CHAPTER 8

GOOD LORD, I FEEL LIKE I’M DYING

The Saints were screwy enough to make a punter their No. 1 draft pick in 1979: Russ Erxleben of Texas. But they were becoming enough of a big-time operation to hire a conditioning coach, an executive vice-president, and a vice-president of player personnel. That season, after losing their first three games, they hit their stride and only lost two in a row once. With three weeks to go, they looked up and were tied with the Rams atop the NFC West at 7–6. They then went cross-country to play the always-scabrous Raiders on a Monday night, the biggest game the Saints had yet played. They came out on fire. Galbreath and Muncie each ran for a touchdown, and Archie threw two more, to Galbreath and Henry Childs, to take a 28–14 lead at the half. That grew to 35–14 after an interception was returned for a touchdown. But these were the Saints, a team seemingly doomed to suffer. And before they knew what hit them, Ken Stabler had passed for three touchdowns, leaving the Saints dazed and 42–35 losers. They still had an outside shot at the playoffs when the Chargers came in for the season finale and left them for dead, winning 35–0.

The Saints finished 8–8, which glass-half-full optimists could appreciate as the team’s first non-losing season. They jumped up to second place in the division, a game behind the Rams, who went to the Super Bowl. They were fourth in yards, first in rushing touchdowns, and scored 370 points, one behind the NFC-leading Cowboys. Archie passed for 3,169 yards and 15 touchdowns and ran for 186 yards. He, Muncie (the first Saint runner to clear 1,000 yards), Chandler, and Childs made the Pro Bowl. However, if they had found a degree of stability, leave it to John Mecom to mess even that up. Never cut out for hands-on, daily team chores, he handed over the GM duties he had tried his hand at after the season to a fellow much like him, Steve Rosenbloom. The 34-year-old son of L.A. Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom, he had run that team until his father died in a drowning accident, after which he was fired by his stepmother, Georgia Frontiere, who took control of the Rams. Rosenbloom arrived even as he was being implicated in a ticket-scalping scandal.¹ While not directly involved, Steve was said to have known about his father’s plan to scalp Rams tickets.² Although Al Davis got a lot of mileage from this matter in his legal warfare with the NFL, which ended with him winning the right to take his Raiders to Los Angeles, no one was ever punished in the scandal. Yet, as omens went, it didn’t seem to be the ideal move for a team seeking legitimacy and credibility.

With the new front-office alignment in place, the 1980 season opened against the 49ers, a bitterly contested game in which the Saints went down on a field goal. Promising as the close defeat was, though, the following week they were mauled by the Bears 22–3. And then they just kept losing. And losing. To teams good and teams lousy. Four games in, they also lost Muncie, not to injury but to his own inner devils. The most troubled player the Saints ever had, Muncie could never coexist in the racist crucible of the Deep South. Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania and gone to ultra-liberal Berkeley, he once said, “After Berkeley’s tolerant atmosphere, it was quite a culture shock coming to New Orleans. I lived in a very nice neighborhood, but my house and car were routinely vandalized by racists.”³

Muncie was known to be using cocaine, and in time he became withdrawn, coming in late for meetings and practices, missing flights, and generally trying Nolan’s patience. Archie was understandably torn. “It was amazing how he performed [but] he basically slept through every meeting,” he said. “I very seldom called a play where I didn’t stop and tell Muncie what he was doing. He gained like 1,200 yards one year on one engine. I don’t know what he was doing during the week but he wasn’t thinking about football.”⁴ With the Saints in a tailspin, Rosenbloom traded Muncie to the Chargers for a second-round draft pick. Muncie would play for four more years, on three division champs, twice as an All-Pro, but his life was a mess. Upon being traded to the Vikings in ’85, blood tests revealed traces of cocaine and he was suspended, then he quit. Four years later, he was convicted of selling cocaine and jailed for 18 months; he died in 2013, at age 60, working as a drug counselor.

As with the sacking of Stram, Archie never forgave the brass for letting Muncie go. In his home, he had kept on the wall a large picture of the big man smashing through the line. Though Rosenbloom vowed that “we will be more productive without him,”⁵ in his absence the Saints’ top rusher that season ranked 48th in the league. With their record 0–10, Buddy Diliberto, who was still banned from the Saints’ team plane, came up with an inspired idea. Cribbing from the self-billed “Unknown Comic,” who appeared regularly on The Gong Show, the radio host wrote “Ain’ts” on a brown paper bag, cut holes for the eyes and nose, and wore it over his face to the next game. Though to some it bore a mild resemblance to a Klan hood, the gag immediately caught on, with fans showing up to the remaining games so bagged,⁶ sometimes embellished with things like “Ain’t It a Shame,” repurposing New Orleans native Fats Domino’s ’50s rock-and-roll anthem into a ’70s lament. The next week, during the Saints’ Monday night game against the Rams, Howard Cosell, seeing hordes of bags in the crowd, mused, “They really have a sense of humor here.”⁷

