CHAPTER 7

“STRANGLED BY THE TRAUMA”

As Richard Nixon became consumed and then subsumed by the Watergate scandal in August 1974, Archie came to summer training camp with no way out. Three seasons of sluggish progress had taken a toll, physically and on his pride and ego. All he could really do was sink his roots further into the Louisiana clay and take advantage of his saintly status to grab as much as he could off the field. He was making $70,000 a year, but almost all of his salary was deferred for tax purposes, and there were no playoff or Pro Bowl perks. What’s more, on March 6, 1974, Olivia gave birth for the first time, meaning he had a new expense. It was a son, Cooper, named after her father. He came into the world with a ruckus, Olivia wondering how she got through delivering a 12-pound, three-ounce bruiser.

Although Archie’s contract would not expire until after the ’75 season, leverage was on his mind—and Ed Keating’s. By chance, it was in even greater supply in 1974, as the NFL again found itself with competition after a coterie of millionaires put together a 12-team circuit, the World Football League. At the same time, in the spring of ’74, the NFL players’ union went out on strike, hoping for a better result than it had obtained from two previous labor disputes. But with teams threatening to use rookies and scab replacements, most veterans crossed the picket line. Others eagerly heard out fat offers to commit to the new league, the Memphis team striking gold by signing Miami Dolphins running backs Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick and receiver Paul Warfield—all represented by Keating, who wrangled for them a combined $3.5 million deal scheduled to begin in ’75, after their NFL contracts expired.

The WFL began its inaugural season on July 10, to big crowds and loud headlines. Archie, playing it coy, said the new league “intrigued” him and that Memphis was “the only team I would consider playing for.” He half-joked, “Do you think they have enough money to pay me?” while insisting, “I’m happy in New Orleans.”¹ In truth, he was torn. And he despised playing on the concrete-like artificial turf at Tulane Stadium; having shattered his arm on similar turf at Ole Miss, he even blamed swollen wisdom teeth on his head smashing into that surface. No matter. When plans were revealed for the construction of a properly futuristic, decadent new downtown home, the Louisiana Superdome, set to open in time for the 1975 season, there would be artificial turf there, too.

What’s more, he and Olivia didn’t feel comfortable with a good many other players and their wives or girlfriends. This no doubt had to do with jealousy about his contract, but neither were the Mannings much into socializing. At games, sitting with the other women, Olivia would endure petty gossip-mongering. Sometimes they would say something unkind about Archie, prompting Olivia to say, politely, “Please don’t talk about my husband like that.” At the same time, Archie was soldered to the town and the team, popular beyond the win-loss records. In ’74, the US Postal Service reported that Archie had received 20,800 fan letters in the past year, behind only Hank Aaron, Dinah Shore, Johnny Carson, Joe Namath, and Bart Starr among sports and entertainment figures.² Indeed, the hints he dropped about jumping leagues, and headlines such as “WFL Teams Seek Archie Manning,” rightly made John Mecom nervous.³

This was no accident. Archie wanted a restructuring of his contract, with more cash freed up. And Crosthwait annoyed Mecom even more when he called the players’ union to make sure that the owner’s threats to withhold promised bonus money from striking players would not be legal. Indeed, seeing Archie leading the strikers seemed to make the owner snap. “We’ve had a difficult time developing a leader on the field, and that includes Mr. Archie Manning,” Mecom groused, adding that he was “disappointed in some of his actions the last few weeks. I hope he tries as hard on the field to be a leader as much as he is off the field.” Burning, Archie responded, “If he wants to get into a debate on leaders, I don’t see what ground he has to walk on. He, Mecom, has been the leader for seven years now. If I’m to blame for the last three years, who’s to blame for the other four? . . . This has really upset me that he would say that about me. It’s not my way to get into controversial situations. That’s not the way to run a successful franchise. But I’m not going to sit here and take it.”⁴

