On Eli Manning

It is just a few hours now before Super Bowl 42 and I want to write a brief note on my strange fondness for Eli Manning.

I am not a Giants fan, nor a big football fan. However, I have always rooted for Eli and have wished him success mainly because he has always struck me, despite his obvious talent, as the least likely of professional quarterbacks.

He seems scrawny in a sport of bulk; soft-spoken and tentative in a game of trash-talking recklessness; utterly lacking in charisma in a world of brashness and celebrity; dazed and confused in an arena of concentrated fierceness; often excluded from the muscular, masculine cameraderie of the gridiron.

Compare Manning to playboys Tom Brady and Tony Romo (who, as has been convincingly argued by a friend, is a poor man's Tom Brady).

Or to the scrappy, feisty Philip Rivers.

Or, inevitably, to his brother who has both an agreeable goofy everyman persona, and is a confident, defiant leader on the field.

Eli is different. And it is not a probing intelligence, or studiousness, that sets him apart. Nor is there an ironic aloofness. Rather, there seems to be something almost vulnerable about him.

A recent article in the New York Times (which you can find on the internet) wrote of his particular bond with his mother, his slowness in learning how to read, the large shadows cast by his elder brothers and father not only on the football field, but within the family. A not insignificant detail is his affection for antiques, one developed in an adolescence full of shopping trips willingly taken with his mother.

This, my friends, is less a path to the NFL as it is to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

In a different player, a lesser player, these details might be constantly referenced reasons or excuses(viz. the difficulties and pressures of growing up in such a household), or perhaps trumpeted eccentricites (viz. the antiques).

But in Eli they are simply facts.

So here's to Eli, in whose success I derive an almost paternal pleasure, and in whose accomplishments I find even hope.