What a sorry state of affairs it is when Johnny Manziel is our model now for the bad boy quarterback. He couldn’t hold Joe Namath’s swizzle stick.
Manziel reportedly was photographed recently in a Las Vegas bathroom rolling up a $20 bill, suggesting some illicit activity was about to commence. Everyone knows if you’re serious about being a big-time party animal, nothing less than a c-note will do.
Perhaps it is a reflection of the era in which we live, one in which it is somehow acceptable to take pull out a phone and take photographs inside a men’s room. But there is no charm to be found anymore in our rakish signal-callers. No magic. No class.
Back when football was football and a man could drank a Tom Collins or four, the hard-drinking, hard-living quarterback held a special place in the fan’s heart (or liver). His exploits off the field became an important chapter of his legend.
Manziel just seems like a slow-motion train wreck. About as charismatic as a drunken frat boy, with about the same career prospects.
In a 1969 profile, the late Jimmy Breslin asked Namath, the Jets quarterback who won a Super Bowl that year, if he at least curtailed his carousing on the night before a game.
Namath answered with a sly smile and a confession:
“The night before the Oakland game, I got the whole family in town and there’s people all over my apartment and the phone keeps ringing. I wanted to get away from everything. Too crowded and too much noise. So I went to the Bachelors Three (nightclub) and grabbed a girl and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red and went to the Summit Hotel and stayed in bed all night with the girl and the bottle.”
If that comes out now in the age of instant reaction, there are all kinds of 140-character howls of righteous indignation. But back then, it just seemed like we were all just a little bit jealous.
Hey, a story goes that a group of women once abandoned the Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger in order to go partying with Namath. Now that’s the kind of serious game that Manziel just can’t possess.
The Bears Jim McMahon somehow managed the delicate balance of misbehavior and playing collegiately for Brigham Young. He once mooned a television helicopter on Super Bowl week. His mantra: “Outrageousness is nothing more than a way to wake people up.”
Before he made his Hall of Fame chops with the Washington Redskins, Sonny Jurgensen was jettisoned by the Eagles, in part because of the hours and company he kept. “When I left Philadelphia,” he once said, “all the bartenders wore black arm bands.”
Somehow all these fellows managed to come out the other end of their careers as somewhat endearing figures, likely because they weren’t subject to today’s no-secret society. (It needs to be noted that the quality of jaunty inebriation doesn’t age well. See Namath slobbering over sideline reporter Suzy Kolber in 2003).
Will we ever be able to look back on the life and antics of Johnny Manziel with anything resembling warm, fuzzy nostalgia? Unlikely, unless we can turn back the clock a couple decades or more.
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