I don’t like to admit it often, but I am a lifelong Browns fan. My grandfather lived in Cleveland and we’d go to games as a family, back when they had Bernie Kosar and a fighting chance. Since, we’ve dealt with the team moving to Baltimore, restarting as an expansion team, only one playoff appearance in 16 years, and about 2,000 different quarterbacks. But, my love for the team is cemented and it’s not going anywhere. At the very least, I am a role model to my sons on how to be resilient, loyal, and have a sense of humor.My fandom was challenged a bit when the team selected Johnny Manziel in the draft 3 years ago. I wasn’t sure what we were getting with the young Aggie, but I soon learned to like the guy. He was brash and cocky, but the Browns had a shortage of that. Because everyone else hated him, it became a badge of honor to want to see the guy succeed. And until a few months ago, that badge of honor remained on my chest.
And now, we’re days away from the Browns cutting Johnny Manziel and ending his tenure in Cleveland. And maybe in the NFL entirely. Johnny has had a plethora of issues off the field, including alleged domestic abuse, alcohol problems, and lying to his coaches about his hedonistic lifestyle. The Browns are done with him, which is hard to take because there was a glimmer of hope with him early in the last season.
Some other team may take a chance and who knows, he might finally figure out how to succeed. But for now, his existence is best used as a cautionary tale to all of us and especially you – college fraternity and sorority members.
You see, one of the reasons it became easy to root for Johnny was that he could actually play football, which makes him different from most other "busts." He has talent and is fun to watch on the field. That talent could have become enough to propel him to become the quarterback the Browns have been desperately seeking for two decades, which in turn, would have made him possibly the most legendary figure in Cleveland sports. With apologies to Jim Brown and Lebron James, the QB that leads the Browns to their first Super Bowl win will become undisputedly the lifelong mayor of Cleveland.
But it won’t be Johnny after all. And the reason why is his sad inability to embrace the opportunities in front of him. Aided, of course, by his apparent addictions to alcohol and a lifestyle that the modern NFL player cannot lead.
Johnny’s time at Texas A&M, and his Heisman trophy-winning success there, is like your time in high school. He dominated his environment with relative ease, and thus, didn’t need to put forth the effort to truly embrace what he was a part of. Going to the NFL was like you arriving to your college campus: a new environment filled with wondrous opportunities for personal growth and achievement, but only unlocked by effort and attitude. The laissez-fare approach you might have been able to use in high school yields a very mediocre college experience.
Sites like Total Frat Move want your chapter to be full of Manziels. For them, that’s the pinnacle of the fraternity experience.
Choosing to be in a fraternity or sorority is akin to choosing be play in the NFL (an easier choice for sure since your 40-yard dash time doesn’t matter). Those who succeed in the NFL then make the extra choice to fully embrace the opportunity they have. They recognize that their time is limited. Better to spend their days in the full flow of the NFL experience knowing that it can’t last forever.
The same is true for fraternity and sorority. As an undergraduate you probably have 3-4 years in the college fraternity experience. That is the blink of any eye. Will you arrive to this experience feeling entitled – like the experience ought to come to you? Or, will you go and grab it. Think forward to your graduation day. How will you feel if you treated your undergraduate fraternity years as Johnny Manziel treated his NFL career? Contrast that with how you’d feel if you were like Peyton Manning or Drew Brees instead?
Within almost every fraternity house are numerous composites of previous classes of members. Within each composite are faces of members who did so much that their names are recognizable years later. Like the names in the NFL hall of fame. In that same frame are faces of members that would lead even their peers at the time to say “who’s that guy?” And sure, there are a few that will be remembered for negative reasons, or easily mocked because of how poorly they treated their fraternity opportunity. That’s Ryan Leaf. And soon to be, Johnny Manziel. How will you be remembered?
There is no formula or easy how-to guide for how to embrace the fraternity experience. I have lots of ideas (see the 150+ posts on this site). But none of those ideas matter if it doesn’t start with your attitude – and the choice you make. Seize it, or waste it.
Johnny’s story also provide caution for how alcohol and drugs can destroy any experience. Johnny has been to rehab once already and I will always root for him to get better. That is stuff never to take lightly, and too many of our brothers and sisters do. We have a conventional attitude that college is a time to party and drink, and I certainly did those things as well. But, just as teammates of Johnny’s saw the signs of excess, we need to be seeing them in our brothers and sisters as well. It’s a sacred responsibility to care for each other.It’s a running theme of this blog that the biggest challenge the fraternity movement faces is how little our own members understand its power. Imagine if 10% more of your chapter fully embraced the experience in front of them. Now imagine 20%, 30%, and more. What would your fraternity be like? If more of our members nationwide decided that these few years as an undergraduate are ones to be seized and taken full advantage of, I expect our movement will finally start to achieve its potential.
But for now, we’re still waiting. Waiting to finally get it right. Waiting like the Cleveland Browns.
No comments:
Post a Comment