Johnny’s grandfather Big Paul, were driven to school by chauffeured limousine. The Manziels entertained celebrities, from Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and Congressman John F. Kennedy to Governor Allan Shivers and comedian and fellow Lebanese American Danny Thomas.
Bobby had been a dazzling athlete too, a small, wiry, blazingly fast kid who played quarterback in high school in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He was also a serious boxer, so quick that in spite of his size he was hired as a lightweight sparring partner for heavyweight champions Jess Willard and Jack Dempsey, who liked his raw speed. Dempsey—the world heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926, known as Uncle Jack in the family—would become Bobby’s lifelong business partner in oil and other investments. One of their better-known ventures was the 20,000-seat indoor arena in Tyler called the Oil Palace, which was eventually finished (on a slightly smaller scale) by Bobby’s oldest son. After Bobby’s death, his wife, known by the family as Mama Dot, who was as driven and as talented as her husband, took over the business and expanded it, drilling fifty new oil wells a year.
A 1930s family photo showing (from left) Bobby Manziel (Johnny's great-grandfather), Mary Manziel (Bobby's mother), an unknown man, Gloria Manziel, and former world heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey, who sparred with Bobby, became his business partner, and was known in the family as Uncle Jack.
The next generation of Manziels were not only wealthy but just as competitive as their parents. Big Paul was a Golden Gloves boxing champion. He raced anything he could get his hands on, mostly cars and boats. He set a Mississippi state record on the Southern drag-boat circuit and won a national boat-racing championship in Oklahoma. Then there were the roosters. Big Paul and his brother Bobby Jr. loved cockfighting, a blood sport that was still legal at the time. They raised roosters on their own spacious ranches in Tyler and traveled all over the world to fight them and bet on them. Big Paul’s then-wife, Pat—Johnny’s grandmother—loved going to the fights. She too was athletic and played to win, especially when going against her nephews and nieces and even her own children, including Johnny’s father. “There was a lot of racing,” she told me. “We would race from the gate to the boathouse. I would beat them every time. We’d have races on Jet Skis, to see who could jump the highest wave. Or who could stay up longest on water skis. I never let them win, and when they did win, it really ticked me off.” Pat would later make a deal with Johnny’s entire Little League team: $20 for every home run they hit. She once paid out $80 in a single day, most of it to her grandson.
The competitive gene continued to work its way down. Johnny’s father grew up racing boats and cars with Big Paul. He played golf in high school; won a scholarship to Midwestern State University, in Wichita Falls; and is a scratch golfer today. He and Johnny’s mother, Michelle, who also played varsity golf, at Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, have a closet full of amateur tournament trophies.
Johnny, three generations removed from his lightning-fisted, bantam-weight great-grandfather, turned out to be the most competitive Manziel of all. When he was young, his step-grandfather on his mother’s side, Jerry Loggins, who owns the oldest restaurant in Tyler, would pick him up after elementary school and take him fishing or golfing. No matter what the activity was, says Loggins, it was always a contest. “If I caught more fish than Johnny did, he would get very quiet, and when we got home, he would go to his room, and you wouldn’t see him. He just doesn’t like losing, at anything. Ever.”
When Johnny was in seventh grade, his parents moved from Tyler to Kerrville. It was a deliberate move away from the family enclave. “We love the family, but we needed to get away,” says Michelle. “In some ways it was too easy. I just wanted our kids to be treated as kids and not have that Manziel name over their heads. In Tyler it means you own a lot of property and have oil interests. Nobody in Kerrville knew about any of that, and we thought that was a good thing. We liked the idea of a fresh start.”
Kerrville also offered them business opportunities, which they needed. Though Big Paul and Pat were wealthy, they insisted that their kids make it on their own, with no financial assistance. Thus Johnny’s parents are, in the words of his uncle Harley Hooper, who owns a clothing store in College Station in addition to the one in Tyler, “entirely self-made. They have worked their butts off.” They are affluent but not rich, as they have sometimes been portrayed. Paul’s main line of work has been selling cars; today he is the general manager of a Honda dealership in Longview. Michelle sells real estate and also works in Hooper’s College Station store. In Tyler, they had built and sold houses as a side business. The opportunity to build houses in the booming Hill Country led them to Kerrville, which was how Johnny ended up at Tivy High School.
To many people, Manziel’s Heisman season seemed to come out of nowhere. These people, it must be said, did not live in the Hill Country or neighboring San Antonio near the end of the past decade. Those who did got their first look at Manziel’s abilities on the night of September 26, 2008, when the Fighting Antlers of Tivy High took on the Chargers of Boerne-Champion High. Manziel was a sophomore who had recently won the varsity quarterback job. The Chargers were undefeated, ranked fifth in the region, and had held their previous opponents to 13 points or less per game. To the amazement of the crowd, the slender, five-foot-ten-inch Manziel ripped through Boerne-Champion’s defense as though it did not exist. He threw for