CHAPTER 2

MR. DREW

In 1966, an African-American man named Eddie James Stewart was beaten and shot to death in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, while in police custody, an incident the Southern Poverty Law Center has called racially motivated.¹ Some things have changed in the intervening 50 years, but a lot hasn’t. In predominantly black Rueville today, there is a street named Barack Obama Avenue, but in 2012, Crystal Springs made news again when its own First Baptist Church denied a black couple permission to marry there.² Three years later, a Crystal Springs woman was one of eight white people convicted of federal hate crimes against African-Americans in Jackson.³ Street signs can’t wash away the bitter past, the most egregious moment burned into history on June 22, 1964, when black Meridian native James Earl Chaney and two white New York activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a crime for which no one would be convicted for 40 years.

It was in this Philadelphia that a girl named Olivia Williams, soon to be Olivia Manning, was growing up. Her family and neighbors were the kind of good, churchgoing, very white folks Ronald Reagan had in mind when he announced his 1980 run for the White House in Philadelphia. Indeed, several of the Mannings were there that day, Olivia having taken her sons to the fair. When Archie, who was in training camp with the Saints, saw the event on the news that night, he spotted Cooper, who was six, in the crowd, mugging for the camera.⁴

As Archie Manning was progressing through his teens, he lived among more than a few bigots. While the nation mourned the killing of its young president on November 22, 1963, in another Southern city, not everyone in Drew mourned the death of a liberal leader who had welcomed Martin Luther King to the White House. Only weeks after the murders in Philadelphia, Fannie Lou Hamer, vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who had been beaten by cops while protesting Jim Crow laws, tried to relocate her organization from racially torn Rueville to Drew. The local white elders kept them out. The only concession the town made to racial progress was to grudgingly permit the children of longtime black resident Mae Bertha Carter to enter Drew High School while all others were relegated to dilapidated, segregated schools. The oldest Carter child, Ruth, was Archie’s classmate, and she later taught at the same school, itself a signal moment in the town’s evolution.

As Archie spun it, “There was no violence, no ugly incidents that made headlines. The people here aren’t like that. The Carter children were simply ignored. . . . At noon they wouldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria, they’d eat on the gym steps. I think there was only one time I ever saw one of those Carter children smile.”⁵ That he could construe ignoring black people in defense of his town is revealing of a conditioned form of racism acceptance; moreover, only in the context of sports does Manning relate any positive examples of racial progress. For example, when the basketball team was competing to reach a district basketball tournament, some of the players’ fathers said they wouldn’t let the boys play against black players. But Buddy was not among them, and that was important, given that his boy was the star of the team.⁶

Buddy may not have been anything like a crusader, but he could read the trade winds. For Archie, the lesson may have been clear, but breaking with the Southern heritage of exclusion was not an easy step. He saw his hometown as neutral rather than racist. “Drew isn’t redneck country; you have to go farther east in the state for that, to the hill country. It is primarily a community of struggling farmers.”⁷ That would have been news to old Joe Pullum, a black man lynched near Drew in the 1920s, legend being that he murdered thirteen men in the lynch party before they could slip a noose around his neck. And while the US Justice Department cracked down on “freedom of choice” laws designed to dodge the Constitution in 1968, for the next three years no more than a handful of black children were allowed into Drew High. In 1971, one who was, an 18-year-old girl named Jo Etha Collier, was killed in a drive-by shooting outside a grocery store near the school. By coincidence, that was the year Drew held Archie Manning Appreciation Day.

Archie’s small-town struggles had mainly to do with exposure. As Paul Pounds says, “Reports of our games never even made it to Jackson, much less Memphis.” Besides, his teams never finished above .500, and if Archie was known, it was for being, as he himself said, “tall, skinny, and injury prone.” Only three schools in total were willing to offer him a scholarship: Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and one beyond the state line, Tulane. Even up in Oxford, the Rebels’ flinty coach for the last 20 years, John Vaught, hardly believed he was mining for gold in Drew. But the timing would be providential. Quarterbacking was a sore spot for Vaught. At times in ’66, three QBs had played in the same game. The Rebels still went 8–3, but that was good enough only for fourth place in the SEC, before they were hammered by Darrell Royal’s Texas Longhorns 19–0 in the Bluebonnet Bowl. Back then, freshmen could only play on the junior varsity, but it was where the future was written. Not that Archie had any delusions that he could wind up like Charlie Conerly or Jake Gibbs. He was just thrilled that Vaught wanted him, given that his résumé “was loaded with risks.”

