Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, the former NFL wide receiver, attributes his great football career to McDonald’s. Today, he is the owner of three McDonald’s locations in Miami, Indiana, and Cincinnati.
Johnson shared that, as a child, McDonald’s was a regular component of his diet because it was cheap. “When I was a kid, burgers were 50 cents,” Johnson told GQ Sports earlier this year. “Fries were 20 cents. Therefore, it was all we could afford when I was a kid.
“You know what happened when I was little too when I ate McDonald’s? I never got hurt. You know what else I did as a kid when I ate McDonald’s? I dominated everything that I did, even in kindergarten,” he added.
The former player for the Cincinnati Bengals stressed on the “I Am Athlete” podcast in 2021 that choosing McDonald’s meals frequently over healthier options allowed him to develop an injury-free body that could sustain tackles. Even when Brandon Marshall, his co-host, underlined the need to adhere to a rigorous diet in order to recover from an injury and record a Super Bowl triumph, Johnson disagreed. He remarked on how satisfying it was to go to McDonald’s both during and between football seasons.
He said in one of the episodes, “I never got f–ing hurt, never… you know why? Because I ate McDonald’s, and I built a f-ing callus in my body.”
The New York Post wrote that the star athlete mentioned that every first date he’s ever gone on has been at McDonald’s. He works out while eating it and has had it delivered to him while in the VIP area of a nightclub.
Johnson established a reputation as one of the flashiest players in the NFL. Despite the image he created about himself, Johnson was very frugal when he first entered the league, according to CBS Sports.
He lived in Cincinnati Bengals’ stadium for the first two years of his career when he first entered the league in a bid to save money. As a rookie coming into the NFL, he said there was no need to spend and waste money when everything he needed was in the stadium.