Mecom, as if playing a game of chicken with his star, implied that he could replace Archie easily enough with his backup, Bobby Scott. When Archie and Keating met with Saints brass in late July, the agent recalled, “Archie couldn’t believe it. For the first time in his adult life, he was faced with a situation where [Saints officials] had their backs to the wall and said some things they may live to regret.”⁵ Mecom didn’t know how close he came to losing Archie, nor Memphis Southmen owner Johnny Bassett how close he came to landing him. But Bassett roiled the pot by offering Archie a $1.5 million deal for three years once his Saints deal ran its course in a year. All Gordon offered was to extend Archie’s contract, with no money boost, which Crosthwait called unacceptable. Archie, he said, wanted Mecom to pony up a league-record $170,000-a-year salary. But when the stalemate continued past the end of the strike on August 10, Mecom seemed to believe that Archie was bluffing and had no stomach to leave the Saints. On September 10, Crosthwait blustered to the press that Archie had rejected the Saints’ “final offer” and had “cut the string” with the Saints. But there was no longer any talk of defecting to the WFL.

Mecom had it right. As the ’74 season wore on, he continued stalling on a new Manning pact, merely assuring Archie that he would offer an extension and a raise at some point before the contract ran out. The bluster from the Manning camp ended, especially when it was clear the WFL would be a failure—it would limp into a second season in ’75 with the NFL stars it had raided, but collapse two-thirds of the way into the schedule, sending the expatriates back to their old or other teams, many at higher salaries (and, for the three Dolphins, with their guaranteed WFL contracts still honored, giving them two salaries). Archie, happy he had been boxed in, expressed relief that he had not signed a future contract with the WFL, because “my family would get a lot of harassment” around town.⁶ He could also be relieved that he was not part of yet another magnificent failure.

Needing a house now that they were parents, Archie and Olivia bought a quaint, pale-yellow-and-white camelback cottage at 1316 Seventh Street. Even today, the value of the property is modest, around $700,000, but it sits in the historic Garden District, a neighborhood created a century and a half ago as a refuge for whites who didn’t want to live in proximity to Creoles in the French Quarter. They had swallowed hard before deciding to become city folk. But once ensconced, they assimilated easily, and why not? Without calling for reservations, Archie could get right through the door anywhere, whether Pascal’s Manale restaurant for the barbecued shrimp, or to listen to jazz in Al Hirt or Pete Fountain’s clubs in the Quarter. On the street, the usual rules of conduct seemed lifted for him. Driving his new red Corvette one day, a perk for endorsing an auto dealer, he braked late at a stop sign, causing a fender bender with a car in front of him. The guy at the wheel of the other car bolted out and came looking for a confrontation, but when he recognized who was at the wheel, he froze and smiled. “Hey, Arch!” he woofed. “Go Saints!” then drove off.⁷

Archie told of another, scarier time, when he and Saint linebacker Rick Kingrea headed for the French Quarter to rustle up some Lucky Dogs, the famous hot dogs legendarily sold from wiener-shaped pushcarts on the street. When Kingrea got out to buy them, traffic backed up and people began banging on the car. Plainclothes cops pulled Archie out of the driver’s seat. “[They] had [us] against the wall and were searching us,” he recalled. “One of them recognized me. He said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Archie. Sorry,’ and they drove away.”⁸ The Mannings were never seen as distant from the masses. As Cooper pointed out, Archie wasn’t really a red Corvette kind of guy. “My mom drove a station wagon, my dad [usually] drove an Oldsmobile. We were around fame but we weren’t entrenched in it. We weren’t going to Europe on private planes.”⁹

Favoritism, however, came with pitfalls. Somewhere in every crowd was a guy just itching for him to blow off an autograph request so that they could complain about how big a jerk he was. However, it was good for his bottom line that the team’s PR people went on presenting him as a humble throwback to happy ’50s family values, never mind Buddy’s suicide. All around town, Archie’s face was popping up in ads and at appearances. In a typical example, an ad in the Times-Picayune read, “You are invited to meet ARCHIE MANNING and view the beautiful new Breckshire Apt. Tuesday, Oct. 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. Children must be accompanied by an adult.”¹⁰ Gigs like that multiplied endlessly—banquets, bank and supermarket openings, state fairs, business conferences, art festivals, whatever, wherever—earning him more than six figures a year. In a still-prehistoric era, when money from jerseys, footballs, and the like bearing players’ numbers and names went mainly to the teams and not the players, Archie was given a cut of the proceeds from posters of him, which were often prizes offered in newspaper contests and sweepstakes. Kids feverishly joined “official” Archie Manning Fan Clubs, for which he hired a PR man to send out certificates fake-signed with a rubber stamp. Making the scene wherever he could, Archie was reported during the winter of ’74 to be at a charity banquet downtown, where the guests of honor were “Louis Prima, the Dick Stabile orchestra, and Archie Manning.”¹¹ For the era, that was the big time.

