Peyton the Kid: “I’ll make ya Famous”
Not taking anything away from talented New Orleans Saints cornerback Tracy Porter, but sometimes in the Wild West notoriety is more about the gunslinger you take down with a bullet rather than the skills of the man who shot it. To put Peyton in a pine box on the NFL’s biggest stage, well, that earns the type of 15 minutes that are slow to evaporate.
Since Tracy’s pick-6 of Peyton Manning on Super Bowl Sunday, the newly-dubbed game-saver has been on every meaningful sports show across the land, including ESPN. Porter has wiggled his way into the type of superstardom that even most anchors of the network have yet to experience. Porter has been on SportsCenter, Mike and Mike, First Take, Jim Rome, and a slue of other ESPN productions – everyone of which goes the same way: Porter is asked about the INT, he tells it like he’s Gorge Foreman come again, predicting the KO of Michael Moorer.
A Super Bowl champion has every right to brag, especially one who single-handedly sealed the game with an interception of such magnitude. But to hear Porter tell it, he baited Manning into throwing his way. The self-gratifying Porter claims to have outsmarted the future Hall of Fame QB by knowing exactly what he was going to do.
On the real side of life, the rest of us have full access to the video. Peyton dropped back, Wayne was curling (supposedly) back to the ball, and the play went awry due to Wayne’s position when the ball was thrown. Porter, who had lost Wayne, received a gift right in his chest when Reggie failed to come back for the football.
Many feel like Porter is taking far too much credit for a play gone bust. And ESPN isn’t helping his case by constantly giving him a platform to pat himself on the back. No one but Porter knows if he truly outsmarted the greatest football player in the league or if he just rolled the dice and struck some golden luck in the no deposit codes online casino from Heaven. But for right now, it’s all moot point.
It is what it is, to quote De Niro, and Tracy Porter and the Saints win while Manning and the Colts look onward to next year. Tracy deserves his time in the limelight, whether he broke the Manning Code or not. But he might want to be careful with the self-advertizing. Football players have great memories, especially Peyton Manning, and the next time they meet might leave Porter with a whole lot to think about that he never planned for.