Johnny Manziel has had a career that has been like a roller coaster, and it has made him one of the largest and most known names in sports. Despite this, he is ready to leave football, and the entire Johnny Football madness that has surrounded it, in the past.
His meteoric rise to fame and glory, the debauchery that followed him from college to the pros, and the personal struggles that ended his nascent NFL career in just two years and nearly took his life are the subjects of a powerful new documentary on Netflix called “UNTOLD: Johnny Football.” The film tells the story of the former quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, who won the Heisman Trophy, and details the debauchery that followed him from college to the pros.
Now, Manziel has shared with Insider that he is prepared to close the book on that period of his life and “let the past be the past.”
“I still get a lot of questions regarding football and regarding a past career, and I want to put the whole Johnny Football thing to rest,” he added. “I don’t think Johnny Football was ever a real person.” “Even though it’ll never quite fully go away, at least for the majority of people in my interactions in daily life, I want to be able to put this story out there and just let it be what it is,” she said. “It’s important to me that I’m able to let it be what it is.”
The rise of Johnny Manziel to the pinnacle of football and his subsequent fall from grace in the professional ranks were both meticulously documented and widely publicized as they occurred in real time. But his current emphasis on “being open and being honest” while “not having any reservations with the struggles that you have in life,” as he told Insider, gives his narrative a fresh perspective and illuminates it in a different way.
Manziel was only a teenager when he was catapulted into the public eye thanks to an amazing performance during his freshman year at Texas A&M. Manziel was born and raised in Texas. As the season went, he broke record after record, gaining the nickname “Johnny Football,” while leading the Aggies to an astounding 11-2 record for the year and a resounding victory in the Cotton Bowl Classic. He also led the Aggies to a record of victory in the Cotton Bowl Classic.
Manziel became the first-ever freshman to win the Heisman Trophy, college football’s most coveted individual award, at the end of the season, just a few days after he turned 20 years old. This is perhaps the most notable achievement of Manziel’s career.
The extraordinary honor pushed Johnny to near-instant celebrity, and his younger sister remarks in the documentary that Manziel became “a little bit larger than football at that point.” Manziel’s meteoric rise to fame was documented in the film.
