kearly":2f36ouod said:
He's one of the best QB prospects in a long time, and he's no less of an a-hole than Philip Rivers or Aaron Rodgers is. Quite frankly, I fail to understand the hate. We don't really need a QB, so I hope he stays far, far away from the NFC West.
You know, "hate" is such a strong — unlike "Johnny Football's" arm, and much like what he (and the media who slobber over everything he says and does) seems to think his image should mean to anyone who isn't playing backgammon with his relatives while fighting the urge to sleep after having eaten too much turkey on Thanksgiving — word, man.
Though I'm pretty sure that most of us who don't understand the antics and the very culture itself of the "one-percenters" playing backgammon with the Manziels — who've made more money off the black gold on which we unwittingly continue to depend every time we fill up our gas tanks to roll down the road to see "Johnny Football" (and alas, his ego) do the turkey strut all over the field every Saturday than most of us will ever see in five lifetimes — at the country clubs, I've little doubt that we "hate" the kid.
Long, meandering, turkey strut-like sentences be damned, I don't think it a stretch to say that most of us just don't like "Johnny Football" because he
1.) for whatever the reason(s) — correct or incorrect, right or wrong, truthful or fictive — doesn't seem like the Norman Rockwell-esque team player with which we've come to identify our beloved sport of football personified in the likes of the Knute Rocknes, the Gale Sayerses, the Ronnie Lotts and the Cortez Kennedys who've passed through the game's hallowed halls long before Manziel and his ego hit our television screens, our monitors, our iPods;
2.) manifests a singular, cult-of-personality-esque disconnect most of us whose families have fought seeming uphill battles off the gridirons all of our lives just to make ends meet, never striking it rich by making backroom deals over black gold while never getting so much as a speck of dirt on a single fingernail, let alone a bloodied hand or a sweaty brow from having done actual real, physical work.
I don't want to make "Johnny Football" into the personification of a class war, but thanks to the media and Mr. Football himself's unscrupulous tweeting about the lifestyle he's been afforded by way of said media's adulation of it, that's what it has tacitly become.
No one "hates" Johnny Manziel. We just don't like how easy things have been for the kid, and we don't like the way the kid arrogantly wears it as a cloak.
We don't understand him, or his ego. And I think Norman Rockwell would agree.
