Manning’s relegation to backup shows cruel reality of pro football
Demotion of two-time Super Bowl champ leaves no time for extended goodbye
An iconic New York athlete’s time came to move on. His skills had eroded, an obvious decline even a casual fan would spot.
His team was not competing for championships any more, the titles he had helped win in his prime a memory among persistent defeat. Fans loved him still, but they recognized his waning ability and knew the end was coming. Team officials had planned for his departure, a future without him.
When it happened three years ago, it was Major League Baseball, and Derek Jeter received a yearlong feting in every ballpark in the country. When it happened this week, it was the NFL, and Eli Manning cried at his locker on a Tuesday afternoon.
The way the Giants crumpled up Manning and tossed him out a car window is another example of how unforgiving and brutal the NFL is.
Manning didn’t have Jeter’s career, and his profile wasn’t as high within his sport, but in the New York sports universe they were on nearly equal footing. Try to come up with a more meaningful athlete to a city than a quarterback who wins two Super Bowls in the middle of starting every game for 14 years.
The Giants may or may not have ended Manning ’s tenure Tuesday afternoon. Who knows what will happen, especially if — or, more likely, when — the Giants have a new coach and general manager?
But they might have. And as they potentially said goodbye to a quarterback who twice beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl, and who had started 210 consecutive games, they did it without dignity.
Coach Ben McAdoo, a shorttimer and lightweight who has trashed Manning all season, told Manning he could keep his consecutive starts streak alive if he wanted, but the Giants wanted to start playing other quarterbacks, with an eye on the future.
The only say Manning had in his demotion was whether he wanted to take part in a charade.
Manning declined, and McAdoo made him the backup.
“My feeling is that if you are going to play the other guys, play them,” Manning said. “Starting just to keep the streak going and knowing you won’t finish the game and have a chance to win is pointless to me, and it tarnishes the streak. Like I always have, I will be ready to play if and when I am needed.”
“I think a lot of Hall of Fame quarterbacks who have done a lot for a lot of teams haven’t been able to choose the way that they get to move on,” McAdoo said.
McAdoo is right in that Manning’s dismissal is symptomatic of the league he plays in.
The athletes are commodified from the meat market of the predraft combine to the day a team discards them. It is easier for coaches, executives and owners to reckon with the violence of the sport and the damage it inflicts on the participants if they keep it that way, transactional instead of personal, loyalty a foreign concept.
The end is cruel for most athletes, even the greatest, and baseball is not immune.
This year’s Hall of Fame class shows why the end is so rough. Tim Raines ended his career as a pinch-hitter for a lousy Florida Marlins team. Ivan Rodriguez was benched for rookie Wilson Ramos and came up short the next winter in his bid for another contract. Jeff Bagwell missed three-quarters of his last season with chronic shoulder arthritis. If the end was easy, it wouldn’t be the end.
But the possibility exists for a ballplayer to finish unscathed, on his terms, even if it does not benefit the team for which he worked for so long. It is naive to think of player-team dynamics as something more than employeeemployer agreements. And yet in most cases, if the sport is not football, the player is allowed at least dignity, and at most laurels.
Despite the clear diminishing of his skills over several years, Jeter chose his own exit strategy. He made life harder on his manager, who continued to bat him high in the order and play him at shortstop despite his incapacity to reach base and his dearth of range. And yet the Yankees acceded to Jeter, and when they did, opponents gave him gifts — literal gifts, in rituals before games — all season long. Change the details, and the same could be said of Kobe Bryant.
It is unimaginable for those ceremonies to happen in the NFL.
Legends become salary cap casualties. Stars succumb to injuries. Players move on with barely an acknowledgment.