Archie Manning, you know: Ole Miss legend, New Orleans prince, Southern Icon, football's First Father.

Peyton Manning, you know him, too: Tennessee hero, Colts' perennial Pro Bowl savior; yeah, well, okay ... quickly turning into Jim Mora's whipping boy.

Eli Manning, you're learning about: Oxford's child star, The Inheritor; rousting the Rebels just like the Old Man.

But the Manning the general public is far too unfamiliar with is the sharpest, funniest, friendliest, most charismatic of 'em all -- his family is unanimous in agreement -- he being the oldest son, Cooper, 27, now dabbling in TV, radio and "investments" just a few blocks from the French Quarter, a place whose joie de vivre almost but not quite approaches his own.

Cooper's true investment is in life, people, fun -- most evidenced by his characteristic line amid that lost weekend in mid-November when both his brothers and their teams were punked barely 24 hours and 250 miles apart (Eli's Mississippi losing to Georgia at home in Oxford just before Peyton's Indianapo-least got embarrassed by the Saints in The City That Care Forgot).

Cooper never forgets -- to enjoy himself. "It's not everybody who has brothers quarterbacking on Saturdays and Sundays," he said then. "I just choose where's the best party."

Ah, brotherly love. For example: "If the Colts are in Buffalo, Peyton's got no chance of me being there. Unless Mississippi's going to Auburn. Now if the Rebs are playing in Kentucky and Indy's at, say, San Francisco, I'd probably be thinking of Eli. But I'd miss him."

Actually, Cooper was the first of the flock to fly off from the 19th century Manning mansion in New Orleans' historic Garden District and follow his dad's football fame and fortune. He was a promising wide receiver catching (two years younger) Peyton's rockets at the sons' spawning ground, N'Awlins' tony Newman school. That was before Cooper's career was halted in his freshman year at Ole Miss by a congenital spinal dysfunction which still affects his posture and stride.

Still, he became a BMOC (Big Manning On Campus) anyway -- cutting a swath from The Grove to historic Courthouse Square, headquarters being the Kappa Alpha House from which he not only partied hearty but eventually ran (unsuccessfully) as a senior in the campus-wide election for the revered position of Colonel Reb.

"My campaign sucked," Cooper says now, shaking his Manning profile in mock sorrow at the loss. "Ran off a few pictures on a Xerox machine. But it didn't matter. I really thought the winner got to be the Colonel. What was it worth if you didn't actually get to wear the hat and the uniform?"

He's kidding. (We think.)

Cooper doesn't mince words about his frat of choice, the raunchy KA's. Both Archie and Eli sandwiched his Ole Miss years by pledging Sigma Nu. "But I wasn't having any of that," says Cooper. "It was enough living Arch's legacy without joining his same fraternity." (Among the bros, only Cooper dares call his father Arch.) "But then Eli did. Of course, by the time my little brother got to Oxford, the KA's had been kicked off campus."

It's no secret that Cooper's off-field legacy in Oxford virtually mirrored the family progenitor's on the grid -- which is why when Eli matriculated there, Peyton (the only Manning who turned his back on the family school; even their mom, the still stunning former Olivia Williams, was a homecoming queen at Ole Miss) said Baby Manning didn't simply have to live up to dear ol' dad, or to his dad and Peyton, but to a "Triple Whammy."

Cooper has dined out on his canny resemblance to Peyton. Their college careers overlapped by two years, and when Cooper used to take Friday flights from Memphis over to his brother's games in Knoxville, all the Tennessee people used to look at him and wonder just where in tarnation the Vol quarterback had been.

"In Knoxville I'd be partying with some of Peyton's boys 'till all hours," says Cooper, "and it seldom failed. Somebody'd always come up and say: 'What the hell are you doing in here, Peyt?' And of course I'd say: 'Oh, just hitting the scotch.' "

Given Oxford's literary traditions -- William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris and John Grisham all lived and created there; Faulkner's statue in the square can be seen from Eli's (formerly Cooper's) wrought-iron balconied apartment -- Eli was asked the other day if he'd ever sampled any of those worthy writers' wares.

"I saw a couple of Grisham movies," he said. "But now Coop, as I remember, was supposed to read Faulkner in high school. But he tried, and my mom finally had to read it to him."

"Well, if the guy could write English ..." Cooper laughs -- and shockingly is not struck down as he blasphemes Mississippi's beloved bard.

Remember again, though, Coop's a Manning, and was any Mississippian, Will-Faulk included, more beloved along the Delta than Cooper Hisownself's daddy? Actually among his fellow icons, Faulkner was dead, Morris gone to New York or some such fancy place and Eudora holed up in her cottage when freckle-faced Archie came slouching onto the Oxford campus from tiny Drew, Miss., in 1967.

It was left to Grisham to name characters in his books after the older Manning -- and to later meet the family which made for another, uh, embarrassing Cooper moment.

"Yeah, well, I had met Grisham through Arch when I went to school, and he apparently figured out what kind of student I was," says Cooper. "Once I had this really tough English class and to get extra credit you could go to what they called a "brown bag lunch" at Square Books [the famous bookstore and authors' haven in downtown Oxford]. You'd do a report on the different authors reading their works there. So I stroll into the bookstore one day and start listening to this woman recite poetry. I was about all the way asleep when, wouldn't you know, who comes over but Grisham!

" 'Hey, what are you doing in here?' Grisham said.

" 'Hey, I got to raise this D,' I said.

" 'You got to be the biggest kiss-ass I ever saw,' Grisham said.

"So, what the hell, that's my John Grisham story," says Cooper. "You'd think he'd put me in one of his movies by now."

Must be waiting for the right plot.

Curry Kirkpatrick is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail curry.kirkpatrick@espnmag.com.