EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Donovan McNabb will be smiling like SpongeBob SquarePants today.
Even if he throws an interception.
McNabb smiles all the time.
Even when he is removed from a game in a humiliating manner, even when he says he doesn’t know a regular-season game can end in a tie, even when his team loses the Super Bowl and it’s claimed that he was vomiting on the field late in the fourth quarter, even when the folks in Philadelphia boo him as they likely would have booed Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross.
Is the 32-year-old quarterback’s smile a corollary of constant happiness? Or is the smile similar to Mona Lisa’s sfumato — an Italian term for a layered painting with a blurred, ambiguous image. Uncertain or real?
McNabb, an observer and guest analyst for ESPN at last year’s Super Bowl, and I talked briefly every day in the makeup chairs. (Yes, quarterbacks and columnists do wear makeup.) Curious, I asked him about the famous, unwavering smile.
“I’m having fun. Not everything goes like I want it to, but my life is great. I enjoy what I do, and I feel fortunate. So I smile,” he said with a smile.
McNabb and the Philadelphia Eagles, given up as clay pigeons in November, are playing the New York Giants today for the right to go to the NFC championship game.
It would be McNabb’s fifth conference title game in eight seasons.
He has been a Philadelphia magnate since being drafted second overall in the 1999 draft, but he has been a magnet of controversy for 10 years. McNabb has never been a troublemaker. He is a family man with a childhood sweetheart wife, three kids (twins were born in December), a Campbell’s Chunky Soup vocal mother and a graduate of Syracuse University, which he chose over Nebraska (the only other school to offer him a football scholarship). There, he was a four-year starter at quarterback and a reserve guard on the basketball team. (The Orange and McNabb’s old coach, Jim Boeheim, are staying in the same hotel I am and played Rutgers on Saturday night.)
But McNabb, who majored in speech communications, has a smiling mouth that runs about as often as he has over the years. There was the tight-turned-tumultuous relationship with Terrell Owens, a Rush Limbaugh remark that cost Limbaugh a spot in network sports, the blogs on the McNabb personal website that questioned his teammates’ desire, the reactions in Philadelphia to his numerous injuries, his discordant (and honest) comments about players and the coach, the national indignation after McNabb said he didn’t realize a regular-season game could end in a tie and his benching in November after playing awful for weeks.
And, of course, there is the smile, instead of ground- stomping and helmet-throwing, when he throws interceptions or doesn’t pick up a first down. People want anger and anguish. “I’m not that kind of person,” he told me.
This season’s McNabb McMess was a 2 1/2-game stretch of six interceptions, two losses and the rare tie. Coach Andy Reid yanked McNabb at halftime of the Baltimore game and put in backup (and supposed heir apparent) Kevin Kolb — think John Elway and Tommy Maddox in Denver — and Kolb was dreadful.
Following the fire and brimstone in Philly, McNabb was reinstalled as quarterback the following week. The Eagles won four of their final five — including a victory here against the Giants and the season-ending, playoff-clinching, 44-6 blowout of the Dallas Cowboys. Then, Philadelphia won at Minnesota 26-14, and the Eagles and Giants — acidic division rivals — play for the third time this season.
In his past six games, McNabb has thrown 10 touchdown passes, with only two interceptions.
During his struggles and after his benching, “it was important to go into the locker room and show the guys that none of that ever affects you and you will do everything you need to do to change that,” McNabb said this week.
McNabb has always had the resiliency to get up and bounce back, on and off the field. And he’s one of the good guys in pro sports. But if McNabb doesn’t defeat the Giants and ultimately play in the Super Bowl, he may not be back with the Eagles next season.
The five-time Pro Bowler and probable Hall of Famer signed a 12-year, $115 million contract in 2002, but there have been changes since, and his salary cap number next season will be $10.3 million. Privately, McNabb and the Eagles are considering options, and the quarterback remains distant from his coach, but, publicly, all the thespians in this play are putting on happy faces. Especially one.
McNabb will confront a defense led by Giants coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, who was with the Eagles in the past and could be, in the future, with the Broncos. The Giants’ defense has dipped and dripped lately.
“You know, just sometimes, I guess, during the course of the year you don’t always play as well as you did early on,” McNabb said. “So, none of them got benched.”
When he made the last statement, Donovan McNabb was, as always, smiling like Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat.
Woody Paige: 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com
