Another Sad Tale

Rick Sarro Thursday, July 21, 2016 Comments Off on Another Sad Tale
Another Sad Tale

Don’t sneak a peek ahead a few paragraphs.

Try and figure out who I’m referring to in yet another tragic American sports saga involving a privileged, spoiled, arrogant sports star who appears to have wasted a dream opportunity.

Now I’m trusting you to play along and refrain from scanning down in search of any clues.

Something tells me you’ll soon lock in on just who is at the center of this sad tale.

He parlayed a successful high school football career into numerous big school scholarship offers. He broke NCAA records, bursting onto the national college football stage with memorable games which led to a Heisman Trophy.

His brief two years in college was marked by early signs of trouble.

There was an arrest on misdemeanor charges, an NCAA probe and subsequent suspension for improper payments. Questionable decisions were made on and off the field. There were run-ins with his head coach and opposing players. Such behavior isn’t acceptable if you’re supposed to be your team’s leader and the face of the program.

The usual hypersensitive and cautious NFL threw caution to the breeze and drafted this evolving malcontent in the first round.

From there, more trouble.

Too much partying and not enough film study. Instead of keeping his head down and grinding it out on the practice field and weight room, this immature ingrate chose the fast lane of booze, drugs, strip clubs and night life.

He won more favors from bar owners and bouncers than NFL games. He completed more passes at the ladies than on the football field. He remembered the names of bartenders and Las Vegas dealers better than his own football plays.

When it was all said and done, he threw his team under the proverbial bus — wasting a lot of time, energy and, more important, a first-round draft pick.

He moved from the penthouse of the Heisman Trophy, the NFL and Sports Illustrated cover stories to the state of being an unemployed ex-jock making headlines on TMZ Sports.

Yes, this is the story of Johnny Football — or more correctly Johnny Manziel, considering he’s no longer officially a football player.

Manziel joins a long woebegone list of talent-laden star athletes who simply couldn’t get out of their own career-crushing way. We’ve seen this melodrama play out before with Ryan Leaf, Todd Marinavich, Jamarcus Russell, Lawrence Phillips and former LSU and McNeese running back Cecil Collins, to name just a few.

Is Manziel on that list of troubled flops? Not just yet. But he’s surely headed in that direction.

Let’s go back to his high school days in Kerrville, Texas, just outside of San Antonio. He started off as a speedy receiver, but quickly made his mark as a quarterback. Manziel was a hard worker by all accounts. But once his success and exploits under the renowned Friday night lights of the Hill Country garnered him that Texas-sized nickname “Johnny Football,” the spotlight grew — and so did his head.

Remember, this is Texas high school football, which tops the scale above most anything else in the state — except maybe the NRA.

Imagine what it’s like to be a 17-year-old kid adored and anointed Johnny Football by fans, the media and most of West Texas.

Cocky, indulged and pampered doesn’t begin to describe Manziel then and now.

He did produce for those football-crazed fans. He set high school passing totals of 7,500 yards with 75 touchdown passes against only 15 interceptions.

What really got him national recruiting attention in spite of his smallish 6-foot, 190-pound frame, was 4,038 rushing yards and 78 touchdowns scored with his legs.

Manziel, a prep Parade All American, won every conceivable honor and award as a high school senior in Texas.

The legend grew larger and so did his ego.

Baylor, Stanford, Oregon and Iowa State were among the many who wanted him. He committed to Oregon only to change his mind, and decided to stay closer to home and play at Texas A&M.

I have to wonder if things would have turned out differently if he’d opted for the Northwest, away from the hype and glare of the Aggies and the SEC.

Once at College Station, he redshirted his first year and wasn’t the big man on campus at the time. But he still acted like one.

All bets were off when Manziel won the starting quarterback position during his redshirt freshman season.

He won early and often in head coach Kevin Sumlin’s Air Raid offense. Manziel was exciting, unpredictable and stunningly effective as a great improviser at both passing and running.

