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The field of sports genomics is rife with argument, starting with the simple question of what athleticism even is. For every study that shows a relationship between ribonucleic acids and raising trophies, another contradicts it. The interplay of slow- and fast-twitch fibers that makes balance, concentration, spatial awareness, these are not traits like hair color.
Maybe someday genomics will be a useful predictor of whether you’re growing a Hall of Famer at your kitchen table, but for the moment, it’s overneat to the point of uselessness. If you’re going down the rabbit hole of athleticism, at least go down a more intriguing path that embraces the messiness and mystery: genealogy.
Genomics is science; genealogy is story. It used to be a hobby for Aunt Marge at the library, but with digitization and AI, it has become an incurable addiction for millions of us who now disappear into the past for hours at a time, squinting at and jigsawing together troves of records on subscription platforms with new online tools, thus swelling a market that is forecast to grow to $8 billion by 2026. I have spent days tracing a skein of my family line back to a possible Blackbeard grandson (Pirates! No surprise there, given the family temperament) and passed untold hours documenting trips a deceptively bespectacled great-uncle made in the 1950s on fruit boats to a place called the Swan Islands off Honduras, known as "the CIA’s radio station." (Spies! He said he was a civil engineer.) That’s my story, or part of it, anyway, between the Texas pioneers and mule traders.
The sport of genealogy is a diverting game in these summer days between tennis Grand Slams and golf majors. Here’s an inquiry: Since genomes are a dead end, why not try another experiment instead? Trace the genealogies of a couple of prominent champion athletes and see what their stories might suggest. Some conveniently easy targets immediately come to mind: Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning. If ever there was a family that begs for exploration, it’s theirs.
The first thing you learn about the Manning genealogy is that those boys are some fighting SOBs, all the way back to the American Revolution. Two Manning forebears served under Brig. Gen. Francis Marion, "The Swamp Fox," in South Carolina. The second thing you learn is that they established large plantations with land grants starting in 1785 and passed them on to whole passels of sons, one line of whom pushed westward into Mississippi and settled more alluvial land at Crystal Springs in Copiah County. There, by 1860 Elisha Manning (Eli is his namesake) and wife Rebecca Edwards, daughter of another large South Carolina planter family, were prospering on several hundred acres with 10 enslaved people and seven sons, acreage valued at $4,000 and a personal estate worth $12,000. For the time, that was close to a millionaire.
Every one of his sons enlisted in the Confederate Army during the Civil War - and that’s when the Manning fortunes turned. At Vicksburg to be precise. Four Manning brothers were in the centermost trenches with the 36th Mississippi Infantry, which took Ulysses S. Grant’s assaults right in the teeth and lost a third of its men to death or wounds. Two Mannings were killed, one lost a leg, and another was taken prisoner.
The surviving paroled sons eventually returned home to a much-diminished estate. As their old patriarch father, Elisha, observed, everything in the county had been "nearly ruined, everything destroyed." Elisha died in 1866. One of his Vicksburg survivor sons, Richard Elam Manning, set about cultivating again with his wife, Elizabeth Ann Pevey, daughter of another early Copiah settler family. But the Mannings were no longer planters. They were small farmers. By 1870, cotton was just 15 cents a pound, and Richard reported on a census that the family’s net worth was just $200.
That still made them far better off than the freedmen tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were their immediate neighbors, but it had to feed and support Richard’s nine children, including a son named Elisha Archibald Manning, born in 1873. Life got no easier for the Mannings as the century turned; cotton continued to rise and plunge, bottoming out at 6 cents in the 1890s.
Richard gave acreage to his children, including a tract to son Elisha, who by the turn of the century was farming right next door, helped by his own sons, including one named Peyton (born March 24, 1901) and another named Elisha "Buddy" Archibald Jr. (May 9, 1910), who would become the father of legendary Mississippi quarterback Archie Manning.
But first came the Great Depression and the all-but-total collapse of Mississippi’s economy, accompanied by floods, boll weevils and droughts. Mississippi’s farm income fell from $191 million in 1920 to just $41 million in 1932, and farm property values cratered. To make ends meet, the next generation of Mannings had to find work as wage earners. Peyton Manning took a job driving a bus. His brother Frank worked in a grocery store, while Elisha "Buddy" Archie Jr. clerked in hardware.
With Pearl Harbor in 1941, Buddy enlisted. According to a family genealogy compiled in the 1950s, he served through 1945 as a technical sergeant in the 218th Field Artillery, part of the 41st Infantry Division, known as the "Jungleers," who saw notoriously hard campaigning in New Guinea and the Philippines, which he never talked about. He came home and went to work as a farm implements salesman at a company in the small town of Drew, Mississippi, in Sunflower County, which despite its cheerful name was the locale of Parchman prison, as well as the barn where Emmett Till was killed and the center of Fannie Lou Hamer’s civil rights battles.
According to the 1950 census, Buddy Manning worked 72 hours a week trying to sell and collect on farm machinery in order to support his family, including his wife, Jane Elizabeth "Sis" Nelson, a graduate of Union College in Tennessee who took work as a legal secretary, and their infant son, Archie Manning, born in 1949. They lived in a small wooden house in Drew across the street from the public high school, which allowed the boy convenient access to athletic fields and extra coaching. Farmers were so cash poor they often couldn’t pay their debts on their implements. Work, stress and chain-smoking caused Buddy to suffer an early stroke. Depressed by illness and financial failures, he killed himself with a shotgun in 1969, just as his son was becoming a national sensation as a quarterback at Ole Miss.
The rest is well chronicled, how Archie found his father’s body and almost quit school, but his mother insisted he go back to Ole Miss, and he went on to play for over a decade in the NFL, mostly with the New Orleans Saints. How he and wife Olivia had three strapping sons - Cooper, Peyton and Eli - who inherited financial ease and some genetic gifts such as strong arms but also congenital defects in their necks. Curiously, none of them had anything like their father’s dodging foot speed. What they did have was the mindset to work at football as if they were broke, even though, as Archie insisted, he never set out to raise NFL players: "We just tried to raise good boys."
In an April paper titled "Genomics and Athletic Performance: An Emerging Discipline That is Not Yet Ready for Society," authors Aikaterini Psatha, Christina Mitropoulou and George P. Patrinos wrote, "Genomic markers cannot per se predict athletic performance for talent identification … and the complex interplay of genetics with other physical, physiological and even psychological and mental characteristics to produce a world-class athlete is still not understood."
In other words, no matter how tantalizing the subject of genomes and sports, the science is just not confirmable to this point. Frankly, it’s hard to see how it ever will be. Lives are not sequential structures.
But genealogy, now there is a field of complex interplay. An athlete is not just a bundle of inherited gifts and traits but also of family influences and circumstances that are passed along with names. Science historian and geneticist Steven Shapin recently tried to unravel the mystery of "genius" in a ruminative piece on Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose in which he observed that we make too much of some things while too little of others, such as a subject’s "passage through knowledge institutions," such as schools.
Or towns or battalions or artillery units. We discount "the meeting with other minds" as well as thousands of other encounters, "the accidents of people met, books read and conversations had, and the paths taken through landscapes of opportunity and risk." There is the fascination of genealogy: It hints at this vast landscape of opportunity and risk, through pieces of old paper now digitized, the spidery hundred-year-old handwriting on birth records, draft cards, farm schedules, tax rolls. What genealogy tells you is that it takes all of these intersecting forces and fates and more to create a person, much less a champion.