guys, and various country music stars. He appeared on Letterman and Leno, threw out the first pitch at Rangers and Padres games, and traveled to Toronto to spend time with his favorite musician, Drake, who Manziel says treated him “like family, like a brother.”
Throughout it all there was a steady drumbeat of criticism. Many people simply didn’t approve of Manziel’s behavior. Thanks to his family’s money, he could afford things that most college kids couldn’t, and he was not inclined to deprive himself of, well, anything. His dad bought him a Mercedes C-Class. He sat courtside at basketball games. He partied in Cabo San Lucas with bikini-clad college students. When his family sued some people who were selling Johnny Football merchandise for copyright infringement, he was perceived as greedy. When someone faked a Tweet from him saying a nasty thing about an Ohio State basketball player, the entire Buckeye Nation came down on him.
This summer he was in the news almost every day. The first incident was his own fault. Angry over a parking ticket he had received in College Station, on June 16 he sent a tweet to his 300,000-plus followers that said, without any reference to the ticket, “Bullshit like tonight is a reason why I can’t wait to leave College Station . . . whenever it may be.” Though he immediately deleted the tweet and followed with the penitent “Don’t ever forget that I love A&M, but walk a day in my shoes,” he set off yet another viral round of tongue wagging and obloquy. On July 13 he roared into the news again, this time for not showing up to meetings and training sessions at a quarterback camp in Louisiana run by Archie Manning and his sons. The subtext was the usual one: he had been photographed at a bar the night before with Alabama quarterback A. J. McCarron, thus his critics gleefully concluded that he had been out drinking again. He denied it, saying that he had missed the meetings because his cellphone had died and the alarm hadn’t sounded. The media exploded further when McCarron, in interviews that week, appeared to distance himself from Manziel. Though Peyton Manning defended Manziel and McCarron later tweeted that “people have lost their mind if they think I dissed JM in any way,” the damage had been done. People who believed he was an out-of-control party hound would see more proof when, on July 15, Manziel pleaded guilty to a single charge of failing to properly identify himself in the June 2012 drinking and fighting incident in College Station. Though the charges of disorderly conduct and carrying fake identification were dropped and he was let off with a $2,000 fine and no additional jail time, news of the plea was devoured on sports talk radio and message boards.
What to make of all this? Though a certain segment of the Internet now seems to regard Manziel as an irredeemable villain, when you get right down to it, his drinking and fighting and poor social-media judgment are little more than the work of a defensibly cocky, impulsive twenty-year-old with a maverick streak. It’s the same quality that makes him such a terror on the football field, and it is essentially a hereditary trait. Earlier in the summer, I’d spent an afternoon at his grandmother Pat’s attractive, memorabilia-filled townhome in Tyler. Johnny and two of his friends were out on the lake with Big Paul, messing around in his speed boat, a heavily tricked-out machine with twin supercharged Corvette engines that Manziel’s father estimates has cost Big Paul half a million dollars. As we waited, Pat told me a story about beating her children at a game called Krazy Bee Rummy back in the old days. Suddenly the boys blew in from the garage.
“Well, I can add one to the bucket list,” Manziel said. “I always wanted to go more than one hundred miles an hour in a boat. It was awesome.” His friends Colton and Nate nodded their heads in agreement. “We hit 102,” Manziel continued. “It blew Nate’s contacts out of his eyes.”
In most families, hanging out with one’s grandfather does not entail attempts to set speed records. But these are Manziels. As the boys wolfed down some reheated Chinese food, they talked about the boat ride and their plans to drive to Dallas that night to meet a new roommate of Manziel’s and attend a country music concert. Manziel, as usual, was a package of fast-moving, nervous energy. “I have trouble keeping up with him,” said Nate at one point. “He doesn’t sleep much.” In fact, you don’t have to be around Manziel long to see that he’s hyperactive—he is restless and moves constantly. “He needs to be kept busy,” says his mother. He is also, in both his personal life and on the football field, a fundamentally improvisational person. On some level an immoderate midnight tweet may be the equivalent of a 50-yard run off a busted pass play. It is this unpredictable streak, in fact, that makes him so utterly compelling, both on and off the field.
Which is why the autographs-for-money allegations have at least the ring of truth. Would Manziel do something so ignorant and self-destructive that it could, in the worst-case scenario, implode the Aggies’ season and jeopardize his own future NFL career? Sure. This is Johnny Football we’re talking about. He still hasn’t mastered all his powers, and there’s really no telling what might happen with him, ever. He could beat Alabama again, this time at Kyle Field, on his way to winning a national championship. Or he could miss that game entirely. Who knows?
A fair number of fans are already disposed to view the allegations as yet one more example of the outrageousness of the NCAA’s amateurism rules (see Behind the Lines ). A system in which Manziel—who has been worth so much to so many commercial and academic institutions—is not allowed to take a