Back in the summer of 2013, before he became perhaps the biggest bust in the history of the National Football League, before the social-media firestorms and the mysterious rehab, before his hard-partying ways put him on TMZ more than on ESPN, Johnny Manziel already worried his parents. A scrambling, showboating quarterback with a knack for leading his Texas A&M team to fourth-quarter victories, 20-year-old “Johnny Football” had won the Heisman Trophy, college football’s highest honor, five months before—the first freshman to do so—and become an international celebrity, partying with Justin Bieber and Drake and appearing on David Letterman and other talk shows.

He had come seemingly out of nowhere, an unheralded kid from the Texas Hill Country town of Kerrville, where he played football the way kids do in the backyard: unscripted, improvisational, just dodging defender after defender until the inevitable Hail Mary pass into the end zone for a touchdown. But Manziel was no ordinary backyard player. In the Southeastern Conference, the nation’s toughest, he set an all-time record for total offense and led the Aggies to the most electrifying regular-season victory in recent memory, a jaw-dropping upset of national champion Alabama, then on to a Cotton Bowl Classic win against Oklahoma. In the four short months of a single season, he became that rarest of things: an overnight legend.

It was a lot to handle for a small-town kid, and Manziel didn’t cope well. Like many college students, he enjoyed his beer. As his parents, Paul and Michelle Manziel, admitted to ESPN magazine at the time, they worried his drinking was out of hand. What Manziel’s parents didn’t say, though, was what truly scared them was drug use. Johnny had been dogged by rumors of it almost as soon as he came on the national scene, but this account, offered by members of his close circle of family and friends, is the first to detail their dramatic attempts to curtail what even now they euphemistically call his love for “partying.”

Left, after a Texas A&M Aggies win in the Peach Bowl, in Atlanta, December 2013; Right, surrounded by Aggies teammates after winning the 2013 Cotton Bowl Classic. Left, by Joe Robbins/Getty Images; Right, by Michael Prengler/Cal Sport Media/zumapress.com.

It was that June when his parents realized the severity of the problem—this according to Johnny’s longtime best friend, Steven Brant, who at the time lived with him in an off-campus house in College Station. It was there that Michelle found drug paraphernalia. “She came into the house and found some pipes, and she totally freaked out,” remembers Brant. “They moved him out. It happened so fast. I was out playing basketball, and when I came back Johnny was gone, and so was all of his furniture.”

The Manziels, who declined to be interviewed, weren’t the only ones concerned about drug use. So was Johnny’s second close friend, Nate Fitch, something of a straight arrow who had dropped out of college to manage Johnny’s affairs. It was “Uncle Nate” (who declined to comment for this story) who handled the reporters, stiff-armed photographers, and dragged Johnny out of parties before things got messy. “Ever since the Heisman, Nate was hinting about drugs, getting it to stop,” says Brant, who admits to using drugs himself. “He was acting all concerned, because Johnny was his meal ticket.”

“Nate was the key—he was the one who had Johnny’s back, who kept him out of trouble,” says a friend more sympathetic to Fitch. “He was the only one in that group who wasn’t using drugs.”

The Manziels questioned Fitch about the extent of the problem at the house Johnny and Brant shared on Pershing Avenue. Fitch, whose father was a drug therapist, told them what he knew. According to people familiar with the details, marijuana was in regular use at the house, as was the prescription tranquilizer Xanax, a popular party drug often ground up, snorted, and chased with alcohol; MDMA, known as “Molly,” a form of Ecstasy; and, occasionally, cocaine. Some in the family came to blame Johnny’s introduction to drugs on Brant, whose Twitter feed is sprinkled with references to Xanax. I asked Brant about his drug use. “I don’t deny it,” he said. “But it’s not like this was some kind of Amy Winehouse scene.”