In 1974, Dick “Moonbeam” Gordon used his first-round pick on Ohio State linebacker Rick Middleton, when all the scouts were raving about his Buckeye teammate, two-time All-America Randy Gradishar. He did this because Gradishar had some knee issues, which would do nothing to prevent him from becoming a seven-time Pro Bowler and a Defensive Player of the Year—for the Denver Broncos. And Middleton? He played two seasons as a Saint, then was traded to the 49ers and was out of football in four years.

Always in the crosshairs, meanwhile, Archie was an even more harassed target. Through the first five games, four of them losses, he threw three touchdowns and seven interceptions. Ominously, he hurt his knee early on and also had soreness in his arm all season, which was diagnosed as bicipital tendinitis. He missed three games—though he did beat the Eagles and Rams—but never quit. The Saints won five games, again finishing third, but his stats were an eyesore—1,429 yards, six touchdowns, 16 picks, a 49.8 QB rating.

Proving that unmet expectations will erode idolatry, despite his immense popularity there now could be heard scattered booing after a killer interception or scramble that went nowhere. Some catcalls were even being directed at Olivia as she sat in the stands, forcing her to sit in the owner’s box instead, where, thankfully, they served booze. In time, she said, Saints games stopped being fun and instead cast a pall over the whole city. “I remember how we’d feel on Monday mornings when Archie was playing. You know, life goes on, you still had to get the kids up, and I’d feel almost like somebody just died, which is ridiculous, but you were so down and the whole city’s mood was like that.” Cooper, who was too young to know better, thought it would be fun to join in the chorus, which drew dirty looks from the other VIPs in the box. He remembered his mother during those days as almost forlorn. “One minute, she’d say, ‘What you did was not appropriate,’ and in the next breath it would be ‘Please put some ice in my margarita.’”¹²

Archie went in for knee surgery over the off-season, but it didn’t keep Mecom from making good on his promise. On July 9, 1975, he finally gave Archie his extension, tacking on four more years at what Archie sheepishly described as “a handsome sum of money,” which turned out to be $600,000 and a $65,000 bonus. Mecom half-gloated, half-rued that Archie was the only one in town who would be able to afford a suite in the new Superdome, since “I can’t afford one anymore.”¹³ Keating had lain low at the signing, letting Crosthwait take the bow. Mecom, who never thought he’d be paying players much when he bought the team, lamented, “Don’t tell me about country lawyers.”¹⁴ Crosthwait, Archie would say late in his career, “is the reason why I’ve slept better for the last ten years.”

That is, when he could sleep at all. The ’75 season would be the nadir of his career, though it began hopefully enough in the bourgeois splendor of the Superdome (called now, with even more élan, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome). Eight years in the making, costing $134 million, it sat on 70 acres in downtown New Orleans, in a formerly rough neighborhood a couple miles from the Garden District. Built by private funds and public bonds, with the Saints signing annual leases, it was modeled on the Houston Astrodome, resembling a giant tiered mushroom. It was then the largest domed structure in the world, seating over 73,000, with dozens of private luxury boxes for the idle rich, the newest prerequisite of NFL high society. Prophetically, the stadium was built over a cemetery, and one day in the future a deadly hurricane would turn the place into a morgue.

Held out of preseason games and practices for fear he’d strain or even break something, Archie hobbled through games, still hell-bent and pushing his luck on every down, but in vain as usual. Dick Gordon even gave him a target, using his first-round draft pick in 1975 on Larry Burton, a blindingly fast All–Big Ten receiver and sprinter from Purdue who had run fourth in the 200-meter finals at the 1972 Olympics. But the Saints lost five of their first six, their first at the Dome a 21–0 loss to the Cincinnati Bengals. That was lights out for John North. Mecom canned him and elevated the team’s 60-year-old personnel director, Ernie Hefferle, as interim coach. Hefferle won his first game when Archie hooked up with Burton on four long passes, but could only watch helplessly as the Saints lost their last seven and ended at 2–12. Archie made it into 13 games, his shoulder and knee aching, his arm deadening with each start. He finished with his worst completion rate (47 percent), seven touchdowns, 20 interceptions. In the carnage, he was sacked 49 times, the most of his career.

