COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Find one of the famous photographs of Johnny Manziel floating around the Internet: holding up wads of cash, or grinning next to a supermodel, or posing with his Heisman Trophy. Any one will probably work. Got it? Now look next to him.

That's Nate Fitch.

"Oh, Nate's on his way!" Manziel said one night at dinner, a month ago, a lifetime ago, before autograph dealers started coming out of the woodwork. "Perfect! We have a driver."

Johnny Manziel with his personal assistant, Nate Fitch, at a casino earlier this year. Instagram @jmanziel2

"You're gonna make him drive?" a reporter at the table said. "Poor Nate."

"No," Manziel said, deadpan, "not poor Nate."

Manziel's grandmother joked that nobody could figure out Fitch's exact role in the ever-expanding circus tent that had become the Manziels since Johnny won the Heisman.

"You know," Manziel said, "I have to think about what Nate really does."

A half dozen sources and counting have said that, among other things, Fitch helped run a Manziel autograph business, setting up signings, handling logistics. He's the unknown hole at the center of a famous person's scandal, both caught up in events and a driver of those events, a participant in a cultural tug-of-war: Will he join Manziel in the spotlight, or will he slip back into the shadows?

"When Sports Illustrated does 'The Rise and Fall of Johnny Manziel,' Johnny is not going to be on the cover," one autograph broker told ESPN. "Nate will be."

Fitch is a Turtle who wants to be an E.

He's a college dropout, in the entrepreneurial sense of the word, more dreamer than slacker. He's Manziel's assistant, media coordinator, business manager, designated driver. He goes by Uncle Nate, which is a nickname Manziel says Fitch gave himself. Fitch, 20, allegedly works for free, betting on the come, looking into the future when Manziel is an NFL star. He wears a gold rope bracelet, acting like an agent on a television show, talking with confidence about tit-for-tat horse trading and his deep knowledge of the NCAA rulebook. If you wanted to get Johnny Football, at least before Sunday, Fitch could do in two days what Texas A&M couldn't do in two months. As publicists go, he handled himself like a pro. Many people in College Station know Fitch's role in Manziel's life. This summer, three days after the now infamous tweet, former Aggies defensive lineman Spencer Nealy walked into a local restaurant and beer hall and found Fitch posted up in the corner with his parents, who were in town from Kerrville, Texas.