The Manning kids are going to have to find their own way to meet Taylor Swift.
During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly pegged to his partnership with Corona, Eli Manning admitted that his daughters ask him “all the time” to make an introduction to the 34-year-old superstar — but the former New York Giants quarterback has no plans to reach out to her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, to make it happen.
“If we happen to be somewhere where Travis and Taylor are in the same town or city and [they’re] like, ‘You gotta text Travis and see if we can, like, just meet up. We’ll be quick. We just wanna see her. We don’t have to say hi.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not texting him [for you] to see Taylor. You [want to] see her, you gotta find a way, you gotta be creative. You gotta do it yourself,’” Manning, 43, told Us.
Manning and wife Abby share three daughters, Ava, 13, Lucy, 11, and Caroline, 9, and son Charles, 5.
“They all torture him,” the athlete continued of his son’s dynamic with his sisters. “The boy, I mean, he doesn’t stand a chance. But they are sweet to him. My 5-year-old son [and] my 9-year-old daughter — they’re buddies. They’re tight and they get along well and they kind of get grouped together and brought along [with the oldest] or left out.”
While he has a teenager in the house now, Manning says Ava hasn’t started acting “like a real teenage daughter” — yet.
“Or [not like] the rumors I hear about what happens. She’s still sweet to me, still nice to me, still wants to hang out,” he said. “She’s doing great [and] excited for school to get started up again.”
While Eli told Us he won’t be reaching out to Kelce, 34, anytime soon, he does have an ongoing and lengthy text thread with brother Peyton Manning as they gear up to cohost another season of their ManningCast, the ESPN2 broadcast of Monday Night Football.
“Peyton sends a lot of voice memos — that’s his move. He doesn’t call and leave a voicemail because you can only leave a three-minute voicemail, [whereas] a voice memo, you can text it and it can be unlimited,” he explained when asked about working with his brother. “It’s 35 minutes of him watching film, all his notes, his ideas or what he might get up to. And so all of a sudden, like, I don’t respond to his 35-minute voice memo, he’ll be like, ‘Hey, what’d you think of my idea? I left it in the voice memo.’ I’m like, ‘What minute of the video of the memo did you leave it in? Because I didn’t last into six minutes of it. I need the CliffsNotes of the voice memo. If you have questions, you gotta text those. You can’t ask the questions within the memo.’ … He’s very long-winded.”
The Manning brothers will be back for season 4 of ManningCast on Monday, September 9, but Eli is celebrating the return of the NFL as of Wednesday, September 4, teaming up with Corona to sell limited-edition Lime Wedge Football sets signed by Eli. The kit features a table runner designed to look like a football field on a beach and a fake lime wedge with laces on the rind. Consumers can purchase the limited-edition game while supplies last for $10 plus the cost of shipping at CoronaUSA.com.
“I played a lot of paper football growing up, and it is fun to team up with Corona [as an adult],” Eli explained. “I usually travel with a couple Coronas, [and] they make great goal posts that you can play through. But the great thing about this game, if you don’t wanna go full throttle and be a professional Lime Wedge Football player, you can just kind of use anything. You can use real limes, you can use anything around the tailgate, around the house and have some fun.”
Whether they have the official kit or are making their own board at home, football fans are encouraged to tag @CoronaUSA with their own versions of Corona Lime Wedge Football for the chance to be featured on the beloved beer brand’s social channels.
