CHAPTER 10

“WE’RE NOT AVERAGE. WE’RE COOP AND PEYT.”

Cooper was the first to show that sort of promise. He began attending the Isidore Newman School, a private prep academy on Jefferson Avenue, not far from the Manning home in New Orleans. Running from kindergarten through high school, Newman’s most famous graduates had been musician Harry Connick Jr. and authors Michael Lewis and Christopher Rice, but its gonfalon would come to be football. In 2010, ESPN ranked the school as the best incubator of NFL talent of any high school in America—having spawned not only the Manning brothers but two future NFL receivers: Omar Douglas, who played with the Giants in the ’90s, and Odell Beckham Jr. Cooper had athletic skill and a mind for detail, handed down by the father who calls himself “an organization nut.”

“[He’s] just like me,” Archie once said. “He can’t open gifts at Christmas without having a garbage can so he can throw out the wrapping paper right away.”¹

But Cooper was also a scamp, a class clown, and when he insisted to his father that he wanted to play football in school, Archie says, “My first reaction was to try to scare him out of it. I really didn’t think he could.” Still, due to his pedigree, he was assumed to be a natural quarterback. When he started high school, he made the team as the second-stringer—reluctantly, given that he never had a yen to play the position.

Tony Reginelli, the Newman football coach, remembered Cooper telling him he wanted to play receiver. “He told me, ‘Coach, Peyton’s gonna be here next year, anyway.’ And he was right, he wouldn’t have had a chance.”² Indeed, while neither Peyton nor Cooper had played organized football, word was that Peyton was Archie’s heir apparent. However, it was Cooper who would feel the pressure of being the No. 1 son. During his freshman season at Newman, game stories in the papers habitually identified him as the “son of former Saints quarterback Archie Manning.” It was hard to avoid the glare, since he was wearing Archie’s Ole Miss number, 18, above MANNING on the back. At first, Reginelli played him only in spots. On September 17, 1989, the Newman Green Wave—the Greenies, who played in the Class AA division of the prep school league—met Ecole Classique in a non-division game. As the Times-Picayune reported, “Perry Eastman threw two touchdown passes each to Tyler Whann and Omar Douglas, and Cooper Manning completed his first varsity attempt for a touchdown to lead Newman to a 36–14 victory.”

The next week was a division game against district rival Redeemer. In the fourth quarter, says Frank Gendusa, the offensive coordinator, “The guys ahead of him got hurt so we sent Coop in. We were on our own one-yard line and I told Coop to fake a bootleg and heave one for Omar [later a Big Ten sprint champion]. He did, and Omar ran all the way for a 99-yard touchdown.” The play, the longest in Newman history, won the game. That was the good news. The bad was that, as Gendusa adds, “We had to start Coop the next week against Belle Chase—and he threw five interceptions.”³ During that game, Cooper said later, “I was crying to myself in the huddle.”⁴ As Archie recalled, “I waited up for him to come home. I thought he might need consoling. I can remember games when I had five interceptions—at least three times in my career—and I wanted to jump off a bridge afterward. When Coop came in the door, I said, ‘You didn’t beat me. I threw six against Tennessee in Knoxville one afternoon.’” Cooper had a ready excuse. “They weren’t my fault, Dad. I’m a receiver, anyway.”

And, according to Reginelli, he was one hell of a receiver. “He had great hands,” Reginelli said. “He didn’t have Omar’s speed, but he could get open.” As a junior, switched to the position he wanted, he made the Class AA all-state team with 37 receptions for 783 yards, a 21.2 yardsper-catch average, and 11 touchdowns. Still, Archie was not convinced Coop had what it took to be a serious player. Early in that season, when he scored a touchdown in practice one day, he went into a jiggling end-zone victory dance. Such celebratory excesses had become common in the NFL, but the schoolboy league prohibited them. “Do that again, Manning,” Reginelli barked, “and you’ll never get off the bench.”

There was also the fact that, like Archie, Cooper was a basketball star as well, the shooting guard and captain of coach Billy Fitzgerald’s state title–winning teams (the point guard on which was Randy Livingston, a future two-time All-America at LSU), and in the spring was on Fitzgerald’s baseball teams. There would need to be some factor that determined which way he went. That factor would come walking onto the football field and take over, just as Cooper had said he would.

When Peyton was a sophomore and eligible for the team, Reginelli saw enough of his skills in early practices to hand him the starting quarterback job. And Peyton was ready for it, having gorged himself on the art and science of the position since he was a toddler. Watching game film with Archie in the den, he’d want to know about formations, tendencies, defenses, where the seams were. He would ask Archie to pull out his dusty Ole Miss films, even his Drew High films, not for nostalgia but as instruction for a teenager on throwing a football either soft or hard, on faking a handoff, on when to scramble out of the pocket. Watching the legendary Alabama game or the Sugar Bowl, he would tell Archie what he had done wrong. To this day, Peyton can announce from memory the Ole Miss lineup: “Jernigan from Jackson, McClure from Hattiesburg . . .”

