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"There are not a lot of professional athletes from around here," says Mike Winker, the activities director at Xavier High School in Cedar Rapids, Johnson's alma mater. "Yet Zach had the inner faith to go for that dream. I wonder how he had the belief in himself to keep going."
Zachary Harris Johnson was the first of three children, two boys and a girl, born to Dave and Julie Johnson, who Zach calls his "heroes." Dave, tall, trim and stern, is a chiropractor. Julie is a religion teacher. All three Johnson kids were athletic, but Zach was obsessed both with playing sports (basketball, baseball, soccer, golf, card games — after golf) and watching them (he can talk University of Iowa football until he's black and gold in the face).
He had a proud streak, too. Benched during a football game in junior high, Zach snuck off at halftime and sullied his pants to conceal that he hadn't played.
"It looked like he had played eight quarters," his friend Rupp recalls, laughing.
Off the field, Winker says, Zach was a favorite among teachers, "a 'Yes, sir,' 'Thank you,' 'Please' kind of guy."
As a high school freshman, Johnson stood just 5 feet and weighed 95 pounds. But his stature didn't inhibit him on the golf course, where he was a fast learner from the time he first picked up a club at age 10. Most kids his age were much longer off the tee, which forced him to rely on his accuracy and short game.
"He didn't hit the ball more than 220, but it was straight down the middle, and he never missed a putt," says Jason Vanderhorn, who played on the golf team with Zach at Regis High School (Regis later became Xavier). "If a putt was inside 10 feet, it was going in."
What distinguished young Zach was his ability to be at once fiercely competitive and eerily calm, even in defeat. During his senior year at Regis, Johnson's heavily favored golf team finished second in the state championship. The other team members were distraught, says Carol Trueg, then the Regis golf coach, "but it just kind of rolled off Zach's back. Not that he didn't care, but he knew how to let it go."
Brad Buffoni, Johnson's agent, recalls his client at a Nationwide Tour event in Chicago getting wired up for a stress test that measured how quickly a person could get his heart rate under control.
"They had to test him two or three times because they thought they were getting incorrect readings," Buffoni says. "He broke all the records."
Don't be fooled by Johnson's peaceful disposition. Anybody who's seen him at a Ping-Pong table (just ask Tiger or Phil) or on a basketball court will tell you he's a ferocious opponent. During an intramural basketball game at Drake, when Johnson was draining shots from all over the court, an opposing player shoved him to the floor at the end of the half. Johnson bounced back up, got in his grill, and yelled, "What was that!?"
"The guy was close to twice his size, and I just thought, 'Wow, there's some competitive fire there,'" recalls Brent Steele, Johnson's roommate at Drake and a teammate on the golf team.