“Dear God, it was awful,” said Derland Moore, wincing. “For as long as he was a Saint, the offensive philosophy was simple: Archie hauling ass. And that was before quarterbacks took the snap five yards back of the line, with some room. He was under center, and as soon as he took the snap, he was runnin’ for his damn life. You seriously had to wonder when he went down if he would ever get up again.”¹⁵

Looking back, Archie said, “I played in the games in ’75 without being able to practice. Then, I’d just finished watching the Super Bowl on TV when I got a call from the league office. Roger Staubach couldn’t play in the Pro Bowl. He was injured. Fran Tarkenton had already said he couldn’t play. The game was a week away and they needed an NFC quarterback. “I said, ‘Hold on a minute,’ and I got a ball out of the trophy case and went outside with Olivia and tried throwing to her in the dark. I couldn’t get the ball to her. All I could do was lob it.”¹⁶ He stayed home, and before long, determined that he had no recourse during that off-season but to undergo an operation—two, as it turned out.

As Moore recalled, “They did an experimental surgery and then he began rehabbing. You don’t ever want shoulder surgery. When you wake up, you gotta keep the razor blades out of your reach, it’s that bad. And it didn’t work, so they had to go back in and redo it. Most people would have been destroyed by that. But I never heard him bitch, not one time.” A laugh. “I’ll tell you what, everything I saw in Peyton and Eli, I saw in Archie. Playing in pain, making unbelievable throws, all that. That crazy pass to Tyree in the Super Bowl? Archie made plays like that all the time. He was always running for his life, get away, and boom, the pass was right there. It just didn’t happen in a Super Bowl, and there was no ESPN so nobody outside of New Orleans saw it. And they didn’t give a shit because we’d lose the game, anyway.”

Archie would lose a season—the healing process for his shoulder stretched through 1976—but gain another son. On March 24 of that year, Peyton Williams Manning was born on his uncle Peyton’s 75th birthday and was named after him. Like Cooper, he was a big’un, 10 pounds, with that big old head people would come to joke about. “Peytie Pie,” as Olivia called him, shared the upstairs room with the big brother, both of them fed and diapered by the glamorous first couple of New Orleans.

Archie also had a new coach, and not just any coach. Mecom lured Hank Stram, the dwarfish, manic fellow the world had come to know from his bravura performance as coach of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs when they beat the heavily favored Vikings in Super Bowl IV. Miked up for the game, he was seen and heard in the film of the game yapping, adjusting his hairpiece, and merrily mocking helpless Viking defenders. Stram would only take the job if he also was made general manager, ending Dick Gordon’s mission to nowhere. Stram’s multiple offensive sets and moving pockets were ahead of his time, as were his training methods, which included weight lifting. He put Archie on a rehab and conditioning program that included tossing a medicine ball to an equipment man named Silky Powell, who threw so many balls back to the quarterback that he blew out his shoulder.

Two quarterbacks filled in for Archie that season, both of them doomed. The first, Bobby Scott, floundered, then tripped over a TV cable on the sideline and tore up his knee. The job then went to mediocre veteran Bobby Douglass. Between Bobby A and Bobby B, the team went 4–10, and rather than wondering how much better Archie might have made the team, the Saints’ brass—a year after giving Archie his extension—fretted that he might never be able to throw again. “There were so many rumors floating around,” recalled Derland Moore, who swears “they had Archie traded to San Francisco before Scott went down. It wasn’t talked about, but believe me, it happened. If Bobby hadn’t gotten hurt, he would have been a 49er—they may not have had to draft Joe Montana. History would have changed but for that TV cable.”

Archie was able to make his comeback in ’77, the year that a grinning Southern Democrat was sworn in as president. The first game of the season was against the Packers at the Superdome, and Manning went 18 of 30 for 225 yards. His fourth-quarter 59-yard TD pass to tight end Henry Childs narrowed the score to 24–20. The Pack held on, but there seemed to be reason to believe this would finally be the season of deliverance. Archie’s load had been relieved by Stram’s first-and second-round picks in the ’76 draft, Chuck Muncie and Tony Galbreath. They rumbled for a combined 1,455 yards and nine touchdowns and caught 62 passes. Still, the defense was a leaky boat, mistakes came at the worst moments, and losses continued piling up. The fans, in no mood for another season of shame, now booed Archie without mercy. Up in the stands, Olivia wore dark glasses, her head covered by a scarf so she wouldn’t be recognized. “It was just horrible,” said Moore. “They were like animals. You’d hear it everywhere, on the street, wherever you went. I’d go out somewhere to get relief drunk and I’d wind up in a fight with somebody. It was a nightmare.”

