The New York Times-20080127-The Quarterbacks- Sideline Play
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The Quarterbacks' Sideline Play
Full Text (980 words)IF you're talking the quarterback as sex symbol, there are basically two types: Namaths and Staubachs. Tom Brady and Eli Manning, the quarterbacks in this year's Super Bowl, are models of each archetype.
A Namath is a playboy, likely to be seen at a nightclub squiring a model.
A Staubach is a strait-laced type, likely to marry his college sweetheart and, by modern standards of celebrity, barely a sex symbol at all.
As Mr. Brady of the New England Patriots braved paparazzi last week during a visit to Manhattan to see his girlfriend, the Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen, he seemed a direct descendant of Joe Namath, the actress-dating quarterback who led the Jets to an upset victory in Super Bowl III in 1969.
Mr. Namath once owned a nightclub called Bachelors III. Mr. Brady partied at the NoHo club Butter.
Moments after the victory last Sunday that put Mr. Manning's Giants into the Super Bowl, a national television audience could see him appearing goofily forlorn as he peered into the stands, apparently in search of his fiancee, Abby McGrew, whom he met at the University of Mississippi.
He seemed to be channeling Roger Staubach, the clean-cut former naval officer who quarterbacked the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s, married his grade-school sweetheart and once said, I enjoy sex as much as Joe Namath, only I do it with one girl.
It may have nothing to do with who wins the game next Sunday in Arizona, but the Brady-Manning dichotomy is dominating the pregame chatter.
We've once again entered into the eternal battle between quarterback chic and quarterback geek, said Mark Kriegel, the author of Namath: A Biography and a columnist for foxsports.com.
I was talking to a friend of mine, said Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, the classic about small-town adoration of high school football players, and we both said if we could come back as anyone, it would be Tom Brady. He seems like a nice guy and he's talented and he can get any girl in the world.
All quarterbacks have the potential to be sex symbols, said the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and an author of books about sexuality. The quarterback is a thinking athlete -- that nice yin-and-yang mixture of descriptions that has a sexual connotation, she said. It's the meeting of highly different qualities that produce an explosive punch of eroticism.
But it wasn't until Sonny Werblin, a former television executive and a co-owner of the Jets in the late 1960s, decided to promote Mr. Namath as a sex symbol that the era of the quarterback as celebrity was born, Mr. Kriegel said.
The other owners thought they were in the football business, and Sonny realized they were in the television business, he said. In Mr. Namath, who wore a fur coat on the sidelines and had shaggy hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, Mr. Werblin had a leading man he could promote.
When Namath comes in, they changed the way football is produced, Mr. Kriegel said. All of a sudden you're getting tight shots on the quarterback when he takes off his helmet on the sidelines.
Mr. Brady, who has posed for GQ, has been getting lots of close-ups. Last week people.com reported he was at Butter on Monday night, when celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and the Olsen twins often hit the club, with Gisele cuddling up to the N.F.L. quarterback in a corner banquette. On Thursday, The New York Post reported that after Butter, the two spent 24 hours straight in Ms. Bundchen's downtown apartment.
Before Mr. Namath, the iconic quarterback was Johnny Unitas, who sported a military-style flattop haircut and high-top black shoes when he played for the Baltimore Colts.
I don't think a lot of women were putting Johnny Unitas flattop posters on their wall and looking at it before going to bed at night, said Richard Manfredi, a writer at Your Face Is a Sports Blog. Maybe Eli is the new Johnny Unitas.
Mr. Unitas, the proto-Staubach, married his longtime girlfriend when he was a senior at the University of Louisville, stayed married for nearly 18 years and then, shortly after his divorce from her, married the woman who stayed with him until his death in 2002.
Like Mr. Unitas, Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers married his hometown sweetheart and was later divorced, and John Elway of the Denver Broncos married a member of the swim team he met while a student at Stanford, and was divorced in 2003.
The more monogamous love lives of the Staubach-type symbols better mirror the lives of their fans than the fantasy single life lived by Mr. Brady and the Dallas quarterback Tony Romo, who spent the weekend before his team's playoff loss to the Giants this month in Mexico with the actress Jessica Simpson.
More Americans are like the Eli Mannings of the world and the Joe Montanas of the world, said Richard Deitsch, an editor for Sports Illustrated. They are more likely to marry their college girlfriends than they are to marry Carrie Underwood or Jessica Simpson.
After Mr. Brady broke up with his previous girlfriend, the actress Bridget Moynahan, she learned she was pregnant and gave birth to a son in August 2007.
Not very Staubach.
I'm not picturing Eli Manning getting any supermodels pregnant, Mr. Manfredi said.
As for the outcome of Sunday's game, if you're looking for a clue in the love lives of quarterback archetypes, consider this: Mr. Namath, who played in one Super Bowl, won only that one. Mr. Staubach, who played in four, won two.
[Illustration]PHOTOS: A HUDDLE FOR TWO: Tom Brady of the Patriots, with Gisele Bundchen. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE)(pg. ST1); BEAUTY AND THE BLADE: Joe Namath and Farrah Fawcett, left, at the Plaza in 1982. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JACKSON LEE/SPLASH NEWS)(pg. ST9)