i wonder if people will ever remember this peyton manning.
Reasons you don’t have to love Peyton Manning
By David Rutter
News-Sun
We beatify quarterbacks for sainthood. They are everything we think superior human beings should be.
They overcome obstacles, improvise, innovate, manage the variables, fight the ravages of advancing age and then win. They suffer pain for the greater good.
But, of course, they aren’t grand at all. If they are grand humans, it’s coincidental to playing football.
While you await Super Bowl 50 this weekend, let’s separate real heroes from manufactured heroes.
If you need a reason to dislike a superstar, pick Peyton Manning who is not really the happy-go-lucky Mister Goofy Guy he plays in his never-ending commercials.
That is his stage persona.
Manning actually did something in his non-showbiz life for which a person should be profoundly ashamed. He has never accepted responsibility except by being forced to pay money by courts for a prank.
It all goes back to 1996 when Manning was a superstar at the University of Tennessee.
To appreciate that moment you must decide for yourself what you think “mooning” is.
In my youth, there was always one doofus passenger in the car of teen boys who would expose his bottom through an open rear window, usually to shock teen girls walking on a nearby sidewalk.
It was a visual crudity.
In 1996, Manning’s painful heel was being examined in the Volunteers’ locker room by a female trainer who was kneeling behind him. In his account, he wished to “moon” a male track athlete in the room and lowered his pants.
Manning later wrote he “didn’t think the (female) trainer would see” but when she did, “it seemed like something she’d have laughed at, considering” the locker room environment. But physics suggest she could not have seen anything else except his nude posterior.
What the track athlete and the female trainer said happened then was something else entirely. Distinctions make a difference.
They testified that he lowered his nude bottom, straddled her head and smothered her face. If you have an image of a grotesque, humiliating assault, that describes what he did. She eventually forced him off and ran from the room. She filed a report with the campus sexual assault program and fled school.
Later she sued the university for 33 counts of sexual discrimination, including the Manning event. She settled for $300,000. Manning faced no public ridicule, because social media was barely born then. Few outside of Tennessee knew what he’d done.
Plus, the university and his family of football stars insistently applied the “boys-will-be-boys” mooning definition.
Was it just a stupid thing any college kid might do? Or part of a pattern? Besides, it was 1996 which makes it ancient history.
Fast forward to 2000. The Manning family men commissioned a ghostwritten autobiography in which Manning recounts the event again and characterizes the trainer as having a “vulgar mouth.” The passage is leaked to her new collegiate employer who demotes and eventually fires her.
Jamie Ann Naughright, now a doctor of sports medicine, sues Manning for defamation. And wins. The financial settlement is secret and stipulates neither party will speak of the event again.
Fast forward again. In an ESPN profile of Manning, he again alludes to the event, thus apparently breaking the terms of the previous suit. She sues again.
At every point, keepers of the Manning Brand — university, family, lawyers, shills and Manning himself — have minimized what he did.
Yes, fans, I don’t like Peyton Manning. Perhaps I merely am more indifferent to him than other players. It’s time and energy wasted.
I don’t like the totally contrived Manning Brand, which is a valuable product. He, like his brand, is a commodity.
As for Manning’s role as football giant, who really cares? It’s a game. If you paid the best hopscotch player in the solar system a few million to leap from block to block, it still would not make the activity important.
The man who trained 20 years to tighten the heart valve suture perfectly on your mother’s bypass is important. The kindergarten teacher who gathers 20 children around her every day, and introduces them to the love of stories and words is important.
The hometown postal worker who digs through a large dirty bin for 20 minutes just to find the lost letter from your child. That’s important.
Maybe I’ll watch the Super Bowl. Maybe I won’t. It’s only a consumer product you are being lobbied to buy.
In truth, I’m just not every interested.
There will be important people doing important jobs Sunday. Peyton Manning isn’t one of them.
David.Rutter@live.com
Copyright © 2016, Lake County News-Sun
