CHAPTER 5

“HE HAS MADE PEOPLE FORGET JAMES MEREDITH”

The new decade began better than it would end for Archie Manning. After another baseball season—winning All-SEC honors on a 25–8 Rebels team—and a summer at home spent still trying to come to grips with being the man of the family, he began his third and final season as Ole Miss’s field general. When the Sports Illustrated college football preview came out, he was on the cover, ball locked in his hand, looking downfield. That season would be, the magazine pointed out, a “Red-Letter Year for Quarterbacks,” the cream of the crop being Stanford’s Jim Plunkett and Ohio State’s Rex Kern, though writer William F. Reed posited that “the best of them all is ARCHIE,” who he said “hardly resembles Mr. Good-Looking All-America Cover Boy Quarterback . . . [and] seems to reflect a certain quality of sadness and rural innocence.” His father’s suicide was briefly mentioned, as a “tragic footnote.” Reed could “envision Manning back home in rustic little Drew, Miss., . . . sailing down the river on a raft or sneaking off to some secret shady fishing hole.” Yet the reality was that Archie could not escape his fame, and the “fever” surrounding him, which included a dozen writers dying to coauthor his autobiography, a fast-food chain planning to sell “Archie Burgers,” and a Memphis company wanting to put out a line of Archie products, one of them a life-sized Archie balloon.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Vaught of the fuss. “I guess it’s the times, the desire to glorify athletes, like the Namath thing. Thank goodness Archie is a smart man, a sensible man, and he hasn’t let any of it go to his head. Why, I don’t think he even thinks about it.”¹ Archie himself couldn’t understand it. “The only thing I can figure out is that Archie is a different name,” he mused. “Maybe if it were Bill or something, none of this would have started.”² He was also aware that he had to be careful. Prohibited from accepting compensation from merchants, he first agreed to, then canceled an appearance at the MediSav, writing in an open letter published in the Delta Democrat Times, “It has been pointed out to me that my appearance at a commercial function of this sort could seriously jeopardise my amateur standing.”³

Another byproduct of the attention was the ragging his teammates gave him about it. Jim Poole recalled the players calling him Archie Who, or Archie What, or Archie Why, and taking the practice field singing “The Ballad of Archie Who.” Archie could deal with that, even take it as a sign of respect. But, he admitted, “sometimes my patience gets short. Like when I’m introduced to somebody, especially women, and they say, ‘Archie who?’ and then laugh and laugh like they’re the first person to ever say that. And sometimes when I sign an autograph I’ll only sign my first name, not to be cocky, just to get through them all. Then people come back griping, wanting me to sign my last name, too, and that kind of hacks me off.”⁴ To keep from seeming cocky, he forbade his mother and sister from wearing “Archie Who” buttons at games and refused to run for class president, knowing it would be a too-easy victory. He decided to live off campus in an apartment with Billy Van Devender, to avoid being mobbed all the time. He did put on one of those buttons at a Sigma Nu frat party, to poke fun at himself. That may have been the only time he actually enjoyed himself the past few years. And did he ever. Poole, cracking up, has indelible memories of lugging a soused Archie over his shoulders and Archie singing, badly. At all other times, he had to watch what he did and said.

One exception was his uncharacteristic response to campus static about the team’s inconsistencies. “I get real disgusted with some students,” he said. “I’ve always gone along with whoever is running the show, like a coach. I might not think he’s right sometimes—I get hacked off at Coach Vaught every now and then—but he’s the one running things.”⁵ That was certainly to be expected of a team man, but also a son of the South who was conditioned to regimentation and was not comfortable with dissent on or off the field. As other campuses exploded in student protests, leading to the horror of Kent State in May 1970, when “tin soldiers and Nixon coming” resulted in four students killed by National Guard troops, many colleges subsequently shut down during a moratorium period, but few did so in the South. Archie was content with the establishment crushing dissent. As for the war in the jungle, his deferment kept him safely distant from it, and he didn’t see any hypocrisy in taking a dim view of draft dodgers and expatriates streaming to Canada. Wrote Reed, “Although he wears his hair so long that it curls out from beneath his helmet, the only way Archie likes his rebels is as a nickname for the football team.” Rather than being impatient with the lack of racial progress on his campus, he said, “I’m kind of proud of Ole Miss. We’ve had a few incidents, but it’s all been minor,” such antiwar and civil rights demonstrations being “minor” matters not pertinent to his world or world view.

