PHOENIX  The Manning brother you don't know spent Super Bowl media day in his office in a New Orleans skyscraper.

The Manning brother you don't watch on television is prone to superstition, and quickly comes across as the gregarious one of the litter — as affable as Peyton or Eli, but with better quotes.

The Manning brother you will never see play in a Super Bowl has a wife and three kids and part ownership of an energy firm that deals with oil and gas stocks. Which means you can be named Manning, enjoy a pretty successful life, and not have linebackers trying to twist around your helmet so you're looking out the ear hole every Sunday.

"I like my gig here," Cooper Manning said over the phone. "I'm trying to blend in. I'm not doing a very good job this week."

To recount quarterbacking's royal family: There's Archie, the Hall of Fame patriarch. Olivia, the homecoming queen mother. Peyton and Eli.

And Cooper.

He was the one Manning the football gods were not kind toward. Matter of fact, they came at him with brass knuckles.

He was once an all-state high school receiver, catching touchdown passes from little brother Peyton, and a hot commodity headed for Mississippi.

But then came the numbness in the hands and fingers, and the tests and finally the diagnosis: Spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal.

That meant Cooper had just become a cheerleader for life.

So now it's 2008 and no winter seems complete without one Manning or another playing in the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the older brother is 33, and not in the least bothered that he has missed out on such things as magazine covers, talk show invitations and minicams in his face.

"I don't play that game," Cooper said. "I don't think that's a good thing. The only thing that is going to come out of that is feeling sorry for yourself."

Or the feeling of being cheated of a pro career that any touted athlete would have — especially one who comes from a family where you look around the Christmas dinner table and see a line of NFL quarterbacks?

"I think I get a little better (in people's memories) every year because of my brothers' success. When your career ends at 18, there's a lot up in the air," he said.

"When they took football away from me, I never took it out on the game. I really never had any bitterness. I just said, this is the hand I'm dealt and I'm going to play it. I don't know if I have it down pat yet, but I'm having fun trying."

The Manning boys have been known to behave absolutely brotherly — if that means bickering, jabbing, poking. In an ESPN promo, the entire family was on a tour of the studio and the brothers were pushing and kicking one another. "That didn't take a lot of rehearsal," Cooper said.

Eli mentioned at media day how Peyton had actually gotten funnier in his commercials — "And it's hard for me to say that, trust me."

But there is no question Cooper lives and dies with his brothers' fortunes.

"Every Sunday night you can tell by the tone of my voice what happened that day," he said.

And there is no question his younger brothers admire how Cooper has carried on.

"He's done a lot better than Peyton or I could have done with it," Eli said this week. "I try to put myself in his shoes, and that would have been hard to take. I've never heard him have a regret or bitterness or any complaints."

So Cooper watches from ... well, that's often a question. Bad omens get him switching seats.

He began the NFC Championship Game in the frozen stands of Lambeau Field. "But at halftime, it's touch and I go, so I decide to move," he said. "Plus, when it's so cold you have to ask the person next to you to zip up your coat because your fingers are frozen, I thought it might be a good idea to take it to the house."

More precisely, a luxury box.

He'll be in Arizona this weekend to share one brother's Super Bowl as he shared another's last February. And then Cooper Manning will return to gas and oil stocks.

"I like being able to get back to the real world," he said. "I don't know if it can get any better than this for me."

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Contact Mike Lopresti at mlopresti@gns.gannett.com