Archie could find his immersion irksome. Peyton, he says, “watched film every day. I’d say, ‘Son, go get a girlfriend. Go to a movie. You need to get out more.’” But, like Archie himself in his teenage days, his boy had little time for anything else. He played basketball and baseball, but his world was football—in particular, quarterbacking. Reginelli was taken aback at how much energy he put into practice and study, while Cooper, well, didn’t. The differences between them were obvious. Cooper was always far more popular than the overwound Peyton. His report cards would be littered with C’s, but teachers would scribble on them what a delight he was, whereas Peyton would get A’s, with no further comment. Peyton only dreamed he could be popular. “I’m a serious person by nature—sometimes too serious,” he said years later. “Cooper and I always had this deal: His job was to help me stay loose, and mine was to help him be more serious. ‘Peyton, loosen up a little bit,’ he’d say. I’ve helped him, too, because now he understands how inappropriate it is to make fun of a guy just because he’s wearing an ugly sport coat.”⁵

They found their happy medium on the field, where they could anticipate each other’s moves. On a subconscious level, they were still competing for their father’s approval, which is why Cooper kept going in football. And Archie could seem more like a coach than a dad. On weekends, he’d put on sweats and take them to the school field and hone their skills. He’d fire passes to Cooper from 10 yards away, at varying angles, at different speeds and difficulty level—Ten Balls, he called the game. If Cooper flubbed any, they’d start over and keep going until he cleanly caught 10 in a row. But Archie would sometimes think about his presence and pull back, fearing he was sending the wrong message to them, that they had to excel in football as the price of his love. “You can become a man in every form and fashion without becoming an athlete,” he once said. “I think sports are good, but I don’t think they’re necessary.”⁶ It was easy for him to say, but it was an article of faith to the boys that when they began to play football in earnest, they never felt they had an option to turn back.

Fatherhood was no easy chore for Archie. He figured he’d done well with his first two sons, in no small part because of Olivia, who was the soft side, the “velvet glove,” as he put it, providing the hugs and kisses, cutting them slack while he cracked the whip. But Eli was a different matter altogether. For all their differences, Cooper and Peyton were strong, even bullheaded in their own way, and fed off each other. Eli, though, as the third son, came of age as a loner with no chance to do anything better than his brothers. Archie remembers him as a happy infant, that his first spoken word was—he swears—“ball,” and that he would sleep with either a basketball or football in the crib. But, too young to be taken into Cooper and Peyton’s circle of friends, he kept to his room, “so laid-back and reserved that half the time you weren’t even sure he was in the house,” Archie said.⁷

As Cooper recalled, Peyton wasn’t like Eli’s older brother, but more like “a second father.” And for a time, Eli was so insular that Archie wondered “if I lost Eli.” Archie and Olivia fretted about him. Seeing how much trouble he was having reading, they took him for an evaluation at a special language-arts school, which if he attended would have necessitated repeating a grade. The evaluation indicated he should be given extra tutoring, which in itself can be traumatic for kids wearing the “special ed” label. He spent much of his preteen years behind Olivia’s skirt, and as a result took on many of his mother’s traits. In time, he would try to find a niche somewhere between Cooper’s class clown and Peyton’s class geek. It was a small middle lane, but he had no intention of leaving it to get where he wanted to go.

In the fall of 1991, Peyton Manning was the starting quarterback for the Newman High team, still skinny and a bit gawky, though he was tall and could throw a ball true and long. Cooper Manning had made all-state and was the team captain. They were on a storied path, and Peyton was not prepared to take a back seat to anyone. If you screwed up on the field, you’d hear from him, even if you were a senior. As arrogant as a 16-year-old could be, he even had a tiff with Billy Fitzgerald when the basketball coach, he claimed, reneged on a promise to make him a starter. Fitzgerald, whose tough treatment of players led some parents to complain to the school, apparently didn’t appreciate that Peyton, like Cooper, waltzed onto the team when football season ended. Peyton let him know he felt it was unfair. “We got into each other’s face pretty good,” he recalled, “and used words you’d never hear in Sunday school. It almost got physical.”

