With Super Bowl LI looming, The Mannings: The Fall and Rise of a Football Family serves as an ideal primer in the countdown to the championship match-up between the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons. Sports Illustrated scribe and New York Times best-selling author Lars Anderson does a stellar job tracing the history of Pro Bowl quarterback Archie Manning and the relationships he fostered with his sons Cooper, Peyton and Eli.
What the Hulls are to hockey and the Boones are to baseball, the Mannings are to football—essentially the first family of NFL quarterbacks. While the elder Manning spent most of his career getting pounded as the play-caller for hapless New Orleans Saints teams throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, sons Peyton and Eli have three Super Bowl MVP awards and a pair of rings between them. And while a spinal stenosis diagnosis derailed Cooper’s football career at the age of 18, the tight-knit bond of his family only served to inspire his younger brothers, particularly middle sibling Peyton who he was closer to in age.
Anderson does yeoman’s work delving deep into the background of the elder Manning and the life lessons of hard work and trying to be as great a person off the field that he learned from his father Buddy, the emotionally distant and workaholic manager of a farm machinery dealership. It would be Archie Manning’s yearning to connect with his father that in turn found him playing an inverse role with his offspring. Coupled with the support and strength of college sweetheart Olivia, the Manning boys thrived, whether it was excelling in college and the pro ranks, or for Cooper, becoming a partner in a New Orleans energy investment firm while still being his brothers’ biggest cheerleader.
Anderson’s access and thorough research brings readers through the sky-high football IQ and thorough preparation both younger Mannings have, the ascendancy up to eventual Super Bowl championships the duo secured and myriad obstacles faced along the way.
Anderson’s approach is warts and all, but in the process he’s penned the quintessential nonfiction treatise on football and family.