That included Archie’s first son. Now six, Cooper put a bag over his head at one game as well, and also slipped one on his baby brother Peyton’s noggin. This was not funny at all to Olivia. After she reprimanded him, Cooper refrained from putting it on again, but it just seemed like the thing to do at the Superdome. Which would explain why, when she became pregnant again, she decided not to subject herself to the games at all. She stayed at home, not even eager to listen on the radio.

As for Dick Nolan, he may have wished he had one of those bags, too, without holes cut out for his eyes—or nose. By that Rams game, the already cadaverous Nolan looked bloodless. Smoking six packs a day now, he was dealing not only with the team’s ills but Rosenbloom’s meddling, which he believed was intended to turn players the GM favored against him. He was right. According to Derland Moore, “half the guys had an allegiance to Nolan, half to Rosenbloom.”⁸ After the Saints lost to the Rams 27–7, Nolan got a break—he was fired. Watching him go down, Archie commiserated with him. “No one took [losing] harder than Dick Nolan,” he said. “His face got to me, his eyes all red. I knew he wasn’t sleeping at night. He was just dying.”⁹ Nolan landed on his feet, hired again by Tom Landry as an assistant coach with the Cowboys. But for the Saints, more trouble was coming. First, defensive end Don Reese hurt his knee, then he called his teammates “sorry bastards.” Moore responded by telling Reese he had “quit on the team.” Reese then jumped him and they fought it out. Moore rolls his eyes about this incident now, leaving Reese’s own history—he’d come to the Saints after being let go by the Dolphins after he and a teammate were busted in a drug sting for which he served prison time—and the trouble he would soon find himself in to speak for itself.

Rosenbloom promoted as interim coach Nolan’s longtime offensive coordinator, Dick Stanfel, who had never been a head coach before and never would be again. The Saints lost two more games, the latter in which they led the 49ers 35–7 before collapsing in a heap and losing 38–35, still the greatest blown lead in a regular-season game in NFL history. That defeat put them at 0–14, tying the ’76 Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ record for futility. The Saints did get it together for one Sunday, nipping the Jets 21–20 before losing to the Patriots to end up at 1–15, then the second-worst season ever by an NFL team. For Archie, nothing would ever wash away the taste of that season of putrefaction, which he called “the most miserable thing I’ve ever gone through.”

The irony was that he actually racked up his career high in touchdowns, 23, his 20 picks not so terrible given that his rate of 3.9 interceptions per 100 pass attempts was the second-lowest of his career, and he had his best completion percentage, 60.7. Still, Cooper Manning would never feel compelled to apologize for his seditious booing that year. “Everyone else was doing it and you know, it’s a copycat league,” he would say. “I mean, 1–15 is 1–15!”¹⁰

Archie almost didn’t survive it, and wouldn’t have if Steve Rosenbloom had gotten his way. A bottom-line type with scant empathy for any player, he wanted to trade a 32-year-old quarterback who had taken a career-long beating. When Nolan was still the coach, Rosenbloom had tried to get him to bench Archie in favor of backup Guy Benjamin. Rebuffed, his next aim was to renegotiate Archie’s contract on insulting terms. He sent the assistant he had brought with him from the Rams, Harold Guiver, to meet with Archie, armed with a poison pill disguised as a contract extension. “It was an extension with an insignificant raise,” Archie recalled. “I told him, ‘Look, I was born at night, but not last night.’”¹¹

In truth, Crosthwait had broached the subject of him moving on to a team where he could do some winning, and not, as Archie said, “agree[ing] to man an oar on a slave ship.”¹² As a model, it seemed pertinent that Jim Plunkett flourished after getting out of New England, leading the Raiders to the championship in ’80. But Archie opted again for loyalty and cockeyed optimism—and a gigantic new contract—when Mecom overruled Rosenbloom and gave him five years and $600,000, by far the most of any quarterback in the league. Mecom then took the logical next step, unceremoniously firing Rosenbloom, explaining, “Steve was vehement about Archie’s going,” but adding, “the only problem with Archie here is that everyone else can’t measure up to the standards he has set.”¹³

