How Arch Manning handles formidable fame - ESPN

«It's not what everyone thinks it is, and what it's all cracked up to be.» — Madonna, in 2005, on the subject of fame.

Fame, which used to have more patience, took its time cozying up to Archie Manning six decades ago, an era when high school football players didn't get famous and recruiting garnered little attention, analysis or hyperventilation.

When a Mississippi State coach tried to lure Manning to Starkville by noting that Ole Miss had signed eight quarterbacks that offseason, it came as news to Manning, who remembers briefly scrambling for information about those other quarterbacks. «We got the Memphis paper. We didn't get the Jackson paper,» he said of the primitive media landscape. When he reached Ole Miss and freshmen lacked eligibility, he spent a year in the company of anonymity. He played three seasons at Ole Miss, where they're building a statue of him nowadays — wait, there wasn't one already? — and where fame caught up to him even as he never craved it but also did not mind it and sunnily handled it.

A mere two generations down the tree, the second of the Mannings' nine grandchildren has just begun an eighth football season of being famous even as he remains technically 22. His fame began cantering during his freshman year of high school and had reached a full-on gallop by graduation. His surname and his country's love of stars intensified it. He topped these funky late-20th-century inventions called recruiting rankings and, like all such souls, walked around with a working knowledge of which prep quarterbacks excelled and where they might be headed.

All along his way from tot to 6-foot-4, he got a point-blank panorama on fame, watching two uncles star for so long that they combined with his grandfather