From Namath to Eli, Big Apple means big pressure

	Eli Manning has run into hard times of late and the Giants have dropped three straight. Damian Strohmeyer/SI
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It was a very special meeting of our high school Sports Club back in 1948. It was special because the informal speaker that day was Paul Governali, quarterback of the Giants. His brother, Joe, went to our school, and I got there early so I could sit up front and listen to what the QB had to say. He was one of my heroes, you see, an All-American at Columbia in the days when the Lions beat teams such as Georgia and Wisconsin.

"Yeah, I think we're gonna get that Conerly kid," he said, sitting on one of the desks and talking to us off the cuff. "We've got a good shot at him." Charley Conerly had been drafted by the Redskins during the war but they already had a quarterback, Sammy Baugh, so some kind of deal was in the works for the Giants to get him. We weren't quite sure what it was, but if Pitchin' Paul said it, that was good enough for us.

Quarterback of the Giants wasn't a huge item in those days. College football was still king. Notre Dame, Michigan, West Point, the Black Knights of the Hudson, that bunch. The NFL was only for football diehards, such as us, and most of us preferred the rival league, the AAFC, anyway, with the mighty Cleveland Browns. Hell, the New York Yankees in the AAFC didn't even have a QB. They were single wing, with the great triple threat tailback, Orban, Spec, Sanders.

The Giants got Conerly, all right, and he remained their quarterback for more than a decade. Governali? Gone before the season was over. See ya around. Half a dozen years later he was the backfield coach at Columbia when I was a player there, and one day we had a brief talk about what the old NFL was like.

"Didn't matter what you'd been the year before," he said. "If they felt they could replace you, you were gone. A lot of the salaries were only game to game anyway. I've seen guys get hurt in a game and then get cut while they were on the trainer's table. They weren't even given train fare home. Quarterback of the Giants? Most people didn't even care that I was gone."

Everything has changed, of course. With the growth of pro football into America's monster spectator sport has come the almost painstaking scrutiny to which the quarterback position has been subjected. Maybe it's because I've been based in the New York area for almost all my life, but it seems that nowhere is that scrutiny as intense as it is in this city.

It seems that almost every day the two QBs in this town, Eli Manning of the Giants and Chad Pennington of the Jets, are subjects of the old Dr. Phil treatment. OK, not so much with Pennington, because his good days have outnumbered his bad, but Manning? Oh my God, the angles that have been devoted to this young man's mechanics, mentality, effect on the franchise, past and present, effect on the careers of those responsible for his arrival in New York.

Typical Sunday, actually the same day the Giants suffered their historic meltdown in Tennessee:

"Is This The Best Eli Giants Will Get?" was the Daily News' headline for an analytical piece with heavy historic overtones. "Relax Folks, Got to Give Eli a Break," from the paper's lead columnist, Mike Lupica, urging patience. And just to show the Jets weren't being neglected ..."Slumping Chad," was Pennington's headline.

In its typically understated style, the Times headed its Giants piece with, "An Erratic Manning Puts the Giants on Blue Alert."

One thing you have to say about the New York area, though. It's creative. On the Newark Star-Ledger's lead sports page, in the form of a letter written in a child's notebook, was the headline, "Dear Eli: There's No Easy Way to Say This. You've Been Kind of Stinky lately. So We Think it's Time You Went Back to School." And on an interior page was Manning's "course load at Quarterback U," lessons from five media figures known to the sport. My favorite was the critique from Fox-TV's Brian Baldinger, a former NFL lineman. A guard! Repeat, a guard! (You see, Eli, when you're playing the trap you've got to drop to a knee).