CHAPTER 4

“I THINK BUDDY’S DEAD”

After a routine checkup in 1968, Buddy Manning was told that he had lung cancer. As his son flourished in Oxford, he adamantly told Sis not to break this news to him or Pam. Figuring he was a dying man, he became sentimental, crying the way Southern men weren’t supposed to about his boy becoming the man he never had been. He tried to play the role of the hardworking husband and father, still chasing after deadbeat clients. But he began pondering what the future would be like for him, sick, bedridden, wasting away, a burden on his family. Apparently, he became convinced he wouldn’t let it get that far. Archie, meanwhile, could have seen visions of his own future. After the football season ended, he played on the Ole Miss baseball team, which enjoyed more success than the football team had. As the Rebel shortstop for Tom Swayze, he hit only .260 but was a vital cog on a 27–15 team that won the SEC title in ’69 and went to the College World Series in June, where the Rebels lost 14–1 to Texas in the semifinals and finished at No. 5 in the nation. With the spring semester over, Archie took a few summer classes. Then, in early August, Buddy went to Oxford to pick him up and drive him back to Drew for a two-week vacation, not disclosing anything about his cancer. But his boy could tell something was not right.

Archie would later describe Buddy as “an old 59” at the time, acting as if he had little to live for. On Saturday, August 16, 1969, while, thousands of miles away, half a million people of Archie’s generation were rocking on at the Woodstock Music Festival, the Manning clan attended the wedding of a family friend. At the last minute, Buddy said he wasn’t going, that he would stay at the house. “We’ll cook steaks later,” he told Archie. At the reception, a few of Archie’s old high school chums wanted to go on a beer run, just up the road to Cleveland. But, tasting those steaks, he told Sis he was leaving early and drove back to the house. When he got there, he opened the door, tossed his keys on a table, and headed for the bathroom.

It was quiet in the house—no TV or radio was on—and he wondered if Buddy had gone out. His and Sis’s bedroom was just before the john, and as Archie walked past it, out of the corner of his eye he could see his father lying on his back in bed. Figuring he was napping, Archie took another look. What he saw he would later call “a series of still shots, each one clear but incomplete. I see the gun on the floor, and the stick he used to fire it. And him lying there, face up, very still. And a big blood spot on his chest. ‘Oh, God,’ I thought. ‘Oh, God, no.’”¹

Buddy had meticulously planned his suicide. He had attached a stick to the trigger of the shotgun so that he could fire it at the correct angle into his chest. Archie, numbed by shock, did not scream in anguish. His legs didn’t crumble and he didn’t kneel down beside the corpse. Rather, he instinctively thought of Sis and Pam, and how much better it was that he found Buddy, not the women. Almost mechanically, he called the police, admitting rather incredibly in later years that “I wasn’t sure of the gravity of it.”

“I think Buddy’s dead,” he said.

Waiting for the cops to arrive, he began to clean up around his father’s lifeless body, wiping blood off the bedspread and floor. He also called a family friend, Louie Campbell, asking him to go to the wedding reception, break the news to Sis and Pam, bring them to his house, and wait there until Archie could get there. When Buddy was removed to the morgue, Archie went to Campbell’s house, where Pam kept crying out, “No!” Sis sobbed in his arms, but seemed not completely shocked; she had seen Buddy decline and may have been preparing herself for just such a prospect. If she blamed herself in any way for failing Buddy, she may also have believed Buddy had failed his children and especially his son, who would have to carry the mental scars of that day forever.

On August 18, a headline in the Delta Democrat Times read, “Archie Manning Finds Father Shot to Death.” But it was not the big news one might have expected. As if not overplaying the tragedy out of deference to the family, or shame to the town, the paper ran it on page 12, along with such news as “Fire Damages House Trailer.” An astonishing coincidence was that, only a day later, the paper reported that “Sunflower County farmer-businessman R. W. Manning, 67, drowned Monday night when he apparently fell into a giant air conditioning system at the cotton gin he operates.” It added, “Manning was a cousin of Ole Miss star quarterback Archie Manning’s father, Buddy Manning, who shot himself to death this past weekend at his Drew home.”

Around Drew, Buddy’s suicide was a mystery and a tragedy best left unexamined out of respect. The funeral was at First Baptist Church, the burial at Drew Cemetery in a grave alongside his father and among the plots of several Manning generations, under swaying magnolia trees. At the funeral, says Frank Crosthwait, who helped make the arrangements, Archie “held the family together. Archie was so darn brave. He felt he owed it to Buddy to carry the family name with dignity. It was like he grew up right there.”² During the mourning period, someone from Case Farm Supply came by the house and gave Sis a check for the equivalent of what Buddy would have made that year—$6,000. In the end, that was how Buddy Manning’s life and worth were quantified: tipping money in the future for his son and the grandsons he never saw.