During the summer of 1970, he had traveled to Washington, D.C., where marches of that kind were common, for the Touchdown Club award dinner. Wearing black tie, he was seated between liberal Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas and Tom Clark, looking quite uncomfortable. As Reed noted, it was “an awkward spot for a Southerner to find himself in these days.” But he kept himself on safe ground, a natural diplomat smart enough not to lurch into politics. When one media story dissected another famous Archie—the fictitious one named Bunker, whose satiric, white working-class racist bellowing had been cheered, not derided, by real working-class whites—the title was “Archie Who? Not Manning for Sure.”⁶ But while politicians of all stripes tried in vain to woo him, he was simply, by dint of his background and color, taken by some as a defender of the Southern heritage of hate. At the Rebels’ homecoming game against Houston in 1970, some Ole Miss students shouted at black Cougar players, “Kill that nigger!” and “Tree that coon!” Some black Rebel fans sequestered in the south end zone displayed signs calling Manning a “redneck.”⁷

Trying to walk down the middle, the school tried to present the quarterback as a unifier. Archie, wrote the campus paper the Daily Mississippian, “has been the best thing to happen to this university and this state in many, many years. He has made people forget James Meredith, [Ole Miss] Dean [Joshua] Stanford, and Fulton Chapel,” the last the site of black campus demonstrations. That was hooey, given Ole Miss’s stalling on full integration, with not even a black fraternity allowed on campus until 1977, a year after the first black vice-chancellor was hired. But a certain resident of Washington, D.C., knew it was good politics to mention the Manning name, if he could remember it. When President Nixon took a trip to the Mediterranean that fall, he made small talk with sailors aboard the USS Saratoga by talking football. Texas looked pretty good, he said, “But watch out for Mississippi and that . . . ah . . . ah . . . ah . . . that Archie Manning.”⁸

John Vaught, looking ahead to the 1970 season, was again raving about his leader. “I have now reached the point with Archie that anything he wants to do from any place on the field at any time is all right with me.” The Rebels, ranked fifth in the preseason polls, began the season with a 47–13 thumping of Memphis State, Archie throwing one touchdown and running for two. They beat Kentucky 20–17 in the SEC opener, though Archie sustained a recurrence of his groin injury. That was when he learned how capricious stardom can be. Lying in bed in his room that week, he told Billy Van Devender with a cynical grin, “Boy, the mail sure dropped off this week.” Perhaps attempting to reduce expectations, he also said his numbers might dip, being that “there are not too many games you play like the one we had with Alabama last year.”⁹

But with Alabama next, again on prime-time TV, there was zero chance he’d sit out. The game, in Jackson, was sold out for months, and at the kickoff, Sports Illustrated said, “the 46,000 seats were overflowing with bourbon-sipping, flag-waving zealots, and the flags were not designed by Betsy Ross.” With intended cheek and irony, the magazine billed the clash as “Archie and the War Between the States.” On campus, Rebel fans were so stoked they put up mocking signs on the athletic dorm reading “The Bryant Hilton.” Archie himself was so zoned in on the game that he nearly forgot Olivia’s birthday, sending her belated flowers. And she was a tad worried about him. “Even before the Tennessee game last year he wasn’t this fired up,” she said. “Why, I think he wants to hurt somebody, and that’s not like Archie.” Although the game was devalued by Crimson Tide QB Scott Hunter being out with a separated shoulder and Archie hobbled by the groin pull, he threw for two touchdowns and ran for another. Vaught had begun to work option plays, the kind Archie once dreaded, into the offense, though now that he was up to around 200 pounds he could withstand open-field hits better; as SI observed, “Manning worked the option play about as well as a quarterback can.” And he walked off a winner, 48–23, only the second Ole Miss win over Alabama in 60 years. Still sizzling, he cranked three more touchdowns the next week, including passes of 66 and 52 yards to Studdard, to beat Georgia 31–21.

But now came this season’s rattlesnake bite. With a “breather” scheduled against Southern Mississippi, whom they’d stomped in nine straight games, Ole Miss, a 35-point favorite, fell behind early and Archie had to throw a school-record 56 passes to try to catch up, completing 30 for 341 yards. Not enough, as they fell 30–14. They did right themselves against Vanderbilt, 26–16, but now came disaster. While leading the Rebels to a 24–13 win over Houston, a hard hit broke Archie’s right forearm. With Manning out, Ole Miss beat Chattanooga but went down 19–14 to Mississippi State. Their dreams of a national title were over. Still, an Orange Bowl berth was at stake when they played LSU in the season finale, and Archie tried to play with his arm encased from hand to shoulder in a protective plastic sleeve. He passed to Poole for a first-quarter TD, but the day belonged to Tigers quarterback Bert Jones. As LSU pulled away, Archie retired to the bench. Final score: 61–17.

