Why I Enjoy Eli Manning’s Success
Tori Toney has been watching Eli Manning play since his days at Ole Miss.
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I’m going to start this off by explaining my unmoving loyalty and love towards Eli Manning. No, I’m not joking and you read that right…I said Eli.
I have watched Eli Manning since he was at Ole Miss, he is the reason I started paying attention to college football. I just loved and still love watching that guy play (unlike my love of Green Bay Packers’ OLB Clay Matthews, this love involves absolutely no physical attraction). For as long as I have been watching him, I always said he was going to be win in the NFL. Always.
Somehow, there is no person I take more shit for liking than Mr. Manning, and no person I have to defend more often.
In the weeks leading up to the first Patriots/Gaints Superbowl, I was everyone’s favorite target.
The team of destiny with Tom Brady at the helm were going to go 19-0 and Eli Manning was going to be another victim.
At the time, it was hard to defend that logic, and since I don’t trash talk with other fans they were usually short conversations.
Yet, even with my fairly thick football skin, one day a kid I knew all through high school from Massachusetts decided to put his two cents in on the matter.
The biggest annoyance that caused me to quietly snap was the fact this kid hadn’t watched a down of football his entire life, let alone that ridiculous Patriots season.
As soon as he began to talk out of his ass, I knew having an intelligent football conversation with him was a lost cause.
On the tenth minute of him spitting out the ESPN crawler verbatim, I got up from my chair in math class, pointed at him and, before walking over to ask the teacher a question, said “Eli Manning is going to win the Superbowl.”
Not only did he laugh, but the four to five football players behind him also began laughing. It was a ballsy thing to say, at the time it was just plain stupid. However, with my mixture of football knowledge and blind loyalty, I truly did believe he was the one who could dismantle the Patriots.
So when the Gaints beat Tom Brady 17-14 and my dude was named the MVP, I cried. I didnt sob, but I definitely shed some tears of happiness.
It was the ultimate screw you to not only my friend in math class, but to everyone else who acted like I was some dumbass teenage girl with a crush.
That’s why I enjoy his success, that’s why the day after he won his second trip to the Superbowl, I smile like Im his mother.
He’s doing what I’ve always sworn he would do, along with what I honestly have thought he would do.
Regardless of the less than precious faces he makes, he’s making me look like the football Nostradamus and for that I love him even more than I already did.