Mecom again made big changes. His next coach was the inimitable Oail Andrew “Bum” Phillips, a human comic-book character in a crew cut, 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots. The 57-year-old native Texan, once Bear Bryant’s assistant at Texas A&M and Sid Gillman’s defensive coordinator with the Houston Oilers before succeeding Gillman as head coach, had gotten to the AFC title game twice in five years before wearing out his welcome. In mid-January, he and his assistant coaches, including his son Wade, were hired en masse by the Saints, whereupon Bum threw his considerable weight around, making changes. One of the first was to release Reese, who signed with San Diego. Phillips then drafted South Carolina’s All-American running back George Rogers, the Heisman Trophy winner, and All-American linebacker Rickey Jackson of Pitt. The dismissals of Muncie and Reese were explained by Mecom assistant Fred Williams’s admission that “we undoubtedly had problems in 1980,” coded language for drugs.

Phillips also snatched redshirted Illinois quarterback Dave Wilson—who had once thrown for 621 yards in a game—in the supplemental draft, a move that struck observers as odd, what with Manning’s new contract. Asked if replacing Archie was in his plans to remake the team, Phillips denied it and spent much of training camp slavishly praising him. Was Archie’s age a worry? “Not the way that guy takes care of his-self,” he said. But Archie would soon come to learn that when it came to the truth, he couldn’t take anything Bum Phillips said to the bank.

Olivia gave birth to their third son, Elisha Nelson Manning, on January 3, 1981. Needing more room for the boys to roam, she and Archie looked around for new digs. For a time, they considered the suburbs. Then Olivia told Archie, “There’s a million suburbs—there’s only one Uptown.” Inured to the sights, sounds, tastes, and aromas of the Garden District, they settled nearby in a large, white, two-story, four-bedroom Victorian at 1420 First Street, surrounded by a brass gate, Old French columns, and turrets up and down the front of the house. Just down the street lived novelist Anne Rice. What they couldn’t have known was that Archie’s tenure as a Saint was growing short. Indeed, at 31, it felt as if the glory days at Ole Miss were as distant as the Confederacy. That year, Sports Illustrated ran a sympathetic profile of him with the title “The Patience of a Saint,” casting him as a fallen idol, a golden calf now with arthritis. With not much in his pro career to hang a hat on, Archie was reduced to saying, “Success, you know, is a relative thing,” as close to self-pity as he would allow himself. “I’ve enjoyed so little success as a professional player. I’ve sat around with [Terry] Bradshaw and [Bob] Griese and [Ken] Stabler, and I couldn’t open my mouth. They’d be saying, ‘Remember the ’75 playoffs?’ or ‘Remember that pass I threw in the Super Bowl?’ and I’d be thinking about our 8–8 season, or our wins over Minnesota in ’78 or Tampa Bay in ’79. It’s all relative. Those things stick out to me, but what am I going to say?”¹⁴

As a kind of epitaph, and cautionary tale, author Paul Zimmerman wrote: “[W]hen you mention Manning’s name around the league you strike an uncharacteristic vein of compassion. Or worse . . . an object lesson, a textbook argument against rushing a baby quarterback into combat: ‘You think your kid ought to play right away? Well, look at that Manning with the Saints. They turned him into a basket case down there.’”

For many fans around the country, the brief mention of Buddy’s suicide in the article was the first they’d heard of it. The photos in the story were also the first time his sons were seen by a national audience, five-year-old Peyton captured throwing a baseball in one photo, Archie cradling the infant Eli in another, a seeming sneer on the little guy’s face. In the neighborhood, it would become a familiar sight to see Archie on the balcony of the house, tossing passes to all three of his boys in the yard below. Archie would obsessively make home movies of the boys, a self-conscious effort to preserve personal memories of the days when he attempted to be a better father than Buddy had been to him. Because the boys predictably took to sports, he kept the living room free of bulky furniture so they could play indoor football. Archie had Saints uniforms made in their sizes, their names and the number 8 on the back. They made up their own game that Cooper called ’Mazing Catches, wherein each son would try to top the others. As Eli recalled, “If it was a little wet and you could dive and slide, that was the big play,” though because he was so much younger than Cooper and Peyton, he was often a spectator as his brothers and their buddies gathered for rounds of touch football. This might help explain why Eli was the least impressed with himself—and even his dad.

