Can his image take the scrutiny? I’m not sure it matters. He’s not Tiger. He’s not nearly that big.
By the end of the Super Bowl on Sunday against the New Orleans Saints, Manning could step into another vacuum left by Woods and replace the golfer as America’s most admired athlete, too. If he hasn’t already.
Neither is a role anyone might have confidently predicted for Manning when he left the University of Tennessee for the NFL in 1998 and quickly built an on-field persona as an arm-flapping, leg-stomping, attention-grabbing fusspot before each snap. Most quarterbacks try to affect a look that says calm, cool, collected and about to steal your girlfriend. Manning looks as if he’s just been hit with a stun gun when he’s at the line. He screams. His eyes bulge. When he has to scramble, which he loathes, he runs like a giraffe with buckets on his feet.
And yet …
Put Manning in a TV commercial, and he’s silky smooth, hysterically funny. He comes off as a genuinely good guy, the sort of pal you’d love to share jokes and beers with on a Saturday night. Even if you’re not inclined to such things, when a Manning commercial comes on TV, you might find yourself actually stopping in your tracks. You might find yourself repeating his classic lines — “Cut that meat! Cut that meat!” — or blurting out, apropos to nothing, “Can you sign my melon?”
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