Eli Manning to host Saturday Night Live

Eli Manning

By Richard K. Barry

Mark this date on your calendar: May 5, New York Giants Super Bowl champion quarterback Eli Manning will be hosting Saturday Night Live. Apparently, he was offered the gig four years ago, the last time the Giants won the Super Bowl, but he wasn't interested. It might have been because brother Peyton did the show the year before (2007) and pretty much knocked it out of the park (sorry for the baseball metaphor).

But this time around Eli is going to do it.

The fact is that you can't really compare Eli's personality to Peyton's. Peyton seems to have been blessed with a lot of the family extraversion and all that. In fact, Archie, family patriarch, is trying to manage expectations a little bit, telling USA Today:

"I noticed they were already tearing him (in the news media) a little bit about it because of his (perceived lack of) personality ... that he won't do as well as Peyton. I don't think of it as a competition. 

"He told me he was going to do it and I said, 'Good, I'll be there.' As a parent, I don't look at it like, 'Will he be better than (New York Yankees shortstop) Derek Jeter?' It's an honor.''

Absolutely, it's an honour. It's what you get when you excel at your chosen profession on one of the biggest stages in the world.

He'll be fine. But even in this brief promo clip from 2007 we can see what Eli is up against, not that it's a competition.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)