Drake has received an apology from former NFL star Johnny Manziel for “letting him down” when he got too heavy into the party life and fumbled his football career.
Drizzy heavily co-signed Manziel as he entered the big league in the 2014 NFL draft and even released a song about him titled “Draft Day.” The pair were close and the footballer even went so far as to get an OVO tattoo on his wrist, but he went on to only spend one year in the NFL before crashing out.
Talking to Shannon Sharpe on a new episode of his Club Shay Shay podcast which dropped on Wednesday (February 21), the one-time Cleveland Browns star reflected on his self-sabotage while also praising Drizzy and denying any such thing as a “curse.”
“Who believes in curses like that?” he said when asked by Sharpe whether he believes in the Drake curse — which people allege the rapper has over the sports teams and players he bets on. “That guy’s the most positive energy, great aura. Maybe he picks wrong sometimes in the people, teams or whatever it is or his bets, but that’s life, right? There is no curse. That’s to each his own, you know?
“If I handle my business in the proper way, I make him proud, right? Our relationship changes; so like there’s a lot of people that I let down and I truly feel like him and LeBron [James] at a point in time were people that I really really let down, you know?”
Later in the episode, he added: “I can even take it a step further and say in 2016, I don’t think I treated Drake the way that I should have with representing the clothes that I was wearing and his OVO brand and his label and everything. At that point in time, I was so selfish that I was dragging everybody that was tied to me through the mud.
“I’m not harboring on this in any kind of way – I’m just calling it exactly what it is and the way that I feel about it. I owe those people an apology and hopefully one day down the line, I’ll be able to have the opportunity as a man to be able to look him in the eye and be able to do that.”
You can view the full episode below. The Drake conversation happens at the 1:46:13 mark and again at the 2:15:17 mark.
Before Johnny Manziel even made it to the NFL, he was getting in trouble for his partying as a Texas A&M Aggies quarterback.
In a 2013 interview on ESPN’s First Take, Drake appeared as a guest and was asked about how much responsibility the then-20-year-old Manziel should shoulder for his actions.
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“There is accountability in some situations,” he said. “I encourage him to have stronger discipline than anybody else, and I tell him: ‘In this position that we’re in, it takes major sacrifice. And a lot of the time, I know you want to live your life, and I know you want to have fun, but there’s also a bigger picture here, and we’re in it for the long term.’”
He continued: “I try to implement that into his psyche, and I tell him: ‘Let’s have that discipline; let’s sacrifice all the fun. Even if it means coming to see me. If they’re going to scrutinize you about coming to see me, don’t worry. We’ll see each other. You play your game.”
According to Manziel in the new Club Shay Shay interview, the pair still have a relationship and it’s “one that changed my life for the better forever still to this day.”