Within the family, there was almost no discussion of why it happened. His mother’s succinct explanation was that Buddy “just didn’t feel good anymore.” Their grief was balanced by either shame or Southern stoicism. Archie would admit, “I never talked to my mother about it in any depth. I don’t talk to my kids about it. Olivia and I have gone over it from every angle without any real conclusions. But I still think about it,” especially every August 16. Never, though, has he shed a tear in grief. His way of dealing with it, he swore, was to make sure he would be “a lot closer” to his own children someday.

Archie at first wanted to quit school and go to work as the family breadwinner. As Pam Manning observed, “He grew up in a matter of two minutes. Any decision made in our household after that, Archie was the one to make it.”³ However, Sis talked him down. Buddy, she said, would have beaten him black and blue if he dropped out. Sis assured him that her work as a legal secretary, combined with Buddy’s death benefit from the Veterans Administration, would suffice. And it was certainly easy to envision Archie’s future income as a pro football player in terms of how it would help the family. So he went back to Oxford, a scab on his soul. But he would not be hounded by the press about it. In an era long before tabloid journalism, prying social media, and 24-hour TV news, the story of Archie Manning’s father was either not well known or kept quiet by his teams’ public relations people, lest it complicate the carefully stoked fable of the South’s perfect native son. The sportswriters who had heard it through the grapevine viewed it as off-limits or a brief aside. Many of his coaches and teammates, when told of his father’s suicide, came to Drew for the funeral. But that was the last time the subject was mentioned as Archie pursued that great goal Buddy had always had for him, through the game Buddy revered.

Already, he had earned high marks from the pro scouts; one of them, New Orleans Saints chief scout Henry Lee Parker, said after Archie rallied Ole Miss to beat LSU the year before, “I’ll take him right now.”⁴ There would be 16 holdover starters on the roster, and some preseason polls ranked the Rebels No. 1 in the SEC, a tall order given the competition; as Vaught predicted, “I can’t see anyone going through the season unbeaten.”⁵ The opening game against Memphis State at Hemingway Stadium was believed to be a tune-up, even if the Tigers were defending Missouri Valley Conference champs. And it was, as Ole Miss stomped them 28–3, with Archie running in two touchdowns. However, in a recurring sign that the Rebels were heartbreak kids, they next played Kentucky in Lexington, another seeming walkover. They lost, dropping Ole Miss from No. 8 to No. 20.

It was no way to approach their first big hurdle, against Alabama in Birmingham, but Archie was the last thing any opposing coach wanted to have to play against. Indeed, Bear Bryant found it nearly impossible to prepare for him. Not even his own teammates knew what he’d do, since so much of the Rebel attack happened on the fly. Archie would sometimes improvise in the huddle, scratching out a play on a whim and diagramming it on the turf with his finger. The Alabama game, on October 4, 1969, would be one of the first college games to be televised at night for a prime-time national TV audience, pushed back to 8:30 because ABC wouldn’t preempt The Lawrence Welk Show.⁶ It was a contest not just for SEC supremacy but for the braggin’ rights of the whole South, even if neither team ranked in the top 10 nationally. After the pomp of the pregame, pseudo-Confederate rituals, the teams exchanged first-quarter touchdowns. But the Rebels’ blunders cost them. On a 70-yard drive, Archie hit Riley Myers, who fumbled at the ’Bama four. Down 14–7, he led them to the nine, but the Rebels missed a field goal.

In the third quarter, Archie tied the game with an 11-yard pass to Jim Poole, then put the Rebels ahead on a 17-yard touchdown run. However, early in the fourth quarter the Tide quarterback, Scott Hunter, brought them back and took the lead, whereupon Archie came back, ending a drive with a touchdown on a sneak. So now it was 32–27 Rebels, with seven minutes left. On fourth-and-goal, Hunter called time and came to the sideline next to the Bear, a man of few words. “Run the best you got,” he drawled. That turned out to be a touchdown pass for a 33–32 Alabama lead, and with 1:48 left, Archie took over for a last shot, all the craziness having left the crowd damp and hoarse. As Hunter recalled, just the sight of No. 18 was daunting. “Every time I looked up,” he said, “we were behind. . . . Archie kept scoring points.” And again he had the Rebels on the go, but could only get as far as the ’Bama 49. Only eight seconds remained, with no time-outs. Eschewing a Hail Mary, Archie threw short to Franks, who was tackled on the 42 as the clock died, leaving Ole Miss in agony.

Yet in heartbreaking defeat, Archie gained more attention—and empathy. As he will tell you, “It put me on the map.” As he trod off the field with his head down, players from both teams and fans who leaped from the stands wanted to shake his hand or tap his shoulder pad. When Hunter shook his hand, he noticed that Archie “had tears in his eyes. What could you say? Here’s a guy who just played the greatest game any college football player ever had and lost by a point.” In the locker room, he slumped onto a stool and, without peeling off his uniform, put his head in his hands and quietly sobbed. The Rebels’ assistant coach, Bruiser Kinard, came over and put his arm around Archie’s shoulder.

“Tough one to lose,” he said, “but you did yourself proud out there.”

