Bruce Springsteen wrote sadder songs than “Glory Days,” one of the final tracks from his 1984 masterpiece Born in the U.S.A., but perhaps none of the Boss’s songs more effectively examines the feeling of being someone who used to be. It might be the most tragic song ever written in a major key, built around a honky-tonk piano and garage band guitar sounds, and meant to be sung with a smile on your face. The pathos of the song—that whether you were a great athlete, great beauty, or world famous rock star in your youth, obsolescence awaits us all—is both undeniably true and incredibly grim. Which, we suppose, makes it a fitting inspiration for the title of Johnny Manziel’s forthcoming interview show, Glory Daze, the trailer for which debuted this week.
The teaser features a group of no-longer-quite-so-young men wearing ballcaps and sitting in a dimly lit bar or man cave or someplace. There’s a stack of discarded pizza boxes on the table, red plastic party cups scattered around the room, and a football game on the television. But the men are not focused on those things; they’re obsessed with an ongoing argument in which they fiercely debate aspects of well-known college and pro athletes’ careers. How long has the argument been going? Probably since the men were boys, back when the glories they’re bickering over were hot topics in the sports world.
When one of the characters imagines the career former NFL and Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III might have had if he were drafted by any team other than one owned by Dan Snyder and coached by Mike Shanahan, it’s easy to surmise that the guy’s been hammering home this same point ever since the second half of Washington’s January 2013 wildcard playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks, when poor RGIII was kept on the field despite an obvious knee injury.
When another dude in the trailer mentions Pete Carroll’s fateful decision to call a pass play with a chance to win Super Bowl XLIX instead of handing the ball to running back Marshawn Lynch, we can presume that he has yelled this at his buddies at least once a week for most of the past ten years. And so on, and so on, the men in their ballcaps grow increasingly intense, bloviating as if at any moment they might be plucked from this basement to sit across from Skip Bayless and defend their hot takes on television.
This is how they show that they love each other. The debate becomes a screaming match. The opinions are no longer merely expressed but shouted. The very points the men are so desperate to make become imperceptible as the constant assertions begin to drown out any possibility of genuine discussion.
And then, finally, one of them turns to a shrouded figure who has stayed above the fray until these last ten seconds of the trailer. “Johnny,” he asks. “What do you think?” The room goes silent, and we see who the mysterious fourth man in the room is: It’s none other than Johnny Football, who slowly lifts his head and, with his trademark puckish half-smile, says, “Eh. We can ask ’em.” The screen goes black and the logo for Glory Daze appears.
This is either your idea of a very fun way to spend a Saturday or a vision of something more hellish than anything Dante imagined in Inferno. If it’s the former, yahtzee! The show premieres this fall. “I’ll get the opportunity to sit down with other iconic athletes and help them share their incredible stories,” Manziel says in the press release announcing the series. “We’ll look back through the lens of the players themselves, giving fans an inside look at the moments they remember and the stories they’ve never heard.” If that sounds like fun to you, please feel free to calmly tell us how good it is, and how wrong we were for doubting it—but please, use your inside voice.
And if Glory Daze sounds awful, well, there’s always the Springsteen song.
