The pain wasn’t the same as a midair smack from a hulking linebacker while coming across the middle, but former Detroit Lions superstar receiver Calvin Johnson said he needed some serious relief during his 2016 season on “Dancing with the Stars.” 

“When I was on the dancing show, I was using a CBD (the non-psychoactive ingredient of the cannabis plant) topical that my buddy gave me because my ankles were swelling up so much that I didn’t think I would be able to finish the show,” Johnson said during an interview with the Detroit Free Press during the Toronto Cannabis Conference last month. “The relief happened almost overnight. I was already open-minded to marijuana, but after that, I became a true believer just because of the experience.”

The topicals helped him stay on ABC-TV’s popular dancing competition, where he made it to the finals and finished third out of 13 contestants.

Johnson’s former Lions teammate and current business partner, Rob Sims, had a similar cannabis epiphany after he retired. [Read more at Detroit Free Press]