“We were probably a little spoiled having a professional quarterback throwing to us,” he said. “That was just what my dad did. It was normal, like—O.K., so, should I go up and ask my friends’ dads for their autographs, too?”¹⁵

The most competitive son was the middle one. Peyton behaved like someone had died and left him boss, even when his own father was there. Archie remembered the time he agreed to coach a neighborhood basketball team. “I couldn’t go to the tryout, so I just drafted all my friends’ kids because I thought that would be nice for everyone to play together. Well, we were terrible. We were very bad. And Peyton got really mad at me. ‘Why did you draft these guys? What’s wrong with you?’ He was really competitive. And so that’s when I quit being a head coach.” He made sure the boys did their schoolwork and studied their Cub Scout manuals, and he went hunting and fishing with them when he could. But that could not stop him from feeling guilty about not being with them for long periods during the season. Mindful of how Buddy had pulled away from him, he began taking Cooper and little Peytie Pie to Saints practices and games. They became fixtures on the field during warm-ups and around the locker room, even getting wrapped with tape to feel like real players. Archie resolved not to let them be smartasses, something Cooper seemed to have a natural propensity for. “My personality was very different from my dad’s,” Cooper said years later. “I can remember early on when I’d do something, he’d say they found me on the doorstep, they didn’t know where I came from.” Archie’s word for him was “renegade.”¹⁶

Indeed, Cooper was growing up with a distinctly broad view of the world beyond his own family. When he was seven, he told a sportswriter that his favorite team was the Chargers. His three favorite players were Lance Alworth, John Jefferson, and Lynn Swann—all receivers. His favorite Saint was Wes Chandler, though he did say Archie Manning was “my second favorite [and] my favorite quarterback.” Cooper looked back at his relationship with Peyton as contentious. They were, he said, “always butting heads,” and Peyton was “kind of a tattletale, a study guy, a mama’s boy—and a daddy’s boy, too. . . . He was so neat, and I was a slob.”¹⁷ They would fight and scrap and cuss each other, earning a slap on the butt from Archie, which they accepted as the price of establishing their turf. He had just one rule for them as they grew: “Whatever you do, finish what you start.”

When Archie went to Honolulu for the ’79 Pro Bowl, he took the family. Looking around one day, he couldn’t find Peyton. He began frantically searching for him. Then a catamaran came into shore. There he was, sitting in the little boat with Walter Payton, having decided on his own to go sailing with the great running back.¹⁸ He was three at the time. There was also the day when Archie took him to the weight room and Peyton fell and hit his head, spurting blood. Archie rushed him to the emergency room, but not once did Peyton cry. “It doesn’t hurt,” he kept saying. If it did, Archie knew, he just wouldn’t let it show. Years later, he still wouldn’t. As Archie put it, “He refuses to give the other side the satisfaction.”¹⁹ The boy had an attitude, and a mouth. At 12, playing basketball, he sassed his coach, telling him he didn’t know what he was doing. Archie, in the stands, was aghast and dragged him to the coach’s house later to apologize.

Peyton was fortunate that was all Archie did. Usually, exercising some old-school paternal discipline, he would tan his boys’ hides with “No. 8,” the thick belt that had his uniform number etched into it, warning them, “No. 8’s comin’ out!” But even with that risk, Peyton and Cooper would go on with their fussin’ and fightin’. Eli, in his bedroom down the hall, would hear them “slamming each other against the wall and all the pictures crashing to the floor.” Oh, they loved each other plenty. Each of them wouldn’t have hesitated going upside someone’s head who had a nasty word for the other. But, for Peyton, keeping up with and even humbling his big brother were all that mattered.

In 1981, Bum Phillips’s offensive coordinator, King Hill, one of the most accomplished men in the game, devised a powerful attack. It relied heavily on the tank-like George Rogers, who made people forget Muncie, running for a team record (and then-rookie NFL record) 1,674 yards and 13 touchdowns en route to the Pro Bowl. On the other side of the ball, under Wade Phillips, Rickey Jackson would begin a 15-year career in which he was a Pro Bowler six times before being elected to the Hall of Fame. But the Saints still reeked of failure. They lost six of their first seven games, five in a row, and by November were also-rans. Hobbled by sundry physical ills all season, Archie missed four games. The Saints went 4–12. Saints fans, now tired of booing, began to stay home in large numbers.

When the ’82 season rolled around, Archie learned how phony Bum Phillips was. The previous year, before the Saints played his old Oilers team, led by the aging Ken “Snake” Stabler, Bum had given his men a fiery pep talk. “Fellas, I been tellin’ you all week this is just another game. Bull . . . shit! This is life or death! My life—or your death!”²⁰ When the Saints won 27–24, Archie figured he’d earned some goodwill. But now, during preseason, Oilers coach Ed Biles cut Stabler, who at 37, with gimpy knees and a belly frequently filled with beer, seemed done. Phillips quickly signed his old quarterback to a $450,000 contract and named the Snake his starter, over Archie. In the season opener at home against the St. Louis Cardinals, Stabler looked reborn. He completed 19 of 27 passes for 221 yards and a touchdown, though the Cards won 21–7. To say Archie felt sandbagged would be a gross understatement. His only appearance in that game was as mop-up man, one with the highest salary in the league.

