Monday, December 24, 2007

Eyeshield 21

Alright. So I was watching the Broncos vs. Chargers game tonight. Not because I'm particularly interested in the outcome, but rather that my fantasy football championship game depends a lot on Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall doing well and LT failing. It's half-time right now, and the first half has not gone well for me. But that's ok. Because I just checked the score (which is really inconvenient using Yahoo, use nfl.com instead) and unless LT scores 32 more points than Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall, I'm a winner. Here's hoping.

Speaking of LT, my older brother was watching the game too, and he isn't a big football fan, but he was really impressed by our boy LaDainian. Then he noticed that LT wears an eyeshield as well as the #21, and is the best runningback in the league, just like the protagonist of one of his favorite mangas, Eyeshield 21. I have not read it myself, but it's about American Football and my brother says it's great, and he's usually right about this kind of stuff, so you can read it in English here.

Anyways, my brother and I assumed that there must be some kind of common piece of football lore that would make the best runningback in the NFL and the main character of a manga so similar. But 8 minutes of searching google has yielded no results, leading me to the only possible conclusion. LaDainian Tomlinson reads Eyeshield 21. And likes it enough to model himself after the main character. What a stud.






































I see it. Do you?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you do some research, you will find that Tomlinson started his NFL career in 2001 as a starter for the chargers, already wearing his #21 jersey and sporting a visor. Eyeshield 21, on the other hand is a managa that was written in the year 2002. So, how could Tomlinson have copied a character from a managa that didn't even exist yet? IMO, it was the other way around; Eyeshield 21 was inspired by LaDainian Tomlinson.