When bored, pull up your news search site of choice and enter the key words “Archie Manning” and “Draft” between January 1, 2004, and April 25, 2004. Before we had a discourse about Caleb Williams and his father, Carl, Archie was the original shadowy figure when it came to the kind of high-carb, pre-draft media snack du jour. The person we discussed far beyond what we actually understood, because it’s fun to talk about, and, sitting in our armchair, we get to tap into our personal haughtiness as well as our own parental and maternal instincts.
We tend to fall into two camps: The people who position ourselves as mommy and daddy Rambo, would bury our kids in our arms and run them through a sea of bullets, or mommy and daddy Bunker, the people who believe that each subsequent generation is too soft and that helicoptering only make matters worse.
The coverage on Manning was mixed. The New York papers, perhaps failing to read the tea leaves on a potential Giants trade and missing the opportunity to extend an early olive branch, were surprisingly critical. A favorite headline of mine was “ARCH MADNESS.” Indeed, most of the northeast, where Manning’s son would eventually make his home, seemed to paint Archie as a villain. The great Phil Sheridan of The Philadelphia Inquirer called Archie the “Bonnie Lindros” of professional football (and, as a bonus, a young reporter named Adrian Wojnarowski, working for ESPN in 2002 long before his famous Woj Bombs, called Bonnie Lindros a “pain in the ass” on the level of Richard Williams, the father of tennis prodigies Venus and Serena). The internet is a beautiful time machine.
