Secrets of a Great Spiral: The Grip and the Release

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

Giants quarterback Eli Manning throws with his pinkie and ring finger across the laces of the ball. “The grip is personal,” he said. “The key, really, is not to hold it too tight.”

By SAM BORDEN
NYT

Organized Thanksgiving football is believed to date to 1876, when the Intercollegiate Football Association decided to schedule its inaugural championship game on the holiday. The first professional game to be played on Thanksgiving came almost a half-century later, in 1920, when Fritz Pollard and the Akron Pros defeated Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs, 7-0.

But all these years later, and for all the Thursday afternoon quarterbacks across the country — on N.F.L. fields and in Central Park and in backyards in Omaha — a single, essential question endures: How can I reliably throw a spiral?

Considering the deeply embedded place in American culture that football occupies, one can only imagine that the well-known players of that era faced the same annoyance at this time of year that current ones do: an endless string of questions from scads of quarterbacks who are eager to battle each other (and indigestion) in backyards across the country.

“Everyone wants to play and everyone thinks they can throw,” Giants quarterback Eli Manning said.

(More here.)