Archie looked up. “Shoulda won, Coach,” he said. “Shoulda won.”⁷

Never before that night had a college quarterback passed for 300 yards and run for 100. He completed 33 of 52 for 436 yards—beating the old SEC record by 126 yards and falling just 59 short of the NCAA record at the time—and rang up 540 total yards, a record that would stand for 40 years. The Rebels had 30 first downs and 606 total yards, both new Ole Miss records. The 55 completions by both quarterbacks set a new NCAA record; in all, 24 school, SEC, and NCAA marks were set. And if Archie’s passing wasn’t enough, at the time he was second in the SEC in rushing. Having survived by one point, Bryant—who, contrary to public opinion, called it “the worst football game I ever saw”—nonetheless frothed over Archie, who, he said, “dominates a college game better than Joe Namath.”⁸

Despite the fact that the Alabama loss killed the Rebels’ chances for an SEC title, the school’s athletic department began getting around 5,000 pieces of fan mail each week for Archie, a budding legend. Against No. 6 Georgia, he hurt his neck in the second quarter. He repaired to the locker room, immersing himself in ice in a trough used to store Coca-Cola. Then, in the third quarter, he sprinted back onto the field to a great roar and took the Rebels to a 25–17 win. They next destroyed Southern Miss 69–7, but then did a complete reversal, decimated in Houston 25–11. Down 23–12 against unbeaten, third-ranked LSU, Archie made up the deficit and fired a 30-yard touchdown pass to Studdard for a 26–23 win—another thriller, and one that prompted a lawsuit, filed in federal district court by a Baton Rouge lawyer seeking, apparently not in jest, an injunction to keep Archie from committing “further harassment” of LSU.

After they blanked Chattanooga 21–0, the Rebels faced another unbeaten team, No. 3 Tennessee, in Jackson. The Vols were 11-point favorites and acted like it. Their All-American linebacker, Steve Kiner, ran his mouth to Sports Illustrated during the week, slagging the backwoods team with the goober quarterback. When asked if he agreed that Ole Miss had “some horses,” he smirked, “Hee-haw, them’s not horses, them’s mules.” Of the quarterback, he asked, “Archie who?” That prompted the writer, Pat Putnam, to add to the story line: “You can guess how gracefully that was received in Oxford and Biloxi and Vicksburg, where they hang pictures of Archie Manning . . . on the living room wall, right next to the ones of Robert E. Lee. . . . In Tennessee . . . they laughed and started handing out Archie Who? buttons. And, baby, that really tore it.”⁹ The game, much like the ’Bama contest, would thus find its way into history as the Mule Game—or, as it turned out to be, the “Jackson Massacre,” given the Rebels’ 38–0 wipeout, the Vols’ worst defeat since 1923.

The season closed with a 48–22 rout of Mississippi State on Thanksgiving, sending the Rebels, ranked No. 13, to a Sugar Bowl victory on New Year’s Day against Frank Broyles’s third-ranked Arkansas Razorbacks. It had been a strange dichotomy of a season, their final ranking at No. 8 earned by beating three nationally-ranked teams, but they also lost to three doormats. There was no downside for Archie. Lamont Wilson, a postal clerk in Magnolia, rewrote Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” as “The Ballad of Archie Who,” its lyrics a paean to “the best dad-burned quarterback to ever play the game.” Recorded by a local group called the Rebel Rousers (not the ’50s and ’60s British R&B band) on a label called Hoddy Toddy, one verse went:

        The ball is on the 50, the down is third-and-10,

        He runs it down the sidelines; yes, Archie takes it in.

It became a regional hit, selling over 35,000 copies, mostly in Mississippi. One was apt to hear it on the radio while cruising through Drew beside signs reading “Home of Archie Manning” or under the marquee of a movie theater reading “Wow That Manning Boy.” A Jackson motel put up a sign reading “Archie Slept Here.” The Firestone department store ran an ad promoting an “Archie Manning Special Price” for its TVs. He made appearances such as one at the MediSav drugstore. The artificial turf at Hemingway Stadium was called the Archie Manning Memorial Carpet. Buttons around campus read, “Archie for Heisman Trophy” and “Archie’s Army.” Posters, dolls, T-shirts, they all made money for the school. A joke went around about a man about to jump off a bridge. His friend begged him to think about his family and religion.

“Don’t have any family, and I don’t believe in religion.”

“Well, then, think about Archie.”

“Archie who?”

“Jump, you SOB, jump.”¹⁰

In November, when Time evaluated the Heisman Trophy race, it dubbed him “Heismanning” and “Huck Finn in hip pads.” However, outside the South, his numbers didn’t move the sportswriters. That year, San Diego State’s Dennis Shaw, under pass-obsessed coach Don “Air” Coryell, racked up 3,185 yards to Archie’s 1,762. Archie did win first-team All-America and first-team All-SEC, was named SEC Player of the Year, and won the Walter Camp Memorial Award, given by the Washington Touchdown Club to the outstanding college back in America. But Heismanning finished a distant fourth in the Heisman vote, won by Oklahoma fullback Steve Owens. No matter. Archie, now the patriarch of the family and face of the SEC, owned the South.