Even the most casual US sports fan isn’t likely to have forgotten about Johnny Manziel, football’s Charlie Sheen. The latest instalment of Netflix’s sports documentary series Untold devotes an episode to the bad boy quarterback’s controversy-stained rise in college football, his NFL flameout and his off-field tumble into infamy and disgrace. Titled Untold: Johnny Football, the 72-minute runtime barely covers everything, and resolves even less.
For a start, director Ryan Duffy (the Vice media alum who also co-stewarded Untold’s excellent two-part deep dive into college football cat-fishing victim Manti Te’o) could have fast-forwarded through Manziel’s humble Texas small town beginnings and jumped straight to 12 November 2012: the day Manziel led Texas A&M to a shock upset over the vaunted Alabama on the Crimson Tide’s hallowed home turf. That victory, the film rightly points out, didn’t just make Manziel a household name across the US. It also changed the economics at Texas A&M, a military school in the Lone Star hinterlands that had recently jumped into the SEC – the top-level conference known for churning out future pros.
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In less than a year, Texas A&M saw its donations more than double to $740m as Manziel Mania spread from shore to shore, and boiled over when the cocksure QB made history as the first freshman to win the Heisman trophy, college football’s top individual prize. Those millions helped finance a hefty raise for head coach Kevin Sumlin and pay for a raft of athletics facilities upgrades. It was only a matter of time before Manziel went diving across the NCAA’s bright red line that stopped college athletes from earning money.
He couldn’t have wanted for a better lead blocker than Nate Fitch, his childhood chum who masterminded an autographs-for-cash scheme that had Manziel flashing cash at private parties with Drake and LeBron James and crisscrossing the country on private jets. When schoolmarms questioned the wretched excess, Fitch said it was him who came up with the idea for Manziel to say his apparently middle-class family was actually sitting on tons of oil money. When the NCAA investigated, Fitch took the fall and Manziel, who risked losing his playing eligibility, was suspended for a half game. After slipping that trap, the man known as Johnny Football was convinced nothing could bring him down.
The Cleveland Browns blowing a late first-round draft choice on Manziel in 2014 simply burnished the team’s reputation for ineptitude. As Erik Burkhardt, Manziel’s former agent, tells it in the film’s most riveting sequence by far, he spent months repairing the damage his client had done to his reputation only to find Manziel coming off a Beverly Hills bender days before he worked out for teams at the NFL scouting combine.
Burkhardt remembers being inside an Indianapolis hotel elevator with three prominent team decision makers while ferrying drugs tests to Manziel’s room and holding his client’s cloudy samples aloft for scrutiny like a fussy winemaker. When another bender the night before a private workout with the Browns takes out the receivers meant to catch passes for Manziel, the hungover quarterback takes the field with his agent and lawyer flanking him out wide as if nothing is amiss. “It’s Weekend at Bernie’s,” Burkhardt says, “like, how can we get him to the finish line? The wheels are coming off every day.”
Carrying a pro franchise proved too heavy a burden for Manziel, and he resorted to self-sabotage as a quick ticket out. His reps dropped him, his loved ones stepped back and the Browns cut him in March 2016 – after just 14 uninspiring games. Derided as an all-time bust, Manziel set off on another bender, burning through $5m with a plan to end his life that was thwarted when his gun malfunctioned.
“Still to this day, I don’t know what happened. But the gun just clicked on me,” he says in the documentary.
There are reasons to be sympathetic towards Manziel: he links many of his problems to his bipolar disorder, which wasn’t diagnosed for much of his youth. But there also isn’t much remorse from Manziel, particularly around troubling allegations of domestic abuse brought by his ex-girlfriend. (The case was later dismissed after he attended an anger management course and a domestic violence victim impact panel.)
Sports documentaries try to look back on controversial times with subjects who are in a much different place. But in Untold: Johnny Football, it’s clear their bad boy hero, after failing in his attempts at a pro football comeback, remains stuck in a tough place by the looks of his crosscountry living situation – back home with dad in Texas one minute, partying with douche bros at a big house in Arizona the next.
“A lot of people wonder, you know, ‘Why isn’t he doing anything?’” his younger sister Meri says. “He’s not in a place mentally to go out and do something right now.”
Ultimately, the tragedy of Johnny Football isn’t that he never lived up to his enormous potential. It’s that he’s still living in the past.
Untold: Johnny Football is available on Netflix on 8 August.
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