Taking aim at the best and worst of movies and television.
Michael Johnson is perhaps best known as a four-time Olympic gold-medal winner, and for the 1996 Summer Olympics, in which he was the first man to win gold in both the 200- and 400-meter races. But he's also a businessman, with a background that goes all the way back to his days at Baylor University.
He has been a motivational speaker, founded a sports-management company and, in 2007, opened the Michael Johnson Performance Center, a training center for amateur and pro athletes in McKinney.
Small wonder that the Dallas-area resident was picked for this season of The Celebrity Apprentice, where he's one of the steadier presences in a series that features a motley crew of celebs that includes singer Cyndi Lauper, Poison lead singer Bret Michaels (both of whom reveal some surprising sides to their personalities) and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
The season begins with the contestants, who are playing for charity, split into all-female and all-male teams. Considering that Johnson has already dealt with his teammates and with Donald Trump, our questions were pretty easy for him to manage.
You have a lot of business experience. What can Celebrity Apprentice throw at you that you haven't experienced in real life?
I have set things up for myself in the years since my retirement [from track] so that I'm in complete control of the people that I work with. The people I choose to work with and choose to bring in are people that I choose to be involved with. So there's a lot of control. In this particular situation, you don't have any control. There's a new task every week, and you don't know what that's going to be. It was a challenge I decided to take on for myself. It was really about putting myself in situations that are unfamiliar to me and that I don't have complete control of.
When did you find out about the guys you'd be working with?
I didn't find out until I agreed to be on the show, but before we started shooting. I didn't know what to expect because I didn't know most of the people. I knew a couple of them already, but not very well. My immediate reaction was "This is going to be interesting." It's television, and they're going to put some characters on there to make it interesting. People that aren't all the same and have different personalities and people that I don't know, that I've got to work with and spend time with. In the end, working with all those guys was a great experience.
Who surprised you the most?
Bret was one of those people. He's a smart guy; he's been very successful in reality television and as a musician. He understands business. He has an organization that he works with for his career and all of the concert tours that he does. He has great business sense, and that's not something you might expect from a guy who wears mascara.
What's it really like in the boardroom?
The boardroom is pretty much what you see on TV. It's a process where there are a lot of questions being asked, and someone's going to get fired. You don't know going in which team is going to win, so that's the first part of the boardroom, winning the task. That takes awhile because there are a lot of questions asked and answers needed. When you're executing your task, it's a team game, but when one side loses and that side is left in the boardroom, it's no longer a team game, because blame is going to be placed and someone's going to have to be fired.
With all the athletes you've raced against and all the football players you've worked with, can you still be intimidated by someone like Donald Trump?
No, because at the end of the day, my real job is running my business. I'm in a situation where no one can really fire me.
