Leave it to Peyton

This Sunday, Peyton Manning plays in his third Super Bowl, and his first for the Denver Broncos. At stake, of course, is the Lombardi Trophy, a prize which most years obtains to its status as the closest thing America has to the Holy Grail, but which in 2014 is a mere pawn in the larger struggle between Manning and the Patriots’ Tom Brady for the mantle of Greatest of All Time. Assuming Manning’s Broncos beat the outmatched Seahawks, who were caught on secret 3-D footage stashed in R2-D2 saying “Help us, Al Roker, you’re our only hope,” the contest between Manning and Brady will head to the fifteenth and final round as a dead heat, much like Bird and Magic on the eve of the decisive ’87 NBA Finals, in which Magic secured his fourth ring to Bird’s three, a deficit Bird would never overcome, or, more apropos of the “fifteenth round” analogy, like Ali and Frazier heading into their third and final encounter, the Thrilla in Manilla, each with a victory under their belt.

This is interesting enough in and of itself, nothing being more satisfying to the hard core sports fan then a lengthy debate as to the Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.); e.g. I could write a dissertation on the respective cases to be made for each of men’s tennis’ Mt. Rushmore figures. (With apologies to Bjorn Borg, I rank them thusly: #1 Federer, #2 Laver, #3 Sampras, #4 Nadal, with the caveat that Nadal may yet leapfrog them all. But, you say, what if Laver hadn’t been excluded from playing Grand Slams for five years because he was ineligible under pre-open-era tennis’ sham amateurism? He would have won at least ten more. I would, of course, retort by asking how many Slams Sampras would have won if three of the four majors were played on grass, as they were in Laver’s day. Etc., etc., etc.) But since a protracted discussion of the merits of Manning and Brady’s respective cases for G.O.A.T. status, while making for some great sportstalk radio, is a recipe for death by blogging, I will instead point out that Manning and Brady aren’t just in a dead heat re: the G.O.A.T., but are also running neck and neck in the popularity polls, even though no one is willing to admit this.

The official narrative is that Brady is the resented demi-god, while Manning is the revered man of the people; Brady does ads for Uggs for Men (Which is the equivalent and no less bizarre than if he were doing ads for Secret Antiperspirant for Men, completing the reframing of the old Secret slogan, which used to be “Strong enough for a man, but pH balanced for a woman,” but is now simply “Strong enough for a woman,” and which, if Brady were the Secret for Men pitchman, could be completed as “Strong enough for a woman, but smells enough like Aqua Velva for a man.” ), while Manning shills for Papa John’s Pizza. (Full disclosure: my sister-in-law is in Manning’s most recent Papa John’s spot. You can see her walking into the Papa John’s while Manning waxes poetic about the freshness of Papa John’s ingredients from the driver’s seat of a ’68 Camaro. It must be pointed out that Manning in a ’68 Camaro is about as believable as Mike Dukakis in a tank.) The truth is that we resent Manning every bit as much as we do Brady, just for very different reasons.

The reasons to resent Brady are legion: he’s movie star handsome, has not just a super-model wife but an ur-super-model wife, along with three Super Bowl rings, hundreds of millions of dollars, a mansion that (literally) has a moat, and plays for a coach who is an evil genius. Plus the aforementioned Uggs for Men. Even the Dalai Lama resents Tom Brady. We pretend that we feel just the opposite for Manning, largely because, like the guy the chick just isn’t really into in the Vertical Horizon song:

“He’s everything you want
He’s everything you need
He’s everything inside of you
That you wish you could be
He says all the right things
At exactly the right time
But he means nothing to you
And you don’t know why”

We pretend we don’t know why because it’s much easier to feign ignorance than to admit the truth: We resent Peyton Manning because he reminds us of Eddie Haskell.

