He didn’t browbeat me into eating, like I’d seen some other parents do. My dad, Buddy Manning, saw my problem and knew what a finicky eater I was. I knew nobody as thin as I was would ever be used as anything-especially a pro quarterback. I never took my shirt off in neighborhood basketball games, and nobody would ever catch me down at the swimming hole.īecause I wanted to be a football player more than anything, I got real hung up about being so skinny. There was no other word to describe me except emaciated. When I was 15, I weighed about 130 pounds and stood almost six feet tall. My parents had other ways of giving advice. “And if you do it again, you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.” “Only the foolish steal and cheat,” she said. It wasn’t a put-down but something to make me think. I never thought about that being wrong, but when I got home and got caught, my mother disciplined me in a way I’ll never forget. I stuck my, hand in and pulled out several sodas and drank them.ĮNJOYING THIS STORY? SUBSCRIBE TO GUIDEPOSTS MAGAZINE! I remember one time when I was 12 I found the concession stand at the ball park unlocked. Maybe the difference had something to do with the way I grew up.ĭrew, Mississippi, my home town, is a beautiful little place with the greatest people on earth, but it’s still a town where a kid growing up needs help in making the right choices. I wondered why this guy and others like him felt so different about life than I do. “They just pull you down and tell you off.” When I met one in a restaurant recently and asked him what he was doing, he said, “My own thing.” When I asked about his family, he told me something that really shook me. Because I travel a lot and because I have longish hair and am relatively young, I often get into conversations with other young people, many of them strangers.
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