Johnny puts football back in his story
Tiger-Cat Johnny Manziel’s four million social media followers and a thirsty media want in on his comeback. Fans will get a glimpse of his star power in Friday night’s first pre-season game
TO HIS TEAMMATES and coaches, this is strictly about football.
But for oceans of outside onlookers, Johnny Manziel’s first appearance Friday night in a Hamilton Tiger-Cats uniform is about celebrity fascination, pop culture and social media; our collective obsession with the Big Name, the Big History, the Big Fall and, potentially, the Big Redemption.
The masses, hip or old school, love a story and Johnny Manziel is a story.
Manziel, one the best athletes in the history of American college football, and a highly paid NFL player until he plummeted from grace by late 2015, will be the top backup to undisputed starting quarterback Jeremiah Masoli Friday night against the Toronto Argonauts in the team’s first pre-season game.
Although he was a spectacularly gifted quarterback before languishing in football homelessness for two seasons, Manziel is more widelyrecognized as a cultural figure than a football one.
Manziel has led a very public life, and the public has come to expect, even demand, a piece of that life.
This is a 25-year-old nicknamed “Johnny Football” whose Twitter account has a stunning 2.2 million followers and his Instagram another two million; who has a podcast contract with the controversial satirical culture/sports website Barstool Sports; who has his own website named Comeback$ZN which sells “comeback season” merchandise; whose name is recognized by more casual sports fans than those of highly accomplished NFL and CFL players; who has made enough mistakes, many captured on social media, that he said last week that he knows he “can never outrun my past.”
He’s such a lightning rod that online gambling sites are offering odds on all aspects of his CFL career, ranging from number of games played to whether he’ll be arrested by next February. Emails sent to a Spectator columnist from Manziel’s home state of Texas predict a massive following of Ticat games there through giant U.S. broadcaster ESPN.
There is an assumption in some quarters that the TigerCats have signed Manziel for the publicity and increased turnstile count. But while casual fans will certainly be more aware of the team, this is a franchise already on sound financial footing and the CFL reality is that winning is by far the biggest boost to ticket sales. So Manziel would not be here if the Ticats football operations staff did not think he could play in the CFL, as a starter or backup.
While a sizeable number of Manziel Ticat jerseys have already been seen around town, the team would not comment directly on Manziel’s effect on either ticket or merchandise sales.
“For a lot of different reasons it’s been a very positive spring,” Matt Afinec, the team’s executive vice-president of business said via email. “There’s a lot of positive momentum behind both the team and Tim Hortons Field right now so to single out the impact of one specific development is probably tough to do.”
But as of Thursday night, there were only about 200 tickets available on Ticketmaster for Friday. Season’s ticket holders take up about 16,000 of the 22,500 seats available for each game including pre-season, and vouchers were distributed to about 2,000 participants in the Ticats’ BeFit school program which could be redeemed for Friday night tickets.
The Tiger-Cats have never included attendance on the official statistics sheets for their exhibition games at Tim Hortons Field, although they do for regular season and playoff games. But crowds have been noticeably smaller than at regular season games (often some season’s ticket holders don’t use their seats). Depending upon the weather, the crowd might be near-capacity Friday and that could be easily attributed to the Manziel Effect.
In his return to professional football Manziel has been forced — again, quite publicly — to take various forms of rehabilitative steps (including a substanceabuse program) as part of an agreement to dismiss February 2016 charges of domestic assault. The CFL has submitted him to similar conditions including being assessed by an independent expert on domestic violence.
During his whirlwind fortnight in Hamilton, he has not only said the right things about wanting to be a better person and harder worker, he has shown it to his teammates.
Time will be the only true barometer of his success in that regard — and, understandably, there are still many cynics — but he’s off to as good a start here as he can get. Manziel’s teammates speak well of him, and he always shows deference to Masoli, praising him as an accomplished quarterback and a welcoming teammate.
Masoli, already admired by his Ticat peers for his strong 2017 performance and career-long persistence, has further endeared himself to them with his near-noble disregard of the media mania around his backup.
Head coach June Jones has essentially told his players that a rising tide lifts all boats in the harbour: the extra attention on Manziel will get them more recognition too.
Most years, the Ticats’ only pre-season game at home raises just a modicum of general interest. The best players usually see only a few minutes of action and the results don’t count in any standings. It’s a coaching and deep-dive fan function.
But this time it’s different. It was always going to be somewhat different with Manziel having a chance to play. But when Jones announced early this week that Manziel had ascended from No. 3 to No. 2 status and would be the first quarterback into the game after Masoli, it became really different.
On Friday night, the press box — traditionally sparsely populated for a pre-season game — will be nearly full. One Toronto newspaper has applied for five credentials, USA Today is sending a writer, ESPN will be there, as will Barstool Sports and both of Canada’s national sports networks.
Even though it’s been clear that he would rather be just another one of the guys in black and gold this week, Manziel is always a crowd magnet.
And should he come up really big in his 15-or-so plays Friday — even if it’s against Argonaut backup players — North American social and sports media will turn into a pile of iron filings.