Janis Joplin was a classmate in the late '50s at Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur, Texas and so was Jimmy Johnson, the former Super Bowl-winning coach of the Dallas Cowboys and a studio analyst for the NFL games on FOX.
But Johnson, a member of the school's football team, didn't take a piece of Janis's heart in a good way. He and his teammates bullied her.
Johnson wrote about this in his 1994 autobiography, but the story has come to light again in a new book, Janis: Her Life and Music.
He used to refer to her as “Beats Weeds,” a crude reference to her pubic hair, and he and his teammates used to grope her and spread rumors that she’d slept with their friends because she “looked and acted weird.”
In his book, Johnson wrote that he picked on her because she "ran with the beatnik crowd."
He added, “Janis looked and acted so weird that when we were around her, mostly in the hallways at school, we would give her a hard time.
This new book, by Holly George-Warren, will be out on Tuesday.