Quote of the Week III
"You're good kids. Stay together. Trust each other and be good teammates to one another. I believe there is a championship in this room."
--Ernie Accorsi's prescient final words in his last address to the team as the Giants general manager last season. Those words come from Tom Callahan's revealing read, "The GM: The Inside Story of a Dream Job and the Nightmares That Go With It." Callahan e-mailed Friday to remind me of Accorsi's talk to his team, which I'd forgotten. But how valid it is this morning now that Accorsi's key draft gem, Eli Manning, has helped lead the G-Men to the Super Bowl. The Giants are young enough and good enough at enough important positions to continue challenging for championships.
The reason I despise Eli Manning has nothing to do with his struggles, or the fact that he plays for a New York team. The reason I despise him is because he is the whiniest little bitch on the face of the earth. After every unsuccessful passing play, the camera shows Manning performing some combination of pouting, throwing his hands in the air, and squinting like he can't figure out what's going on. He bitches at his receivers, or his running back, or his offensive line, or his coaches, or the referee.
The best example of his disagreeable nature, however, came way back on the day he was drafted. He actually had the gall to complain publicly about playing for the Chargers, who had the No. 1 overall pick and were planning on drafting him. He went so far as to insist that he wouldn't sign with them, thus forcing the Chargers to trade the No. 1 pick to the Giants so Manning could play for his team of choice. Needless to say, I delighted in the fact that Philip Rivers, whom the Chargers selected with the pick acquired from the Giants, became an above-average starting QB basically as soon as he started playing, while Manning, despite being handed the starting job much earlier than Rivers, was sucking it up for years and being carved up by the media in the very city in which he had insisted on playing.
What does all this have to do with Peter King's "Quote of the Week III"? Well, this little tidbit stood out to me:
But how valid it is this morning now that Accorsi's key draft gem, Eli Manning, has helped lead the G-Men to the Super Bowl.
Accorsi's "key draft gem" fell into his lap because the attention-whore refused to play in a beautiful city where everybody's more or less accepting of your performance. Accorsi's brilliant move was to think to himself, "Hmm, the consensus number 1 draft pick is begging to play for my team. Perhaps I should draft him."
I fucking hate Eli Manning.
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