He was the first in NCAA history to have two 500-plus-yard offensive games in one season. Manziel broke Archie Manning’s long-standing record of 540 total offensive yards in one game. Manziel broke it twice, while becoming only the fifth player in college football history to pass for more than 3,000 yards and rush for 1,000 yards in a single season.

If you follow SEC football you know the game. You know the play.

It was the 2012 matchup against No. 1-ranked and unbeaten Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Manziel went back to pass — under pressure and engulfed in a sea of Crimson red. In a split second, Manziel spun around 360 degrees, somehow escaping the scrum. All of a sudden, the football was bobbled into the air. But the shifty quarterback grabbed it, avoided the fumble and scrambled out of peril — all the while holding the football with one hand ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

He did, and zipped a bullet pass in the end zone for what proved to be one of the season’s most amazing plays.

Manziel took a pounding from a tenacious Bama defense, but he came out on top 29-24 as the then 15th-ranked Aggies scored an early season upset.

That play won Manziel the Heisman Trophy — the first freshman ever to be so honored. Johnny Football was now a household name.

I think the play also did him just as much harm as good.

It convinced Manziel he could vanquish most any foe or obstacle with some playground-like fancy footwork and admittedly great football instincts. If he could get away with fooling the legendary Nick Saban, he could do the same with everyone else in almost every situation.

Trouble was never far behind wherever Manziel went. There were misdemeanor charges from a bar fight in College Station. Then there were headlines of him crashing and getting tossed from a frat party at the University of Texas. (It was a bold move for an Aggie to mingle with his rival Longhorns — in Austin, no less.)

More controversy resulted when it was learned that Manziel had received payments from a memorabilia salesman who had him stashed in a hotel signing hundreds of cards, shirts etc.

The NCAA and Texas A&M apparently agreed to sweep this incident to the sidelines by putting Manziel on the bench for a half-game suspension in a season-opening game against Rice in 2013.

Again, Johnny Football scrambled his way out of another embarrassing mess.

Sumlin, the coaching staff and athletic department administrators must share the blame, as they enabled Manziel’s boorish behavior on and off the field. They had to keep their Heisman Trophy candidate happy and motivated because he was winning games, selling tickets and jerseys and making the university millions.

The national media attention and coverage was priceless when it involved football victories and not police reports.

Money was at the root of it all.

Manziel grew up not wanting for anything, as his father Paul and mother Michelle were wealthy from oil interests in Texas. They obviously spoiled their only son, which kept him on the low end of the maturity scale.

Once Manziel started flashing that obnoxious money sign by rubbing two fingers together during games, I knew he lacked the character and leadership required to be an NFL quarterback.

Winning or losing, he made the money sign. Sumlin told him to cool it, but to no avail. More money signs. His fingers were busy at the Heisman presentation and NFL Draft as well.

Manziel didn’t have a clue. “I don’t like his antics,” ranted former Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys head coach Barry Switzer. “I think he’s an arrogant little prick.”

After Manziel decided to forgo his final two years of college and enter the NFL Draft, I thought he was no better than a third or fourth round pick: a project kind of player who might find a roster spot with the right team and offense.

Don’t get me wrong: he was an exceptional college quarterback. But I thought he lacked the level of skills, arm strength, discipline, work ethic, maturity and leadership the NFL requires.

The Cleveland Browns thought differently, and once again used a first-round pick on a suspect college quarterback. He was taken with the 22nd selection.

Johnny Football fooled them again.

It went from bad to worse in a hurry.

Manziel flipped the bird at Washington fans in a preseason loss to the Redskins. There were reports he didn’t study or simply could not grasp the Browns playbook. Browns head coach Mike Pettine, a veteran of NFL coaching, didn’t want Manziel, nor did most of the staff. It was a front office and ownership selection, and it showed.

Social media was Manziel and the Browns’ worst enemy.

