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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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THE BIG UPSET  Our Staff Artist has turned NY GIANTS QB ELI MANNING into an oil painting. But shouldn't we have used gold paint? Manning won his first Super Bowl the year after his older brother, Peyton, won one for the Colts. |
Super Bowl: The Name of the Game is Quarterbacks
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
It came down to the quarterbacks:
Eli Manning and Tom Brady. They dominated Super Bowl No. 42 (Phooey on hard-to-grasp Roman numerals!), which was underscored at one point late in the game when a split screen showed an image of both.
As shots of Manning and Brady, then Brady and Manning popped up on screen time after time, I thought of the “Dreams of Glory” cartoons of New Yorker artist Williams Steig. He would have little kids dreaming of great feats. And I kept thinking that the little kid could once have been the Giants’ Manning or New England’s Brady as each struggled to win this game for his team.
Quarterbacks are the men in control. We see them in the huddle relaying plays to teammates and breaking out of the huddle with purpose. And they seem so commanding pointing at the opposition and moving players as they change plays at the line of sscrimmage.
There was one incisive image for me near the end. The Fox TV people showed a close-up of the Patriot huddle. The camera zeroed in on Brady clapping his hands to send his teammates out to the line of scrimmage. And then came the six-yard pass to Randy Moss for a 14-10 lead with less than three seconds left that looked like victory for the Brady Bunch.
Another image from the past came to me from seeing them in the huddle. It was the times I saw Glenn Dobbs, a onetime great Tulsa U. quarterback who had a few memorable if unsuccessful seasons with a Brooklyn Dodgers football team in the long defunct All American Conference.
Dobbs had a different way of lining his mates up before a play. Instead of a circular huddle they would line up in two rows looking at him as he stood in front of them, facing them and giving them the plays with the same kind of clap of his hands. It made him look more like a peerless leader than most quarterbacks.
I should mention that those Dodgers went something like 0-11 one year in the late 1940s, but it wasn’t Dobbs’ fault.
Manning’s was one of two dramatic figures in the astounding play of this Super Bowl. With a third down, needing five yards to go on what figured to be the Giants’ last drive of the game, Manning somehow escaped the clutches of would-be Patriot smearers and let go a desperate heave.
It was the kind of do-or-die throw that often is intercepted. But David Tyree managed to clutch the ball away from a Patriot defender for a 32-yard gain to the Patriot 24-yard line. As much as anything else that play won the game for them because it kept alive the 83-yard scoring drive in 12 plays.
It would be four plays after the Manning-Tyree heroics that Manning would throw the 13-yard touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress for the winning touchdown. Giants 17, New England 14 and the end of the perfect season for New England. And a Most Valuable Player Award for Manning "because in the end it was Eli who beat Tom.
Quarterbacks live in a zone of peril. Earlier, when the Giants led, 10-7, they had a chance to solidify their lead and make things easier, but didn’t because Manning faltered. After escaping a Patriot rush, he threw a pass toward a wide open Plaxico Burress downfield. Had it gone straight and true, Burress would have racked up a huge gain, possibly scored a touchdown. Manning overthrew his man, but this turned out to be a preview of Manning’s escape artistry later.
This was a notable upset for sure because the Giants were 12-piont underdogs and deflated the Patriots from what would have been the greatest season ever by a pro football team. I don’t regard it as big an upset, though, as the Jets 16-7 shocker of Baltimore in Super Bowl No. 3 in 1969. Not only were the Jets 16-points underdogs, but they were ridiculed by most people in those days when the American Football Conference franchises were mocked because they had lost the first two Super Bowls to the National Football Conference teams.
Though these Giants were 12-point underdogs,
they were respected for having come through the playoffs so impressively.
The Jets earned respect only when they won the Super Bowl.
* * *
There are scalawags like me who saw this
game not necessarily as the New York Giants vs. the New England
Patriots, but as a game of suburban worthies: the Giants of East
Rutherford, New Jersey and the Patriots of Foxborough, Mass.--the
communities in which they play.
John Mara, one of the Giants’ owners, recited some painful
history for New Yorkers in his exultations during the victory
ceremonies. He thanked all the Giant fans who have stuck by the
team now and when they played in Yankee Stadium [in The Bronx]
and even those who cheered them on in the long ago when they
played in the Polo Grounds [in Manhaatan).
The Giants gained their initial fandom
in the Polo Grounds. Then, after they enjoyed nothing but sellouts
in their more-than-a-decade in Yankee Stadium, they departed
New York at a time of financial crisis for the city to grab a
sweetheart stadium deal in New Jersey. And they have succeeded
in keeping the name New York, though I’d hate for Mara and
friends to have to walk from the Meadowlands of Jersey to Times
Square in Manhattan.
* * *
Watching a Super Bowl on TV is better than being in the stadium
because you are enlightened about such things as the sight of
bananas on the Giants’ bench. Crack sideline reporter Pam
Oliver explained that some Giants were suffering from cramps
and an emergency call was put out for bananas and the potassium
they would provide.
A slap on the wrist for all those viewers who are not likely to run out and buy any of the products that some of the companies paid up to $2.7 million dollars for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial. Tut-tut.
And why during all the pre-and half-time hoopla that provide escapes for refrigerator snacking do I often think this enterprise should be called “The Oscar Wilde Game.” He said, “Nothing succeeds like excess.”
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration of Eli
Manning is a staff artist's version of a newspaper wire photo.
This column first posted Feb. 4, 2008.
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