Coming into the game ranked at No. 16, they emerged unranked, their season record 7–3. As consolation, they were invited to play in the Gator Bowl against No. 11 Auburn, led by junior quarterback Pat Sullivan, who led the nation in total offense and would win the Heisman a year later. This made for an obvious story line: Archie, in his farewell to college football, fighting for his reputation against a new top dog. Though Ole Miss fans wore “Pat Who?” buttons, Sullivan quickly put the Tigers up 21–0. Archie, who had missed practices while he had surgery to insert a metal plate in his forearm, again wore that bulky cast/sleeve, but kept scrambling around and throwing. He ran one touchdown in from the two, then hit Floyd Franks for a 34-yard touchdown. But Auburn had him running for his life, and after a 42-yard run in the third quarter he was so spent he had to come out. He returned, but after another long run, when he reversed field twice, he was done. So was Ole Miss, losing 35–28. “My wind left me,” Archie said afterward. “That old hospital bed never got off my back. . . . That baby [on my arm] got kinda heavy.”¹⁰

In the final coaches’ poll, Ole Miss crept back to No. 20. Archie, though, had lost altitude. The feverish hype of autumn having cooled considerably, he was omitted from the All-America teams. Plunkett and Notre Dame’s Joe Theismann came in ahead of him in the Heisman vote. His college career had produced 4,753 passing yards and 31 touchdowns, yet among the many school records he had set, only that single-game onslaught against Alabama would withstand the test of time; the others would be fair game for dashing quarterbacks, including his youngest son. Today, he ranks no higher among Ole Miss quarterbacks than eighth in passing yardage. And yet, throughout the South, his legend would far outlive his heralded career, the topic of endless stories told by aging Rebel fans at dinner tables and family picnics.

What’s more, the Gator Bowl was also the end of the line for Vaught. In ill health, he suffered a mild heart attack after the season and quit, replaced by Billy Kinard. He would be healthy enough to return for a last roundup in ’73, after Kinard was fired, then retire permanently to run the school’s athletic department. His record was 190–61–12, with six SEC titles and the production of 18 All-Americans to his credit.

When Archie and Vaught walked off the field after the Gator Bowl, the first black player was due to walk onto the Ole Miss varsity the following season. Much of the grandeur and delusional mythology of the Ole Miss tradition went with them, though not everyone on campus was ready to deify Archie. Rebels basketball star Johnny Neumann, who would lead the nation with an average of 40.1 points per game in 1970–71 and sign a $2 million contract with the Memphis Pros of the American Basketball Association, lamented, “Archie sure did hog the headlines. Why, I could score 60 points one night and the next day’s lead story would say, ‘Archie Says Broken Arm Hurts Golf Game’ or ‘Archie Plans to Watch TV and Turn in Early.’” On Neumann’s car was a bumper sticker with his opinion. It read, “Archie Is a Saint . . . But Johnny’s a Pro.”¹¹

Relying on their own methods of evaluating college talent, NFL scouts had lost none of their ardor for Archie, who was assumed to be among the top three picks in the upcoming draft—all of them quarterbacks—along with Plunkett and Santa Clara’s Dante Pastorini. Accordingly, agents came streaming to the house on Third Street, some showing up unannounced during the season, meaning that their offers were, as Archie would put it, “illegal solicitations.”¹² He had Frank Crosthwait politely send them on their way, as he did with the agents who dropped in after the season, when it was legal. One, Herb Rudoy out of Chicago, hung around the house for hours, waiting for him to come home. As Archie recalled, “After a while he got tired of waiting and he got up to go, but before he left, Sis gave him a jar of her homemade peach preserves and another jar of pickle relish. I could just picture him going back to Chicago with those two bottles and people asking him, ‘Well, did you get Archie Manning?’ and him saying, ‘Nope, but I got these.’”¹³

