GLENDALE, Arizona. Concerned about the risk of career-ending injuries, former pro quarterback Archie Manning today announced that his sons Peyton and Eli would retire from football and stand at stud for sports-crazy parents who want to produce future signal callers from his proven bloodline.
"I get the blonde."
"I don't want my boys to get sacked like Joe Theismann and have to be put down to the role of television color commentator," Manning said. "They can make just as much money servicing broodmares--I mean housewives--all over the country and never throw another interception."
"I'm sorry Joe--we're going to have to put you to sleep."
The market for athletic stud services is young, but equine syndicators estimate that it could become a billion-dollar business in just a few years. "People are willing to pay good money to get sperm from Nobel Prize winners," said Blakemore Jones of Kentucky's Post Time Thoroughbreds. "Which would you rather have--a kid who's an NFL quarterback or one who's a gloomy Norwegian novelist?"
Sigrid Undset, Gloomy Norwegian Novelist, 1928 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
Following the New York Giants' victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, the Mannings are the first brothers to win back-to-back professional football championships, and their market price is probably at its peak. Otto Graham led the Cleveland Browns to the championship of the All-America Football Conference in 1948, the year after his mother served as the team's signal caller.
Otto Graham: "Aw, Mom--do I have to run the naked bootleg?"
The Manning brothers say they won't mind leaving football behind for the bordello. "You ever seen Dwight Freeney?" asked Eli Manning, referring to his brother's pass-rushing teammate. "One missed block and that guy tears me apart like a half-price bucket of chicken wings."
NEW YORK. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell emerged from a tense, four-hour meeting with children's television activists last night to announce that the league would place limits on the number and duration of Peyton Manning commercials in future broadcasts.
Goodell: "They made some good points, now I wish they'd just dry up and blow away."
"We are gratified that the Commissioner understands the risk to our nation's youth of a constant barrage of mindless advertisements" featuring the Super Bowl XLI MVP, said Alicia Hartsell of Mothers Against Peyton Manning Commercials. "The average American child will watch 972 hours of Peyton Manning ads by the time he or she is four, for an average of 1,215 minutes per month and a Quarterback Viewer Rating of 101.3."
Not another!
Manning is currently featured in national advertisements for Mastercard, Sprint, Sony, Gatorade, Rocco's Texaco and Smitty's Bait and Tackle of Muncie, Indiana. The push to limit commercials aimed at children was started by Sesame Workshop, a non-profit producer of several educational children's programs including Sesame Street.
Cookie Monster: "Me have strong side curl-to-flat responsibilities in 5-2 Monster Defense!"
Sesame Workshop produces educational content for a variety of media, including on-line math quiz questions such as the following:
"I'm full--I had some celery last year."
Tom, Gisele and Bridget need to cross a lake in a canoe to go to a picnic. The canoe will only hold Tom, the picnic basket and one supermodel at a time. Q: What should Tom leave behind? A: The picnic basket--the supermodels can survive on a celery stalk between them.
FOXBORO, Mass. Bill Belichick, the defensive mastermind who has led the New England Patriots to three Super Bowl championships, is often casually referred to by sportscasters as a "genius" for his game plans. The contemplative coach bats such praise aside as if it were a pesky tyke hounding him for his autograph, saying "A genius is somebody who comes up with a cure for polio, or maybe Jon Bon Jovi," his favorite rock singer.
But no more. The MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program today announced that Belichick will receive one of this year's $500,000 "genius" grants, making official his status as a giant among the small fraternity of highly-competitive men who pace the sidelines at NFL games.
"It was only fitting, " said Cynthia Lichtenstein, executive director of the program. "Who can forget the fly pattern to Troy Brown he called on the last play of that overtime game against the Dolphins in 2003, or the way he's turned Peyton Manning into a personal love poodle with his defensive sets?"
The MacArthur grants are awarded to a wide range of scientists, artists and social reformers, and come with no strings attached. Last year's winners included a sculptor, a public-health researcher, a documentary filmmaker and the entire cast of "The New Hollywood Squares."
At least one person who was passed over for a grant was not ready to concede that Belichick's contributions to society outweighed hers. Miranda Rush-Goldie, a performance artist who smears Elmer's Glue on her nude body before boarding crowded New York City buses and subways, said she was more deserving. "He can probably make tons of money endorsing clothes, which I obviously can't," she explained.
"Not true," said Scott Winstead, a spokesman for the Patriots. "You've seen how Belichick dresses for games--homeless people don't buy new clothes."
STOCKHOLM, Sweden. Peyton Manning today accepted the first Nobel Prize in Football, given to him by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his contributions to the distinctly American game that Scandinavians have grown to accept, if not completely understand.
"Mr. Manning was the inventor of the fake spike, an innovation which, like the 'flea-flicker' and the 'fumble-rooski', forever changed the way the game is played," Annika Furstenberg told the crowd assembled at the Academy's headquarters here.
American football has long been derided by the Swedes as a game for numbskulls, even though Bronco Nagurski, one of the sport's early two-way greats, was of Scandinavian descent. The establishment of a Nobel prize honoring the sport thus represents a watershed of sorts, and Manning complimented the Nobel Foundation for its willingness to rank football with chemistry, physics and other really hard subjects he had trouble with in high school.
"All I can say," Manning quipped with a grin on his face as he paused for effect, "is DY-NO-MITE!" Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite, and the crowd erupted in cheers at the quarterback's nod to the award's heritage.
No sooner had Manning stepped down from the stage than controversy erupted, as Dan Marino issued a press release stating that he had invented the fake spike seven years before Manning in a 1994 game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets.
"With all due respect to Ms. Furstenberg, she doesn't know which end of a Gatorade bucket is up," Marino said in the statement. "This is the same kind of mistake the Nobel people made in 1962 when they gave a prize to Watson and Crick for DNA. Everybody knows that Rosalind Franklin was the sparkplug of that team."
Manning brushed off Marino's charges as sour grapes. "I can buy a lot of Isotoner gloves with ten million Swedish Kronors."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
