"In Sunday night's Manning-Manning throwdown at Giants Stadium, the most hyped regular-season opener in NFL history, two strong-armed brothers will go at it for three hours while a rapt nation alters its viewing habits. For those of you who might have missed it -- all nine of you -- Sunday is the new Monday, and if Madden/Michaels/Costas & Co. can't adequately hammer home that point, Peyton and Eli most certainly will.
When the show is over, one quarterback will experience a bittersweet victory, while the other will be bummed. This will almost certainly trigger a heartwarming hug, the signoff NBC so eagerly seeks.
If only the network could capture what a real Sunday night disappointment in the Manning household once looked like.
"We had very heated battles back there on the basketball hoop in the backyard, and Sundays were always the most intense games of all," recalls Cooper Manning, the eldest of the three Manning brothers. "That's because Monday morning was garbage day, so whoever lost the game had to take out the cans the night before."
The Mannings grew up in a house that, unlike most others in New Orleans' Garden District, has a decent-sized grass yard in the front. Hauling the cans along the side of the lawn and out onto the street was a more daunting task than it sounds.
"You had to open a fence and drag them about 25 yards to the street, over a bumpy dirt path that was full of large tree roots," Cooper remembers. "And with three boys in the house, plus all the friends we'd have over, we had a lot of garbage. This was before they made the cans on wheels, and we'd always have old ones with the bottoms falling out. Inevitably, you'd try to drag two or three at a time, and one would fall over and all the crawfish and shrimp and other crap would fall out and you'd have to try to scoop it up."
Suffice it to say that for the loser of that Sunday's matchup, the words "you stink" took on added significance.
"I'm telling you, it was brutal," Cooper says. "You know Sunday nights -- you're lazy, catching up on homework, depressed that the weekend is over. Mom would say, 'Somebody's gotta take out the garbage.' And you'd go, 'By the way, I banked that last shot in -- have a nice walk.' The whole thing took about seven or eight minutes, and it was pure luxury watching Peyton have to deal with it."
Cooper, who now works as an institutional broker for an energy research firm, is two years older than the Colts' quarterback, and far more jocular by nature. The Garbage Wars were always between him and Peyton, and/or their father, Archie; Eli, five years younger than Peyton, wasn't even allowed on the court, which in this case was a good thing. Says Cooper, "Eli probably never had to take out the garbage in his life."
Archie, the protective dad scoffed and said, "Aw, Cooper likes to say that Eli never had to take out the trash because we babied him...." The former Saints quarterback stopped himself, laughed and said, "You know, maybe he didn't."