There was no scouting combine then, and the IQ tests given to college players were rudimentary. Neither were the cream of the crop brought to New York for the draft, which was not yet televised and took place in the morning. The 1971 edition was held on January 28 and 29 in a small, airless room in Manhattan’s Belmont Plaza Hotel. On that day, Archie sat by the phone in the office of the Ole Miss athletic department, awaiting word on what was a remarkable milestone in NFL history. The first pick was owned by the Boston Patriots (who became the New England Patriots in March), the second by the New Orleans Saints, the third by the Houston Oilers. Plunkett, who had played in a pro-style drop-back scheme at Stanford, was expected to go first. The next two teams in line, being from the South, lusted for Archie, especially the Saints, who had come into the league only in 1967 and were dreadful. The league’s second Deep South team, after the Atlanta Falcons, they played in the 19th-largest city in the country—the biggest after Indianapolis, San Antonio, and Memphis not to have a franchise—and, with a large surrounding regional market area, could sell a lot of tickets and advertising with a top-rated attraction. Anticipating that Archie was the ideal get, the team cleared roster and salary space by trading the creaky veteran quarterback Billy Kilmer to the Washington Redskins, which for Kilmer was the sort of liberation that Archie Manning, in time, would only be able to wish for.

As Johnny Neumann suggested, Archie was already a saint in Oxford. And his gal, Olivia Williams, was royalty, having been named homecoming queen during the season. When Archie played in the Hula Bowl college all-star game, he invited Olivia and her family to come along with Sis and Pam to Honolulu, where it was played. When they got back, they tied the knot, on January 21. Perhaps not coincidentally, at the draft lottery for men his age in July 1969, his birth date had been drawn 75th, a low number that would normally have sent him to Vietnam. With that number still hanging over his head as graduation neared, getting hitched won him a marriage deferment.

The wedding was at Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church, the reception at the National Guard armory, the country club being too small to hold the groom’s teammates and the bride’s high-society family and friends. The local cops helped out, too. When Archie and some buddies tarried before the service at a honky-tonk called Ed’s Beer Joint, Archie and his best man, Billy Van Devender, were given a lift to the church in a squad car. Incredibly, the public was invited, and at the reception some strangers made off with napkins, champagne bottles, tablecloths, whatever, as souvenirs. The next day, Archie and Olivia were off to Acapulco for a honeymoon, where Archie forgot he was a redhead and got a terrible sunburn. Returning home, they rented an off-campus apartment and went back to their studies.

As expected, a week later the Saints made him their No. 1 pick. At Ole Miss, Archie received calls from Saints general manager Vic Schwenk, coach J. D. Roberts, and owner John Mecom. But he wasn’t going to come cheap. He had by now enlisted Frank Crosthwait to handle negotiations for him, as a family lawyer. As for an agent, he and Frank chose Ed Keating, an eager 34-year-old underling at the biggest sports agency of all, Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, which handled the fabulously wealthy golf troika of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player. Archie, meanwhile, did the banquet circuit, feted by the Mississippi Economic Council, and autograph signings, collecting around $800 a week for appearances. He also had his “day” in Drew in early February, honored at a ceremony at City Hall emceed by the mayor—who was now none other than Snake Williford. Archie, Olivia, and his mother and sister rode down Main Street, where all 20 stores festooned their windows with pictures of Archie. An automobile dealer presented him with a new Lincoln, another a ski boat. His Ole Miss teammates came in for the day, as did J. D. Roberts from New Orleans. Baseball Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean and Mississippi senator Jim Eastland also grabbed some face time.

It was the biggest event ever held in Drew, and at the time was a welcome relief from the realities the town had tried so hard to resist. Even as late as Archie’s senior year, Drew High had admitted only four black students, all from the Carter family. The rising racial tension encroached on Archie’s big day. One of the bands was to be an all-black unit, but the oldest of the Carter daughters approached the band’s director, saying Archie had been “ugly” to her during their time at the school, which led the band to drop out. Archie would leave town upset about it. Decades later, he still was. “There was no truth in it,” he insisted, adding that it was “the polar opposite of what I would have done.” In his memoir with Peyton years later, he reserved nine pages for his halting path to racial acceptance. But while he tried hard to be sincere, his innate Southern conditioning was obvious in his downplaying of the tensions in Drew during his formative years. He noted that his uncle had rented homes on the farm to black folks, and that blacks had cheered him at Ole Miss. But he also drew an unfortunate, even jarring tautology with the Trumpiansounding bromide that “the stereotyping is repulsive . . . both ways. All black men aren’t noble, all white men aren’t swine.”¹⁴

The negative vibe with the black band did nothing to make Archie want to rush back to Drew. On the other hand, Sis had spent her whole life there and had no intention of ever leaving. And Pam had married Vernon Shelton, a native of the city who had also gone to Ole Miss and then taken a job teaching history classes to inmates at the Parchman prison. Archie didn’t begrudge them for remaining on the family’s longtime soil. Pam, he said, “won’t live anywhere else. Must be in the genes.”

