The Mannings: The Fall and Rise of a Football Family - Hardcover

Anderson, Lars

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101883820 ISBN 13: 9781101883822

Verlag: BALLANTINE TRADE, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Lars Anderson comes a revealing portrait of the first family of American sports.
 
What the Kennedys are to politics, the Mannings are to football. Two generations have produced three NFL superstars: Archie Manning, the Ole Miss hero–turned–New Orleans Saint; his son Peyton, widely considered one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game; and Peyton’s younger brother, Eli, who won two Super Bowl rings of his own. And the oldest Manning child, Cooper—who was forced to quit playing sports after he was diagnosed at age eighteen with a rare spinal condition—might have been the most talented of them all.
 
In The Mannings, longtime Sports Illustrated writer Lars Anderson gives us, for the first time, the never-before-told story of this singular athletic dynasty—a story that shows us how finding strength in the face of catastrophe can be the key to success on and off the playing field.  
 
Growing up, the three Manning brothers dream of playing side by side on the gridiron at Ole Miss. But with Cooper forced to the bench before his prime, Peyton must fight to win glory for them both. Meanwhile, Eli is challenged by his college coach to stop trailing in the footsteps of others and forge his own path. With Archie’s achievements looming over them, the brothers begin the climb to football history.
 
From the Manning family backyard to the bright lights of Super Bowl 50, The Mannings is an epic, inspiring saga of a family of tenacious competitors who have transfixed a nation.

Praise for The Mannings

“Anderson, an accomplished storyteller, writes about the Manning football legacy—warts and all—with style and verve, backed by an abundance of research and scholarship.”—Publishers Weekly

“An expertly written impressionistic account of the first family of football.”—Library Journal

“This is one of the most beautifully written and memorable books I’ve read in years—stunningly spectacular. I couldn’t put it down. Once again, Lars Anderson has shown why he is one of the seminal sportswriters of this generation. The Mannings is an absolute masterpiece.”—Paul Finebaum, ESPN college football analyst and New York Times bestselling author of My Conference Can Beat Your Conference
 
“Lars Anderson drills to the core of the Manning family. I love this book because it’s not just about football; it’s about how to raise a family.”—Bruce Arians, head coach of the Arizona Cardinals
 
“Anderson’s yarn never wobbles. . . . A winner for fans of modern football.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Anyone who has paid attention to the NFL over the last five decades understands the significance of the Mannings. They are to America’s best-loved game what the Holbeins are to portraiture, what the Bachs are to classical music, what the Kardashians are to mindless reality television, an unsurpassed dynasty. In The Mannings, Lars Anderson delivers an incisive, honest, and thorough chronicle of the first family of football.”—Jeremy Schaap, New York Times bestselling author of Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lars Anderson is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Storm and the Tide, Carlisle vs. Army, and The All Americans. A twenty-year veteran of Sports Illustrated, Anderson is a senior writer at Bleacher Report and an instructor of journalism at the University of Alabama. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife, April, and their son, Lincoln.

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CHAPTER 1



Desperate for a Hero

Parchman Farm, Mississippi. Summer 1961.

It was one of the scariest places in the South, a vast acreage of cotton and corn deep in the Mississippi Delta.

Beyond the two massive iron gates that served as the entrance to Parchman Farm, the sinners worked the fields at the old penal plantation during the day and prayed they wouldn’t be attacked at night. They never knew what could leap from the shadows—­a knife-­wielding guard, an enraged bunkmate, a fellow inmate who had been driven to the brink of delirium. Slavery, the condemned said under their breaths at Parchman Farm, couldn’t have been this bad.

Located nine miles down the road from the town of Drew in northwestern Mississippi, Parchman Farm was the state’s oldest penitentiary. Built in 1909 on fifteen thousand acres, it was a prison that had no walls. Other than the maximum security unit that was known as “Little Alcatraz,” Parchman didn’t even have cells. Inmates were housed in military-­style barracks they called “cages,” where they would collapse onto rickety bunks after toiling from sunrise to sundown chopping timber, clearing ground, and picking cotton.

For decades the prison was a working farm that resembled an antebellum plantation, filled with black field hands (prisoners) and white foremen (guards). The leather strap, known as “Black Annie,” was the ultimate symbol of discipline on the farm; when a convict didn’t keep up with the line in the cotton fields, an overseer would grab Black Annie—­three feet long, six inches wide—­and administer a hellish whipping, cracking open bare flesh for all to see.

To make sure the prisoners didn’t run, the guards had bloodhounds and specially trained German shepherds always at the ready. There were also gun-­wielding marksmen who stood sentinel day and night. Called “headhunters” on the farm, the shotgun-­toting guards rarely hesitated to fire on a fleeing convict. The only potential for escape came in the evenings when the chained inmates sang in unison about their backbreaking misery in the miles and miles of dusty, hot cotton fields. At Parchman, the blues came naturally.