The good news—for Archie—was that it would be the last New Orleans would see of him as a Saint. Not singing rhapsodies to him anymore, Phillips traded him. Archie knew it was coming. A hasty deal was worked out with the Oilers to exchange the biggest star the Saints ever had for 30-year-old, three-time former All-Pro tackle Leon Gray, who was recovering from Achilles’ heel surgery. Biles and Houston’s general manager, Ladd Herzeg, demanded that the Saints pick up half of Archie’s contract, and Phillips agreed. This time, John Mecom didn’t stand in the way, not incidentally because he was close to selling the team and making a windfall profit from the pitiful franchise. The trade was made on Friday, September 17. When Archie was told, it had to sting that he had come so cheap. Years later, he was still miffed, recalling that Gray was on the “downside of his career . . . to put it politely.” Somewhat irrationally, he came to believe that Phillips “wanted me gone because I had a lock on the endorsements in town, and he liked to do endorsements.” More plausible was that Phillips yearned to re-create his old Oiler team. Some began to call the Saints “Houston East.”

Tarnished or not, Archie Manning was still a saint to many in New Orleans, and the trade was a delicate matter, though not to the buzz-cut coach. As it was, Bum barely said goodbye. The decision, he conceded, was “tough,” given that Archie had done “many good things for this city” and had been “a loyal and good quarterback.” But he justified the move by pimping Gray the way he had Archie only a year before, as an ageless player who was vital for the Saints to build an offense. A good many Saint players, though, regarded Stabler as a short-term solution at best, and a train wreck at worst. Archie stayed on the high road but was so broken up that when Phillips asked him to address the team one last time, he refused. “I just couldn’t do it,’ he said at a farewell press conference. “I’m having trouble just talking.”²¹

Once the shock had worn off, he could see the move as others did, as a benefit, being able to escape the Saints for his own sanity. After 10 seasons in Purgatory, he had left pieces of himself on fields all around the league, sacked 340 times, his 115 touchdowns submerged by a 35–91–3 record. Peter Finney, in an elegy titled “Requiem for Saints No. 8,” likened him to Terry Molloy, Marlon Brando’s tragically exploited antihero in On the Waterfront, who lamented that, but for the manipulations of others, he “coulda been a contender.” At the same time, there were those in the city who hailed the trade as “long overdue.”²² Olivia, no doubt saying what Archie couldn’t, admitted, “I sort of feel relieved. I just didn’t think I could go back to the Superdome and sit there anymore. I had just gotten where I didn’t look forward to it anymore.”²³ Cooper, for his part, was miffed—not that his dad was traded, but that he wasn’t traded to Dallas or Pittsburgh.

To be sure, Archie could not have been relieved about going to Houston. As Finney wrote, “The Oilers have the look of an unmade bed, wandering aimlessly in the NFL jungle, with a coach, Ed Biles, whose days may be numbered. Of one thing you may be sure. Diminished physical skills aside, Archie will give it his best shot.”²⁴ Archie saw himself less heroically. He would cynically say the deal had made him “a full-fledged mercenary.”²⁵ But the timing was fortuitous. Ripping the veil off the festering drug problem on the Saints just months before, in June 1981, Sports Illustrated published a bylined confessional by Don Reese, indicting the league as a whole and in particular the “horror show in New Orleans,” where he said players “snorted coke in the locker room before games and again at halftime, and stayed up all hours of the night roaming the streets to get more stuff.” He laid blame on Chuck Muncie for getting him hooked on freebasing cocaine, and claimed that Nolan and Mecom “must have suspected that we were on the stuff.”²⁶ That same year, former Saints running back Mike Strachan was sent to federal prison for dealing coke.²⁷

Archie, in his memoir with Peyton, dealt with the drug issue as he had the team’s racial tensions—guardedly, writing that “cocaine raised its ugly head in the NFL” during those years, and, “taking into account New Orleans’s tendencies toward over-the-edge lifestyles, it was a sure place for it to find expression.” But, he insisted, “Me, I knew nothing about it. . . . I suppose I was too straight, too naïve, too removed from the element involved.”²⁸ All the same, a Saint no more, he could justifiably say with some hope that he was getting “a fresh start.” And Ed Biles seemed ecstatic to have him. “I’ve been wanting this guy since I got the job,” he said. “We were discussing trading for him a year ago.” Cold comfort for a man who knew he was swapping one horror show for another.