Eddie Haskell is the greatest two-faced bastard in the western literary canon, his unctuous, quasi-flirtatious overtures to Mrs. Cleaver lending cover to his bullying of The Beaver. We, the public, are Manning’s Mrs. Cleaver, to whom he says all the right things at exactly the right time. Just today, asked by the media what he hoped his legacy would be, Manning exhibited his exquisite sense of how to come off like a “class act,” explaining, in so many words, that he hoped he would be remembered as a great competitor who played as hard as he could for each team he took the field for, blah, blah, blah. This is complete and utter horseshit. You know it, I know it, Bob Dole knows it. Peyton Manning gets out of bed each morning for one reason only, which is to prove to everyone that he, and not Tom Brady, is the Greatest of All Time. Making the rest of the NFL Manning’s Beaver, whom he never bullied as effectively as he did this year, setting a new single-season NFL record for touchdowns completed (a record previously held by The Man on Manning’s back, Tom Brady, making Manning’s breaking of the record like Eddie Haskell cuckolding Mr. Cleaver). Our secret pact with Manning is that we’ll play along with his (class) act, as long as we can remain voyeurs to his relentless, pinpoint bombing. (Making our relationship with Manning evocative of our relationship with our federal government. Is there, we should be asking, any substantive difference between the subjective experience of controlling Manning’s aerial assault on the Chiefs’ defense in a game of Madden from the comfort of one’s own living room and piloting a drone while executing its aerial assault on Pakistanis from the comfort of a hi-tech office cubicle somewhere in Pennsylvania? Are we already living out Ender’s Game, with video games nothing but practice for a generation of “soldiers” who will, like Ender, never experience war as war? And in cultivating an army of drone “gamers” are we not, in the words of Alain Badiou, one decisive step closer to having “rendered war and peace indistinguishable?”)

As the media attempts to fill the two-week gap between conference championships and the Super Bowl, there has been much discussion of Seahawks’ cornerback Richard Sherman’s post-game interview, conducted immediately after Sherman made the decisive interception in the Seahawks win over the 49ers, a win that sent them to the Super Bowl. Sherman, like Manning (or Brady), is widely considered the best at his position, making him one of the world’s elite professional athletes. Interviewed on the field by Fox’s Erin Andrews about his climactic feat, Sherman expounded thusly:

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me… Don’t open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick.”

The narrative thread in the ensuing media melee has been all about whether Sherman, who attended Stanford University and who happens to be Black, is a “thug,” and if the word “thug” is code for the n-word. Which entire narrative reveals either a startling lack of insight into the mind of the elite professional athlete, or the depths of our self-deception. Because Peyton Manning (and Tom Brady, for that matter) feels exactly the same way about his competition as Sherman feels about Crabtree (and if Manning and Brady didn’t feel that way, they’d have ended up as an altogether different sort of pizza delivery guy and shoe salesman). The difference is that Manning is savvy enough to serve up the Mom, apple pie, and Papa John’s pizza instead of granting us access to his throbbing will to power, which is exactly what Sherman let us see two Sundays ago, and which display had nothing to do with the fact that Sherman is Black, and everything to do with Sherman’s failure to grasp that everyone playing the bloodsport we call professional football is also playing the very same character, whose initials are Eddie Haskell.

So even if Manning and Brady retire in a dead heat, and even if deep down we resent Manning’s Haskell as much as we resent Brady’s Midas, we’ll all throw our weight behind Manning’s G.O.A.T. candidacy for the simple fact that he’s a better actor. His act allows us to feel classy too, enabling us to pretend the L.A. Coliseum has nothing to do with the Roman Coliseum, and to act as if nice guys don’t finish last, obscuring the fact that there are no nice guys on football’s gridiron, nice guys not being the type to “punch the opposition in the mouth,” “go for the jugular,” or adhere to the wisdom of football’s most underrated talking head, Brian Billick: “When you go into the lion’s den, you don’t tippy-toe in- you carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, ‘Where’s the SOB?’ If you go in any other way you’re gonna lose.” (Sherman’s real sin was in reminding everyone of exactly that fact, his rant the equivalent of Haskell goosing Mrs. Cleaver as she does the dishes.) And if in a few years, after he’s finally hung up his cleats, Manning’s neck begins to feel the after-effects of four surgeries and counting, we’ll be too busy arguing about who the new G.O.A.T. is to notice that Manning has gone from hero to goat. (“Our” old hero will have no one to blame but himself for his empty shell of a body and, if Brett Favre and Jim McMahon’s dodgy memory banks are any indicator, mind.)

I can’t wait for kickoff!