Mike Check: Let Johnny Football have his fun

Johnny Manziel reported for duty on time with the Browns this morning thus disappointing all of the moralizers who were ready to rip him  if he showed up a couple minutes late.

You see, Johnny Football had too much fun over the weekend. Manziel did what Manziel does and went to Vegas to party with Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski. Manziel, again doing what Manziel does, posted a picture to his Instagram account featuring Gronkowski and several attractive women in bikinis.

This sent some fans and sports media moralizers into a tizzy. Manziel should be studying his playbook! This isn’t helping Manziel shed his party-boy image! Johnny Football just needs to grow up!

Oh, please. The Browns were off. Manziel wasn’t on the clock. Who cares if he heads to Vegas to party?

Manziel is a young, rich famous athlete. The people who have a problem with his partying tend to be none of these things. These two things are related.

Personally, I'd wonder about Manziel if he didn't party. I'm not young, rich and famous but, if I were, you'd see pics of me partying with beautiful women all over the Web. Heck, I'm past my partying prime but if I had an invitation you would have seen me in that pic raising a glass with Gronk, Johnny Football and those attractive women in bikinis.

Of course, I’m neither a Browns fan nor naïve enough to believe sports are anything but entertainment. That makes me unsuited for the kind of irrational, hypocritical thinking necessary to have a problem with Manziel’s off-field activities.

I understand this phenomenon from my days covering the NBA, first the Heat and then the Hawks. Fans want to believe that the players for their favorite team spend every day in the offseason working on their game and become upset when they hear  about those players having too much fun.

The same goes for too many of my sports media colleagues. They have decided that players must behave a certain way while away from the field to prove their seriousness, their “dedication to the game,” their professionalism. Players should “set an example,” be the first to arrive and last to leave and all the other romantic BS clichés sports commentators cling to as it becomes more obvious that it’s all entertainment.

Combine the get-off-my-lawn crustiness and self-righteousness of some in sports media with  fans’ expectation that players for “their” team are always working to fill their vicarious needs and you end up with absurd hand-wringing and tsk-tsking of players for partying.

There have been lots of choir boys who did the “right things” and couldn’t play. There have been lots of party boys who were superstars. You can find counterexamples for both, of course, but the point is Manziel’s partying in of itself does not mean he’s not doing his job with the Browns.

Manziel made this point with a figurative middle finger for his haters on his Instagram account.

The message accompanying that pic: "Guess it's impossible to enjoy the weekend and study?"

Long live Johnny Football.