Around Drew, his decision about where to go obsessed people, especially those with a parochial interest. In a scene right out of Smokey and the Bandit, the town sheriff, a Buford T. Justice type known as Snake Williford, called Archie one day and said he’d pick him up in his squad car. Archie had no idea why, but agreed. When he got into the cruiser, Snake’s radio crackled with an urgent call about a man who had kidnapped two cops being on the loose and headed his way.

Snake had what looked like a machine gun in his lap and began rattling on about how, if need be, he would “show our force.” Then, out of nowhere, he suddenly began to speak of his college days at Mississippi State, Ole Miss’s traditional rival. He only stopped to apprehend the bad guy, no force necessary, handcuffing him and putting him in the back seat. Driving to the jailhouse, he went back to extolling Mississippi State to an incredulous Archie.⁸

State would invite Archie to visit their campus in Starkville. When they sent him a plane ticket, Archie got on a plane for the first time and went. However, the Bulldogs had fallen in the SEC, while Ole Miss, which was on a run of 10 straight years of bowl appearances and bore the lingering scent of national titles in 1959, ’60, and ’62 (if only unofficially, based not on the coaches’ polls but on metrics determined by primordial sports-math geeks of the day—shockingly, Ole Miss has never won an official NCAA title). But Johnny Vaught was playing it coy with Archie. He sent a graduate assistant, Roy Stinnett, to Drew but didn’t offer him a letter of intent. Then, days later, Vaught sent Tom Swayze, an Ole Miss star of the early 1930s who had spent the last 20 years signing players for Vaught. Swayze was, as Archie said, “a cocky kind of guy” who was playing hard to get. He kept asking how much Archie revered Ole Miss, but never said Ole Miss wanted Archie. Taking an active role, Frank Crosthwait, who was also an Ole Miss alumnus, drove Archie to Oxford and arranged for him to meet Vaught and the coaching staff. The offensive end coach, J. W. “Wobble” Davidson, who moonlighted as the freshman coach, took note of Archie’s angular frame and called him “Ichabod Crane.”

No offer was made until weeks later, when Archie and the Drew basketball team went to Clarksdale for a state tournament. One of the refs in those games happened to be Roy Stinnett, and he was quite generous to Ichabod Crane. As Archie remembered, whenever he had the ball, “if an opposing player got in my zip code he was called for a foul.” In the first two rounds, he shot 43 foul shots alone and was the top scorer. Coming in as heavy underdogs, Drew got into the championship game. Moments before the opening tip-off, Stinnett came into the locker room and unfurled a letter of intent for a grant-in-aid football scholarship. Not knowing what else to do, Archie signed. Drew then won the tournament. Archie looked back at this strange sequence of events insisting Stinnett was “totally fair and honest” in his refereeing, but then added, “If you want to jump to any conclusions . . . feel free.”⁹

The grandstand at Beef Maxwell Field was always home to a congregation of Manning family members. But as time went on, the only one who missed his share of games was Buddy Manning, the man Archie most wanted to be proud of him. His son seemed to have learned to live without Buddy’s guidance and strict codes. He could still be a choirboy, but more and more, also a bit of a rakehell. Another of his classmates, Georgeanne Clark, who went on to teach at Drew High, recalled, “On graduation night all the boys got kind of wild and woolly, and I guess Archie felt as president of the class he had to get the drunkest. My date had to leave me to go out and take care of him. The sight I’ll never forget is Archie dancing around with a tambourine in his hand, saying, ‘I’m the Drew High leader and I’m going to lead y’all to Slim’s.’ That was where we bought beer.”¹⁰

Archie even now still held out some hope that he might get to play baseball, a dream that became a dilemma when he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves. Their general manager, Paul Richards, notified him that “our scout in your area will contact you shortly to discuss your baseball future with us. You will be a welcome addition to the Braves organization.” But as heavenly as it seemed to someday play alongside Hank Aaron, a kid from the Delta had a higher authority to answer to: the great god of football. And at the altar of Ole Miss. As Pounds says, “If he didn’t go there, his daddy woulda disowned him.” On April 6, he traveled to Oxford to be honored by the Ole Miss chapter of the National Football Hall of Fame and was photographed standing with three other “scholar-athletes,” two of them Ole Miss seniors. Also in the shot were Vaught, university chancellor Dr. John D. Williams, and athletic director C. M. “Tad” Smith. He hadn’t even enrolled yet, and already he was in its Hall of Fame.

In his farewell to high school football, Archie played in the state high school all-star game in Jackson on July 31 and led his team to a 57–33 victory, throwing four touchdowns and running for another. He took home the MVP trophy. The next stop was Oxford, 60 miles northeast of Drew, the epicenter of a good bit of Southern mythology and college football royalty. Of course, the notion that Archie Manning might hold all that in his hands seemed preposterous. Not least of all to Archie Manning.