LIONS INVITE JOHNSON TO TRAINING CAMP

After Calvin Johnson basically trashed his former team, the Detroit Lions, during a news conference in Italy last week, Lions President Rod Wood said Monday that he had extended a training camp invitation to the franchise’s all-time leading re- ceiver in an interview on the team’s radio station WJR. “It’s a little disappointing,” Wood said in Monday’s interview with Frank

Beckmann. “Calvin, interestingly, texted me a couple weeks ago, so we’ve exchanged a few text messages recently. They were very cordial. ... I did invite him out to training camp. We’ll see if he does that. Hopefully he shows up. He’s a great player. We want to have him kind of in the tent, not outside the tent. And hopefully that’s the way it ends up.” Johnson told reporters in Italy: “I was stuck in my contract in Detroit. … I didn’t see a chance for them to win a Super Bowl at the time, and for the work I was putting in, it wasn’t worth my time to keep on beating my head against the wall.” He then added, “It’s the definition of insanity.”