Few fans sympathized with Archie’s latest round of injuries—by late season he was playing with a broken jaw and a sprained ankle. Nor did Mecom have any patience with Stram. The season’s penultimate game was against the second-year Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who had lost 26 consecutive games, turning a great college coach, John McKay, into a national joke. But the Saints lost 33–14, with Archie benched in the second half for his own protection. Afterward, Mecom was apoplectic. “There is dissension on the defensive team,” he said. “I’ve told [Stram] that and he doesn’t believe me. Now it’s infecting the offense. . . . I have not interfered with him. I’ve given him everything he’s asked for, everything. I’ve been crucified by the press for some things I’ve done, but you don’t criticize him.” Stram, a man rarely at a loss for words, could only respond, “I would rather not make any comment,” but said, “We are all very ashamed of what happened today,” calling it “my worst coaching experience. We got strangled by the trauma. The harder we tried, the worse we got.”¹⁷

The Saints limped in at 3–11–1, one game better than Tampa Bay, and Stram knew he was a goner. Still, his axing right after the new year hit Archie hard. Saying he was “crushed,” he equated it to the deepest scar of his life. “I got a big lump in my throat,” he said, “kind of like when my daddy died. . . . We haven’t even scratched the surface, and it’s over.”¹⁸

Stram’s linebacker coach, Dick Nolan, inherited the job, his second go-around as a head coach. An underrated defensive back on the great New York Giants teams of the 1950s, where he learned from defensive coach Tom Landry, he applied Landry’s “flex” defense as defensive coordinator in Dallas and then as head coach of the 49ers for eight years, twice coming up one game short of the Super Bowl. Assessing the Saints, the chain-smoking, dour-looking Nolan drafted for offense—the top pick Wes Chandler, Florida’s All-American receiver—and made key trades for receiver Ike Harris and guard Conrad Dobler. This was meant to benefit Archie, around whom Nolan’s offensive coordinator (and brother-in-law) Ed Hughes built a low-risk, run-heavy attack, softening defenses with Muncie and Galbreath—“Thunder and Lightning,” as they were dubbed. Muncie, said Archie, was “the fastest back out of the I formation I’ve ever seen. Toes in, kind of hunched over, then boom! Gone.”¹⁹

It seemed promising indeed when the Saints won the ’78 opener against the Vikings, 31–24, with Archie throwing only 22 times, completing 15 for 193 yards, while Fran Tarkenton filled the sky with 49 passes, four of them intercepted. The formula, however, broke down when the defense faltered. In the second game, falling behind against the Packers, Archie had to go up top, throwing 53 times, completing 33 for 303 yards and a touchdown in a 28–17 defeat. And then Muncie broke down. He suffered a string of injuries and could only play in 13 games. Archie would rack up 3,416 yards—third behind Tarkenton and Jim Hart—and completed a career-best 62 percent of his passes, garnering 17 touchdowns but also 26 interceptions, though his passer rating was still a robust 87.1, fifth-best in the NFL. The Saints, 5–4 at midseason, concluded at 7–9, again in third place. But for his hard labor, Archie finally won his All-Pro stripes, the only Saint player who did that year, and was named the NFC’s Offensive Player of the Year. By the terms of his contact, that was worth a bundle—his salary zoomed up to $370,000, the most of any quarterback. On the Saints, the feeling was that it was the least he was owed.

“I was thrilled to death for Archie, but at the same time I was pissed,” said Derland Moore. “With the shit he went through, anyone else would have just said, ‘Just get me out of here.’ And I wish he would have, I really do. Because in New Orleans they took him so much for granted. They never knew what they had in him. I heard them booing him and I wanted to go up into the stands after ’em. That was what it was like to play for the New Orleans Saints. It was like being in a nightmare and not being able to wake up.”