Archie was livid. Amending his usual wisdom, he told Peyton, “I know I’ve always told you never to quit something you’ve started, but this might be a time that you should.” By mutual agreement, Peyton dropped off the team and apologized to Fitzgerald, though years later he would only allow that “I was more wrong than Fitz.” He went on playing baseball for him, hitting .400 the next season as a shortstop. Fitzgerald, on his part, put the episode in a positive light. “It was typical of Peyton the competitor,” he reasoned. “I don’t fault him for it. It was a privilege to coach him.” Returning the favor, Peyton would look back fondly at Fitzgerald, who he said “taught me about toughness.”⁸

Even back then, Peyton was clearly his own man. As if wanting to delineate his talent from his father’s, when he came to the varsity he wore No. 14—nothing with an 8. People could easily see that football really wasn’t fun for him, but rather, serious business. Tony Reginelli often had to pull him aside and admonish him for getting in the faces of teammates who blew assignments or, in Peyton’s eyes, didn’t give their all. As with Archie in high school, Peyton made it known he was not going to be a sitting duck in the backfield. “Coach, we’re not gonna run the option, are we?” he asked Reginelli early on. As the coach recalled, “He did run the option—one time, and he ran it around 60 yards. He had to prove he could do it; then that was the end of it.”⁹

In Cooper, he had a target with a psychic connection. The first time they played a game together was on September 7, 1991. As the Times-Picayune covered it, “Cooper and Peyton Manning—sons of former Saints quarterback Archie Manning—connected on two touchdown passes Friday night to lead Newman to a 14–6 victory over Riverside. Peyton Manning threw a 20-yard scoring pass to his brother Cooper late in the first quarter, then threw an 18-yard TD pass in the second quarter.”

Archie and Olivia, of course, were there watching, with 10-year-old Eli, who had also discovered he could throw a good spiral. Seeing them playing in their bright green uniforms was just an extension of their living-room and front-yard football skirmishes—complete with the petty spats. Neither seemed to have any patience for the other. When Peyton would overthrow him downfield, Cooper would mope back to the huddle, glaring at him, and vice versa, Peyton figuring Coop should have been where he threw it. If Coop was wide open when he made a catch but was caught from behind, he’d hear about it for days. “Cooper could let a bad play go. Peyton couldn’t,” said Gendusa. “When Peyton got too wound up, I’d tell Cooper to call time-out, tell a joke, pass gas, anything to calm Peyton down.”¹⁰ But Peyton believed Coop needed to chill, the flak he’d give him for throwing a bad pass “a royal pain.” When their teammates would hear them sniping at each other like that, they got excited, because whenever those two wanted to prove to the other who was right, the next play might be the game-buster.

Needless to say, that happened a lot. The coach’s son, Reggie, who also played on that team, said, “I’ll never forget a throw [Peyton] made at St. Martin’s. He threw a dart to Cooper, who was streaking across the middle of the field, and it was right where it needed to be. It was a major college throw as a high school sophomore. Cooper took it for about a 50-or 60-yard touchdown, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, my father has something special here.’”¹¹ Another teammate, defensive tackle Nelson Stewart, said, “Here was a kid running a pro-style passing attack and hitting a third read which was a 25-yard post. We would line guys up in some unique formation and then—[with] his own verbiage—he’d break them out of it into the real play just so he could see how the defenses aligned.” Indeed, way before an older Peyton Manning ever started moving people around before the snap and barking “Omaha!” and other mystifying semiotics, he was doing something like that with slightly less sophistication at Newman.

By late September, he had found Cooper 13 times, five for touchdowns. However, unknown to anyone but Cooper was that something was wrong with his right hand. The first time Peyton dropped back in that Riverside game, Cooper ran one of his smoothly intricate routes, faking the cornerback out and making a beeline for the end zone. The pass landed in his hands—and fell between them, incomplete, a shocking moment for a guy who almost never dropped one. “He just missed it,” Archie remembered. “We all sat there stunned.”¹² Cooper had not even told Archie that the fingers of his hand felt numb, about the worst thing a receiver could experience. He was able to adapt. When it got cold and he could barely grip the ball, he tucked it under his left arm to keep from having it stripped. He even began tossing the ball with his left hand; when he held for the kicker on field goals and extra points, he put the ball down with that hand. Somehow, he got away with it, telling his brother and his coach that he had a mild sprain, and was as productive as ever. Which meant college recruiters were regular attendees at his games. Both Archie and Peyton kept on him to get in the gym, pound weights, and work endlessly on his footwork on pass routes. Too often, they thought, he was a goofball, a lounge comic. But during his senior year, he became a ringleader for the cause of extended practicing.

“Cooper and his group of seniors were like Bolsheviks,” Peyton recalled, also calling them “reactionaries,” which is something akin to comparing Lenin and Marx to the czars. Clearly not a history or poli sci major, he apparently meant they were insurrectionists, rabble-rousers, because “they wanted to change things, mainly Newman’s laissez-faire attitude toward football.” Indeed, with its emphasis on academics, Newman had a modest athletic scope until Billy Fitzgerald’s championship basketball teams elevated its profile. But unlike the intense Fitzgerald—who, when he was given the runner-up trophy in a tournament, smashed the thing to pieces—Reginelli was laid-back. Cooper, prodded by his brother, began getting teammates together for unsanctioned practices, joined by Peyton when he got to the varsity.

