6 February 2010
Mancrush
Filed under sport
It’s true. I have a mancrush on Peyton Manning.
Women sometimes ask what the deal is with guys and spectator sports. They say they get the whole participatory sports thing, but what’s so great about watching sports on television? And why is there such fanaticism tied to certain teams?
It’s not an easy question to answer, and it’s different things to different guys. One part of it, though, is the fact that at the professional level, guys are watching other guys do stuff they have only fantasized about. The ability to play a game at that level is kind of a mind-blowing thing. After my trip to Cooperstown with JB, I spent a couple of days at JB’s place and we went to a Richmond Braves game. That’s AAA baseball, one step below the Major Leagues. What impressed me most (besides what I thought was a lovely stadium for a minor-league team) was how excellent the level of play was. These guys were darn-good baseball players, yet they weren’t good enough to be playing in the Majors. It reminds you how good those guys at the highest level really are.
When you’ve watched professional sports for a long time, you get used to being amazed. Records are broken every year. Every season, someone is doing something that hasn’t been done in decades. I imagine that from the point of view of someone who’s not a fan, it must seem kind of boring the way fans are always using superlatives in talking about some achievement, because next year there are going to be a whole new set of achievements unheard of.
A funny thing happens to sports fans when they’ve turned from boys to men. They stop idolizing the players they see on the field. Men can still be passionate about the games they watch, but they are seeing younger men playing a game, now, where they used to see heroes. There’s quite a difference. My love of and appreciation for baseball and football is deeper now than it’s ever been, but it becomes more and more difficult to really, really impress me.
That’s why Peyton Manning is so amazing to me. It’s rare enough to see a player play the game as well as you think your boyhood heroes played the game. To see a guy like Manning, who actually plays it that way but better, is a thing of beauty. I’m old enough to remember when quarterbacks called their own plays, something that’s hasn’t been commonplace for decades now. No matter how good guys like Favre and Brady are, there’s a part of me that thinks in some ways they were never as good as Stabler, Griese, Tarkenton, and the original Manning, guys who knew enough about the game to call their plays. Smart guys who knew football, not just robots who went out there and did what they were told.
Peyton Manning calls his own plays, and he does it better than any of those guys. Manning is playing the game at a level far above and far deeper than anyone I’ve ever seen. As smart as those guys from the 70s were, they didn’t watch film until 10:00 at night. Ken Stabler is my favorite football player of all time, and I know that he couldn’t wait to break out of practice so he could get drunk and/or get laid. Stabler was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a grinder.
I heard this story on the radio today that I almost couldn’t believe. According to Tony Dungy, Manning’s coach for his whole career until this season, when the Colts drafted Anthony Gonzalez out of Ohio State in 2007, Gonzalez (an Academic All-American) was still in school until early June. A lot of drafted players get to go to rookie camp in May, but Gonzalez wasn’t done with his semester, so twice a week in May, Peyton Manning drove from Indianapolis to Columbus to have one-hour, one-on-one workouts with Gonzalez. Just a few months after winning the Super Bowl with receivers like Reggie Wayne and Marvin Harrison, Manning was driving three hours each way to throw footballs to a rookie wide receiver.
All by itself, that’s merely impressive. When you realize it’s just one example of the kind of leadership and work ethic Manning possesses, what you see on Sundays during games is just not a surprise. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s a thing unlike anything I’ve seen in thirty years of fandom. Manning is playing the game differently, not only more excellently than those who’ve played before him, but a different way, at what seems to be a completely different level.
All of this doesn’t mean he’s unbeatable. You’d think a guy with all his talent and brains and football acumen would have won more Super Bowls than Trent Dilfer, but at least for a few more hours, this is not the case. He’s fallible. He’s beatable. It’s possible that his own skill at his position hampers his team (the Colts have never had a great running game, and at least one of my friends say it’s because Manning is such a good thrower). Still, what he does on the field blows my mind, and when you add to that the exemplary way he conducts himself off the field, you’ve got the ingredients for a full-blown mancrush. I love Peyton Manning.
Prediction: Colts 31, Saints 23. I actually think it’s going to be 31-20, but something won’t let me predict an eleven-point differential, so call it Colts by 8.
2010-02-06 :: me