One of the inmate-­bluesmen was Bukka White, who, in the 1940s, served time for a shooting incident. One afternoon one of White’s nephews, a young man named Riley B. King, visited his uncle at Parchman. Upon entering the front gate, Riley saw the terror in the eyes of the inmates.

The images of his trip to the Farm would stick with young Riley and become his artistic inspiration. He soon moved to Memphis and began picking at the guitar and singing at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill, earning the nickname “Blues Boy.” He later shortened it to B.B. For the rest of his life B. B. King played the blues with the haunting desperation that he saw in the soul of his uncle at Parchman, as if every note he strummed was a scream for freedom.

In the spring of 1961—­just as an earnest, redheaded boy celebrated his twelfth birthday that May by tossing around a football with his daddy in the family yard only nine miles down the road from the Farm—­a group of civil rights activists from several Northern states rode interstate buses into the Deep South. The so-­called Freedom Riders wanted to challenge the nonenforcement of two Supreme Court cases that ruled racial segregation in restaurants and on public buses were unconstitutional. The state governments of Alabama and Mississippi ignored the rulings, and the federal government refused to enforce them. So the Freedom Riders traveled in droves to the South.

The wick on the powder keg was lit. Mobs of angry Southerners, viewing this as another act of Northern aggression, surrounded the buses in the Alabama towns of Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery and attacked the Riders. Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, agreed to protect the Riders as long as he could arrest them for disturbing the peace once they reached Jackson, Mississippi. By late June of ’61 more than forty Freedom Riders were sent to Parchman. They were immediately assigned to chain gangs.

The Mississippi governor told the guards at Parchman to “break their spirit.” Once the Riders arrived at the Farm, they were strip-­searched, were allowed to shower only once a week, weren’t given any mail, and slept in cells in which the lights were kept on twenty-­four hours a day.

Twelve-­year-­old Archie Manning walked among the convicted at Parchman. A few of Archie’s closest friends at Drew Junior High had parents who worked at the prison as administrators and lived in housing on the grounds. Archie occasionally spent the night with his friends at the Farm, and he would see the condemned up close, watching them toil in the fields and perform yard work around the employees’ houses. One time Archie’s Little League baseball team traveled to the Farm to play a squad of convicts; Archie’s team won, but Archie understood the other team was on orders to lose the game.

Little Archie heard about the Freedom Riders at Parchman, but he was too young to fully understand why they were there. Archie was never scared of the prisoners—­the boy had a fearless streak—­but the mere presence of the prison was a daily reminder to Archie to always do right.

Citizens across the country were outraged at the treatment of the Riders at Parchman, where three hundred Riders would be imprisoned. Reporters and camera crews descended on the prison, which during the early days of the civil rights movement came to represent the brutality of the Old South.

America was beginning to boil. More than ever, Southerners were desperate for one of their own to rise up, for someone to spark those fading embers of greatness, someone to bring light to a place that was now growing dark, a hero to redeem them all.

They were looking for a kid from Drew.

CHAPTER 2



The Pee-­Wee QB

Drew, Mississippi. Summer 1951.

The bolls of soft cotton blew out of Parchman Farm. When a dry wind stirred the parched fields, the cotton would drift like snowflakes southward down Highway 49 for nine miles to the corner of Third and Green Streets in Drew, to the little white house of Buddy and Jane Manning.

Prisoners escaped from Parchman a few times a year—­the announcements would blare over the radio in Drew: “A convict is out! Lock your doors!”—­but Buddy always told his two children and wife not to worry. “If he’s out, he sure as heck ain’t stopping in Drew,” Buddy said. “He’s leaving here, not staying.” If Buddy’s only son ever did get scared, he would dash into his backyard clubhouse with a sign on the door that read “No Girls Allowed.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, life in this Delta town of about two thousand moved slower than winter. Drew had three stoplights, two cafés, three service stations, two drugstores—­where the sodas flowed from hand-­pumped spigots—­a dry cleaner, three churches, and one school. In the summers a frozen custard stand opened, where kids smothered their faces in eggs, cream, and sugar while shooting marbles. Two policemen patrolled during daylight; one night watchman relieved them once the lampposts flickered on.

Virtually every resident knew all their neighbors, and kids of all classes of life played together on sandlots and lawns. Drew was a kind of Mayberry, a wholesome-­as-­milk place where an adult could grab anyone’s child by the arm, hand him or her a dollar and tell the youngster to head to the corner barbershop...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BALLANTINE TRADE
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101883820
• ISBN 13: 9781101883822
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien