money if we don’t run it. If you take some people off the street and put them in there, nobody’s coming to watch that. It was real touchy with me. I even thought about not doing the ring ceremony.”
Foster, the odd- on selection as the second player to go into the Texans’ ring, decided to forgo the ceremony for Johnson because of McNair’s remarks.
McNair recently made his remarks even more incendiary when he declared he regrets making the apology about his comments last fall. Stay tuned. McNair is on a roll with puzzling remarks that critics say make him seem racially tone deaf.