By SAM MELLINGER
The Kansas City Star ..Feb. 1, 2012
 
 
The narrative of Eli Manning as the cool and collected Super Bowl champion is a fraud. At least, that’s what some inside the league will tell you. Wisdom of crowds can be a powerful thing, though, especially when it makes for a good story.
 
So you mostly hear that Eli is on the cusp of being a Hall of Famer mostly because he’s a better quarterback under pressure than his older brother, Peyton.
 
Baloney.
 
Go back and watch the miracle play to David Tyree in the Super Bowl four years ago. The throw is high. It is late. And it is over the middle. NFL Films has turned it into the football equivalent of the Mona Lisa, and that’s cool, but it’s also dangerously close to a lie.
 
And if you think that’s just a punk sports writer talking, listen to a future Hall of Famer describe it.
 
“Trash,” Warren Sapp says. “It was the worst pass ever in a Super Bowl, and he got away with it.”
 
But history remembers it differently, so good for Manning. He’s put the reputation to use this year, setting an NFL record with 15 fourth-quarter touchdown passes. This kind of status is gold in football, where the difference between Ben Roethlisberger’s bio and Philip Rivers’ standing as a whiny underachiever is their performances in the biggest games.
 
Or, more accurately, their performances in the biggest moments.
 
The idea of performing in the clutch is talked about a lot, of course, but it’s hardly ever explained. You don’t hear much about the science behind it, but as it turns out, the men playing in the Super Bowl here on Sunday will be facing much more than the pressure of America’s biggest stage.
 
They’ll be fighting against thousands of years of evolution.
 
• • •
 
Humans developed their fight-or-flight response as hunter-gatherers, and for perfectly sound reasons.
 
We often ran into scary animals back then, saber-tooth tigers and the like, so it became helpful for our bodies to produce adrenaline and related hormones to quicken our hearts, tighten our muscles and generally enable us to perform feats of speed and strength that we otherwise couldn’t handle.
 
It was either that, or die.
 
Today, we don’t fight tigers. We fight fear.
 
“We’re not afraid of dying,” says Gregg Steinberg, a sports psychologist in Tennessee who’s worked with NFL players and other pro athletes. “We’re afraid of looking foolish.”
 
Fight-or-flight remains in all of us, so science tells us something remarkable about the athletes we obsess over and the ones we cuss: their ability to own and manipulate this energy separates Lin Elliott and Billy Cundiff from Adam Vinatieri and Lawrence Tynes.
 
Steinberg says we can learn to be clutch, at least to a certain degree. Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and Tom Brady weren’t necessarily born to be cool under pressure. They developed that ability, because they developed good habits.
 
The trick is to make your best emotional state your habit, because we all tend to fall back on our habits under pressure. Being nervous, having bad thoughts, performing with fear, these are bad habits that need to be practiced out of us.
 
Billy Cundiff missing that kick at the end of the AFC championship game comes from the same biological place as a middle manager rushing through an underprepared speech.
 
The best athletes practice with the hope of having pressure. The worst ones practice with the fear of it. Billy Jean King titled her autobiography “Pressure is a Privilege.”
 
There are ways to do this in empty gyms and stadiums. Basketball players create challenges, like hitting 10 straight shots or running five suicides. Football coaches create chaos, like blaring crowd noise during practice or surprising players with strategy quizzes.
 
“That bodily change is going to happen when the pressure goes up,” Steinberg says. “But it’s still an energy source. We either see it as a positive or a negative.”
 
Confidence can go a long way here, both in sports and in life. Swagger up to the moment and you have a better chance.
 
This is where Manning’s lucky break in the Super Bowl four years ago turns into something sustainable.
 
• • •
 
Tom Brady may or may not know the science behind what he does. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the way he thinks is exactly how sports psychologists teach clients to approach pressure.
 
“As a competitor, you want to be here; you need to be here,” he says. “This is why we’ve worked so hard over the years — high school, college, pros — to prepare for games like this. It’s a fun game.”
 
Athletes across all sports say things like that, of course, and it’s important to remember Brady doesn’t have some secret he’s keeping from the rest of us. He’s not invincible, not undefeated in big moments, and actually, it’s easy to overlook the fact that he’s been pedestrian or worse in all but one of his last six playoff games. He threw two interceptions and no touchdowns, even missing open scoring chances against Baltimore two weeks ago.
 
But that’s a bit off the point. Brady can become only the third (Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana) quarterback to win four Super Bowls, and you don’t do that by cowering in the moment.
 
He, like Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders, Phil Simms and a handful of others, earned their way into football’s most prized club. The trick is there’s no way to know how a man will handle the moment until he, well, has to handle The Moment.
 
Gil Brandt, the executive who helped build the old Cowboys’ dynasty, says you could get a hint by watching who stepped up first in drills and who drifted toward the back. But scouts are still sometimes fooled by guys who show all the good signs during the week and then wilt when the stadium is full. These are called “trap players.”
 
Same as Brady, Manning may or may not know the science behind what he does. Doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the way he works is exactly how sports psychologists teach clients to attack The Moment.
 
“Pressure is something you feel when you’re unprepared,” Manning says. “I’ve been very prepared for each game.”
 
The last of the doubters are waiting until Sunday to make their judgments.
 
• • •
 
Manning is in a good place. He is the starting quarterback for the betting underdog, able to use that time-honored rallying cry even as many experts think the Giants are the better team.
 
The questions about his brother this week — Would a second Super Bowl win make you the better Manning? — are both silly and annoying.
 
But the ones about how he will perform in America’s biggest game are not. This will be different than four years ago, when he could play freer, when the thousands of years of evolution weren’t hitting his body in the same way they will be this weekend.
 
In other words, now is his chance to convince the NFL’s skeptical circle.
 
“We want to see Eli do it in this situation,” Sapp says. “Because now it’s on him. This will be the Super Bowl that defines him. This one. I want to see him in this one. There were no expectations of him in the first one. This one here, this is it.”