'Untold: Johnny Football' pulls back curtain on wild ride Johnny Manziel took through football career

For all of the hours of interviews director Ryan Duffy captured of a seemingly older and wiser Johnny Manziel, it was a quote from his first press conference as a member of the Texas A&M football team that captured the heart of the documentary “Untold: Johnny Football.”
“I don’t really see myself as that ‘Johnny Football’ craze that’s kind of swept Aggieland and swept around the nation a little bit,” he said in the clip. “I see myself as Johnny Manziel, the guy from Kerrville, Texas, who is trying to be a laid-back guy who likes to hang out with my friends and be a college student just like anybody else.”
The 70-minute documentary, which debuts Tuesday on Netflix, pulls back the curtain on the multiple sides of the former Heisman Trophy winner: the football phenom known by his fanbase as Johnny Football and his hard-partying alter ego that didn’t let football get in the way of his fast-paced lifestyle.
“I made [the documentary] to answer a question which is that fundamental one that the country has been asking since 2012, which is ‘What happened to Johnny? What really was this? And where did Johnny go?’” Duffy said.
The documentary begins with Manziel’s time in the boot camp regimen of the Kerrville Tivy football program and leads through his eventual ouster from the Cleveland Browns and the low points of his life to date, which he said included daily drug use. Manziel says his rock bottom came after his shot at pro football ended when he purchased a gun to use for suicide. Ultimately, the attempt failed. He said the gun clicked on him and he still doesn’t know what happened.
“Direct self-sabotage,” he said of his life at the time. “Trying to burn this thing down. I had planned to do everything I wanted to do at that point in my life, spend as much money as I possibly could and then my plan was to take my life.”
The Manziel documentary is a part of a series on Netflix’s streaming app, which also includes Duffy’s work chronicling the first-person story of former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o and the Heisman finalist’s online love interest that later was uncovered as a fake.
Since Manziel was cut from the Browns in 2016, he has fielded multiple requests to do a documentary, but this was the first he agreed to. While Duffy said he wasn’t completely sure why Manziel signed on, he said timing and the wide audience of Netflix possibly played a part. Duffy also said he got to know Manziel and built a professional relationship for months before they started filming interviews.
“I think sometimes the timing on these things just feels right,” Duffy said. “Johnny turned 30 during the course of production. I think he’s got a decent amount of distance. He’s feeling good. He’s in a good place in his life.”
One segment of the documentary explores the money-making operation Manziel and his friend Nate Fitch, known as “Uncle Nate,” took on after his Heisman trophy freshman season. The money collected from autograph signings, which at the time was illegal per NCAA rules, set up a jet-setting lifestyle that took Manziel courtside to NBA games across the country and into parties with some of the biggest names in entertainment.
“This train was going full speed ahead, and it didn’t really stop until the NCAA got involved,” Manziel said in the documentary.
Ultimately, Manziel was forced to sit out a half of a game against Rice to open the 2013 season for infractions that would be legal now under new name, image and likeness laws.
During the production of the film, Duffy said they posed the question of how much Manziel was worth during his college days in various interviews.
“No one could even quite get their heads around it,” Duffy said. “Kliff Kingsbury tried to do the math in front of me, and he ended up landing on like infinity dollars. The Manziel phenomenon was truly singular.”
When it came to the field, it was evident that Manziel relied on his raw talent alone, according to those in the documentary. Both Fitch and his agent Erik Burkhardt confirmed that he rarely watched game film during his time at A&M or in the NFL. Burkhardt said the Browns had a way to track how many minutes players spent watching film on iPads and Manziel’s remained at 0. Kingsbury admitted Manziel missed practices while at A&M.
“After football, he didn’t talk about football,” Fitch said in the documentary. “So it was as if he was just doing this thing on the side. The reason wasn’t to be bad [expletive] and win and do all these unbelievable feats. It was for what happens after you win.”
Duffy said the goal of Netflix’s Untold series is to get first-person accounts of major stories from the people who were involved. Among those interviewed for the documentary were Manziel, Fitch, Kingsbury, both of Manziel’s parents, A&M associate athletics director for athletics communications Alan Cannon, TexAgs owner Billy Liucci and Burkhardt.
Burkhardt also details the days leading up to Manziel’s private workout with the Browns before the 2012 NFL draft, when he and his wide receivers partied so hard the night before neither pass catcher was able to run routes the next day. Burkhardt and Manziel’s agent were forced to catch passes for a hung over Manziel during the workout.
For the two sides of Manziel depicted in the documentary, it was another side that surprised Duffy the most: how enjoyable Manziel is to be around.
“Johnny’s got a lot of chances,” Duffy said. “He’s made a lot of mistakes and always seems to kind of come out of the other side. From afar, you look at that, and you go like, ‘Wow, wonder how he is able to pull so many rabbits out of the hat there?’ And then you sit in the room with the kid. It doesn’t matter what your preconceptions of him were. You can’t help but love him.”
For an interview subject who spends the majority of the documentary retelling the many lies and tricks he used to get out of troubling situations, it is reasonable to wonder how much of what Manziel says is the truth. Duffy said the whole purpose of the story was to tell it from Manziel’s perspective.
“This is not an objective academic retelling of history,” Duffy said. “It’s always going to be somebody’s version. I feel like for the Johnny Football story, if I can get the version that comes directly from the horse’s mouth — the Johnny Manziel version — I feel pretty good about it.”