Super Bowl | Mama lets baby grow up to be Eli

By the time Eli Manning was able to throw a tight spiral, his father Archie's long drives were confined to America's highways, the elder Manning's station as the singular quarterback of the subpar New Orleans Saints winning him a long and lucrative second career as a public speaker.

One day last week in Orlando, Fla., where he was delivering an address that had been arranged months earlier, Archie spoke on his cellphone of the strong parental bond that shaped Manning, the New York Giants quarterback who is following up his older brother Peyton's appearance in last year's Super Bowl.

"Eli and Olivia are certainly very close," Archie said, referring to his wife and Manning's mother. "They have that special bond that you see between mamas and their baby boys."

Manning, who turned 27 this month, is nearly five years younger than Peyton, who guided the Indianapolis Colts to a victory over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI in Miami. He was born almost seven years after Archie and Olivia's firstborn, Cooper, whose football career was cut short by a chronic spinal condition that required surgery.

In 1982, Archie was traded to the Houston Oilers from the Saints. He played one season in Houston and one more in Minnesota before retiring from football in 1984 after 14 seasons.

Because he was only 3 years old when his father retired, Manning has fewer memories of Archie's playing days than his brothers. They remember accompanying their dad to practices, getting their own healthy ankles taped by the team trainers and being shoulder to shoulder with NFL behemoths in the whirlpool.

Archie did a fair amount of traveling while Eli was growing up, although he arranged his schedule so he could spend as much time with his sons as possible. Even when Archie was away, as long as Eli's voluble and kinetic older brothers were around, the family's house in the Garden District of New Orleans was full of life.

Cooper, 33, was a loud and animated child, the family's natural-born entertainer. Growing up, he and Peyton, 31, were fiercely competitive, the dining room table becoming another battlefield for their sibling rivalry. Eli was more reserved, like his mother. They would sit largely silent at mealtime, digesting the conversation along with their meals.

"I was always kind of the quiet one, the shy one," Manning said last week in a phone interview Saturday after practice, the Giants' last one in New Jersey before leaving Monday for Phoenix and a date in Super Bowl XLII with the undefeated New England Patriots. "Sitting around the dinner table, Cooper kind of ran the conversation. He and Peyton and my dad were the ones who carried the conversation. Mom and I never got to do a whole lot of talking."

Olivia, who turned down an interview request out of a desire to remain in the background, ran the household the way Manning runs the Giants' offense: with quiet authority.

"Growing up," he said, "we would have been lost and clueless without her. She ran the household and was our biggest supporter."

Manning grew up in the very long shadow cast by his celebrated father and high-achieving brothers. At the same time, he had the luxury of living a life more akin to an only child starting in the eighth grade, when Peyton left for college.

"We had Eli kind of alone for five years," Archie said.

It was during high school, Manning said, that he grew especially close to his mother. With Archie away part of most weeks, Manning and Olivia began a ritual of eating dinner out once a week, just the two of them. They had a regular rotation of restaurants: Casamentos for oyster poor boys; Figaro's for pizza; Joey K's for creole cooking and catfish.

Between mouthfuls, Manning and his mother shared tidbits of their lives. She grew up in Mississippi and met Archie at Ole Miss, where he was the star quarterback and she was a cheerleader and homecoming queen.

"I got to know more about her," he said. "She told stories about growing up or about college." Freed from having to compete with his brothers to be heard, Manning also found his voice. "It kind of helped me get my stories out," he said.

It was not the first time Manning and his mother had bonded over stories. Long before he learned to read defenses, Manning struggled to decipher Dr. Seuss. "I had trouble reading," he said.

The inadequacy he felt drove him deeper into his shell. "As a child, it's embarrassing and frustrating," Manning said. "They call on students to read out loud in class, and it's one of those deals where you're praying the whole time that they don't call on you."

His mother, he said, was influential in helping him improve his reading so he would not have to repeat first grade.

Years later, with his reading struggles well behind him, Manning posted a score of 39 out of 50 on the Wonderlic, the intelligence test administered by NFL teams to evaluate draft prospects. It was 11 points higher than Peyton's score and well above the average.

Eli was dragged to so many of his brothers' athletic events as a child that Archie thought it might turn him off from sports. Some weekends, Archie would take the older boys to their games and Eli said he would ask if he could stay home with a baby-sitter. When that was not possible, he would go shopping with his mom for antiques — anything to avoid sitting through four or five basketball games in a day.

In the playoffs earlier this month, Peyton's Colts played host to the San Diego Chargers on the same day that Manning's Giants traveled to Dallas to take on the Cowboys. Archie flew to Indiana and watched Peyton's team lose to the Chargers. Olivia was in Texas to see Manning outduel Tony Romo in the Giants' upset victory.

The following week, both parents were in a suite in Green Bay for the NFC title game between the Giants and the Packers. In the waning minutes of the fourth quarter, with the score tied, the television cameras caught Archie with his head buried in his hands.

"For 90 percent of the game I was actually very calm," he said. "Then, in those last few minutes, something hit me." He was transported back to his days as a player, to those games when his team played better than its opponent but a bad break here or there cost it a victory. "It seemed like that was what was happening to the Giants," he said, "and it was hard for me to watch."

Olivia remained calm, of course. As did her youngest son, who marched the Giants into scoring position twice in the fourth quarter, only to have the team's kicker, Lawrence Tynes, miss both field-goal attempts. After Tynes made a 47-yarder in overtime to send the Giants to the Super Bowl, Eli came out of the locker room, still dressed in his uniform, and locked eyes with his mom.

"It's good to see you smiling, honey," she told him.

Eli was happy, for himself and everybody who stuck by him, starting with his mother. "She had just as much relief," he said, "as I did."