Manziel kept popping up on websites, Instragram and Twitter while he was partying in Texas during a Browns bye week instead of studying film or working out in Cleveland. Then there was the time he was supposed to be recuperating from a concussion but donned a disguise and got caught in Las Vegas again.

He could not be counted on — on the field or off. It was a problem the lowly Browns could not afford from a first round pick.

The minion-sized, scrambling quarterback with negligible NFL assets didn’t comprehend that he had limited options at this level and was about to throw away his best opportunity to prove himself worthy.

Manziel was given every opportunity to prove his critics wrong. But his performances in a few starts or during back-up roles never got appreciably better.

The Browns did what the Browns usually do: admit their mistake and cut their losses. Manziel was released in March.

You would think this would be his wake-up call. Not quite.

Domestic abuse charges stemming from a physical altercation with his former girlfriend Colleen Crowley led to an indictment from a Dallas grand jury in April. The case and charges are still pending.

His marketing team dropped him. His agent Erik Burkhardt cut bait and bailed. The bombastic Drew Rosenhaus agreed to represent Manziel on the condition he clean up his act. If any agent could get through to the tainted Heisman winner, it had to be the equally arrogant and egomaniacal Rosenhaus.

A few weeks in, Rosenhaus, for the first time in his 27 years as an agent, dropped a client. He saw no future in continuing ties with Johnny Football.

The next day, Nike dropped Manziel as well.

The hole just got deeper when Bob Hinton, his attorney in the domestic abuse case, accidentally sent a text to an Associated Press reporter lamenting Manziel’s alleged purchase of more than $1,000 dollars of drug paraphernalia in Dallas. That, too, was splashed across social media, TMZ and mainstream media.

I was waiting on news that Manziel was hooking up with one of the Kardasian sisters. That would make this whole crazy story complete.

All the while, going back to his early problems in college, I wondered where his parents were in all of this. Why didn’t his mom or dad come down on little Johnny; cut him off from the family fortune; or lock him in his room until he grew up?

They remained silent but supportive through the entire circus. That was the case until recently, anyway.

The nadir moment had to come when Manziel’s father Paul opened up to ESPN. “He’s a druggie,” Paul said of his 23-year-old son. “It’s not a secret that he’s a druggie. I don’t know what to say other than my son is a druggie and he needs help.”

Paul Manziel continued, “I hate to say it, but I hope he goes to jail. I mean, that would be best place for him.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

From a star-studded high school career, to a record-setting two years at Texas A & M, to winning the Heisman Trophy and being a first-round NFL draft pick; yet Manziel’s dad says prison is where his son should be right now.

That, apparently, went in one ear and out the other, as Johnny, the unemployed quarterback who has now been suspended for four games by the NFL for substance abuse violations, told his dad “Hi” — via social media, no less — while partying at a beach side mansion in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Manziel claims he will begin a path of sobriety, a healthy diet and focused workouts in July. This will be after he finishes his holiday party with Playboy Playmates and a posse of 20 pals south of the border. Remember, he has had one stint in rehab before. See how well that worked for him.

It’s impossible to imagine any NFL team stupid or desperate enough to take a chance on Manziel this year. He’s living off of millions from the guaranteed money from his contract with Cleveland. But the NFL’s just announced four-game suspension has prompted the Browns to try to recoup $2 million from that deal.

NFL executive and former player Troy Vincent has said the league wants to help Manziel with his problems, but the globe-trotting party boy won’t return their calls. Vincent says, “It’s hard to help someone if they won’t meet you halfway.”

Even though I don’t think Manziel has NFL skills, I would like to see him succeed at some level — or just get his life in order.

His second chances will soon run out. His bank account won’t last forever. And even TMZ will lose interest and move on, as will all of Manziel’s partying friends.

Johnny Football might end up alone, broke and in jail, left with only a pretty cool nickname.

Comments are closed.