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Blood, sweat and tears

This time, the horse had left the barn.

Judy Johnson, William Jackson’s grandmother, couldn’t stop crying Thursday night. Not after the Bengals took him with the 24th pick. She has seen him play nearly every game he’s ever played, starting with the Fifth Ward’s Finnegan Park Falcons and she just couldn’t stop.

“He tried to console me,” she said Friday. “But the more he hugged me, the more I cried. I had to leave. If I had stayed I just would have kept on crying.”

How things have changed. From the time he was six weeks old to until he started to go to school at six years old, William lived with Judy.