Super Bowl champion quarterback Eli Manning talks to more than 2,000 attendees at the 2012 Best of Preps banquet Thursday at the Chattanooga Convention Center.Eli Manning is as square as a game of checkers on the front porch — refreshingly down to earth and normal.
So much so that during Thursday night’s annual Best of Preps banquet, when one high school athlete asked the New York Giants’ two-time Super Bowl winning quarterback if he would follow him on Twitter, Manning smiled sheepishly and in his typical aw-shucks way responded, “I don’t know how to tweet. I don’t have a Twitter account.”
After a morning practice in New Jersey on Thursday, Manning flew to Chattanooga in the afternoon to serve as the guest speaker for the annual Times Free Press dinner honoring the area’s top high school athletes and coaches. After more than a 30-minute Q&A session, before exiting the stage to a standing ovation, Manning held up his hand as if quietening a stadium full of fans and thanked the audience for welcoming him, then ended his portion of the evening by encouraging all the prep athletes to continue making the right choices in life.
Since our town’s two newspapers merged 13 years ago, the event has grown to the point that more than 1,300 attended Thursday’s banquet. The featured speakers have progressed from local coaches to world-class athletes, including back-to-back years of bringing in NFL-champion quarterbacks.
Manning quietly solidified himself as the embodiment of all that’s right with athletics on the biggest stage. He certainly connected with many of the athletes on hand to receive their awards.