Crosthwait and Keating played hardball with the Saints for months, something the multimillionaire Mecom and his front-office people did not expect from a supposed hick. Archie was asking for a five-year, $1 million deal, spread out over 10 years for tax abatement. He had leverage, too. During his college years he’d been drafted twice more by big-league baseball teams, the Kansas City Royals and the Chicago White Sox. In May 1971, when he and Olivia collected their degrees and she took a job as a teacher in Batesville, he still had not signed with the Saints. In those months, John Vaught had acted as a surrogate as well, playing bad cop by hinting that Archie might just go play in the Canadian Football League. “I’m a little disappointed with the Saints’ attitude,” the former coach said. “The Saints don’t seem to realize Archie is a unique talent . . . [H]e would have no trouble getting a one-year contract for at least $125,000 [in Canada].”¹⁵

On July 9, Crosthwait said Archie might skip the July 30 College All-Star Game, a preseason event played in Chicago that pitted the top collegians against the NFL champions. As an unsigned player, Manning was not yet covered by the Saints’ insurance. So Crosthwait said he would only play if the team paid the premium for coverage above the $24,000 the organizers of the game provided. Crosthwait got the idea from the Patriots, who paid on behalf of their still-unsigned quarterback, Jim Plunkett. What’s more, Plunkett ticked Archie off when he made a remark that he was “honored” to play in the game, which Archie construed as a slap at him for holding out. Nerves were clearly beginning to fray all around.

Neither would Manning attend the Saints’ preseason camp in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He did visit the camp and meet with Vic Schwenk, but Crosthwait couldn’t be there because he had more pressing business, the kind that really did change things in the South. As prosecuting attorney for Sunflower County, he had indicted three white men for murder in the shooting death of that Drew High School student, Jo Etha Collier, on the eve of her graduation in May. Her murder came during what was called a “wave of senseless killing in Mississippi of black citizens by white citizens”¹⁶ and led to black marches through the town. Although the case was a landmark, in the end the only man convicted was sentenced to a mere five years and set free after three. In the Delta, civil rights remained stuck in neutral.

Archie, meanwhile, was becoming frustrated with the pace of contract talks. So was Vaught, who after the Saints made one offer was either joking—or worse, wasn’t, since the NCAA would not have laughed—that “Archie made more than that playing here!”¹⁷ Mecom, too, was now getting impatient. The 31-year-old son of Texas oil baron John Mecom Sr. had been the team’s majority stockholder since its creation. A pudgy-cheeked guy with a rich-brat reputation, he had not involved himself in the negotiations at first. Now he did, biting the bullet to make Archie the highest offer ever made to an NFL rookie, though Archie had to come down from his original asking price. On Friday, July 23, Archie drove his big Lincoln back to the Saints’ training-camp base in Hattiesburg with Crosthwait. They went up to Mecom’s suite at the Holiday Inn, where the owner and his lawyer, Glen Magnuson, presented the team’s offer: $100,000 plus escalating bonuses, for five years. It was a deal.

Though the yearly salaries—$30,000, $40,000, up to a maximum of $70,000—seem like small change next to his sons’, back then they were about average for league quarterbacks—except Joe Namath—and more than the average salary of all but four teams. The Saints’ average salary, by contrast, was a meager $21,700.¹⁸ Archie was also given a $160,000 signing bonus, and a $250,000 insurance policy, bringing the price tag to $410,000, the most ever lavished on an NFL rookie, and slightly more than Plunkett, the No. 1 pick. It was not quite the three-year, $427,000 windfall the New York Jets of the American Football League had given Namath in 1965 to put the upstart loop on par with the NFL in the public consciousness. But if Delta Archie was no Broadway Joe in terms of self-promoting, skirt-chasing, drama-queen rebelliousness, if there was a city in which he could create a stir, it was certainly N’awlins. And he had two good knees.

The Sunday Delta Democrat Times ran a three-quarter-page headline reading, “Archie Signs with Saints.” Now he was free to make a hasty trip to the College All-Star Game, though all he would do was stand on the sidelines, in no condition to play, and pose for photographers with the other rookie quarterbacks. Having lived in the SEC bubble, he recalled, “I had no idea what style Dan [Pastorini] played. I didn’t know where the hell Santa Clara was. It could have been in Egypt as far as I knew. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Dan before the draft.”¹⁹ Then it was off to the Saints’ camp, where J. D. Roberts, tasting imaginary sugar plums, awaited the commodity of an unproven player he stirringly called “the best young quarterback in the country.”