That season, Peyton likes to say, was the happiest of his life. Cooper went on tearing up the prep school circuit and again made all-state. When they played Episcopal High in the Superdome—most of the high schools played one game a year under the roof—they lost 35–14, but much was made of Episcopal quarterback/defensive back Van Hiles holding Cooper to one catch, as rare as that was.¹³ On the other hand, Peyton, despite his poise and long-ball dramatics, was prone to mistakes and interceptions, 13 in all. But he fed Cooper 76 balls for 1,250 yards. In the district quarter-finals, Cooper was double-teamed the whole game, yet Peyton still found him 12 times. Next came Haynesville in the semifinals, and a real nail-biter. Newman was behind all game, but as the clock wound down, Peyton was driving them upfield for the winning score. Trying to hit the tight end, he was picked off—the kind of killer interception that all quarterbacks dread. Walking off the field, head down, he felt an arm around his shoulder and a familiar voice in his ear, the voice that had always scolded him when he threw to someone else.

“Don’t worry about it, Peyt,” Cooper told him. “It was a great year.”¹⁴

Completing 60 percent of his throws, Peyton had compiled 2,142 yards and 23 touchdowns, and he ran seven more in. Cooper left behind career school records with 125 catches, 26 touchdowns, and over 2,000 yards. That spring, as he finished his last semester playing baseball again for Fitzgerald, the recruiters descended on him. However, there was little doubt he would retrace Archie’s path to Ole Miss, and he made it official in March. By then, however, he had grown nearly despondent about his hand. Just like on the gridiron, he adapted, doing his shooting and dribbling with his left hand. No one knew why. “I kept it a secret,” he remembered, “because I thought if word got out, players for other teams would figure out how to defend me.”¹⁵ Newman won the state roundball title again, but Cooper had a confession for his brother. “My ball’s gone dead. I can’t spin it,” he said, meaning he couldn’t balance the ball on the index finger of that hand, because he couldn’t feel it.

He also told this to Archie, who took him to the Saints’ orthopedic surgeon for an MRI. The diagnosis was a “nerve condition,” specifically of the ulnar nerve that runs through the arm and fingers. This was not an uncommon injury among athletes, and in late spring he underwent routine surgery to relieve pressure on the nerve. Over the summer, before leaving for Oxford, he played in the Louisiana high school all-star game in Baton Rouge. He made his usual array of catches, even though the numbness was still there. Assuming it would eventually subside, and with a world of optimism, before he left New Orleans he scratched out a message in Peyton’s junior yearbook.

“Peyt,” he wrote, “We had our fun times and our serious times (watch out world, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet).”

For Cooper, this was not his father’s Ole Miss. Although the speed limit on campus was still 18 miles an hour, an odd sort of tribute to the man who’d worn that number, the Rebels had lost that old-time religion. Attendance had fallen and the old rituals involving Colonel Reb and the odious Stars and Bars before games at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium were now a wheezing parody as the reality took hold that black athletes were eclipsing Dixie’s white sons. Rebels coach Billy Brewer, a hot-wired guy who had played for John Vaught in the late ’50s, had revived the team when hired in ’83. However, Ole Miss was found to have committed recruiting violations in 1987, then again in ’93, taking them off TV for a year. Nonetheless, Brewer pushed on, filling players’ heads with promises of SEC glory. Arriving in Oxford, Cooper moved into a dorm not far from where his father had lived. He went through the same initiations, his head shaved bald. Brewer, who had planned on redshirting him, instead put him on the squad as a freshman. Archie and Olivia had already checked the schedule, planning to attend as many games as they could, sometimes bringing their luggage to Peyton’s Friday night games so they could get right on the road afterward.

However, it became clear that the surgery had done Cooper little good. Feeling pain and numbness still, he could no longer hide his lame hand from the coaches and trainers. Archie and Peyton drove up for the second Ole Miss game, though all Cooper did for those first two games was ride the bench. Afterward, the team doctor, Ed Field, found Archie. “I don’t feel right about Cooper’s arm . . . we don’t like what we see,” he said, advising Archie to get his boy checked out by an orthopedist and neurosurgeon. The next week, he was at the Baylor Medical Center in Dallas. Archie also flew with him to the Mayo Clinic, a place he knew well. The process was rougher on him than it was on Cooper, who he said “kept things loose.”

It was also rough on Peyton. He was already in his junior year, planning to follow his brother to Ole Miss. A week after the trip to the Mayo Clinic, with Ole Miss on a break, Cooper came home to watch Peyton play. That day, Archie got the call from Baylor. The doctors had concluded, and the ones at Mayo concurred, that Cooper had spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the vertebral canal, which can be hereditary, congenital, or caused by continual trauma, such as on football fields. Indeed, slender as he was, Cooper had been lucky so far; one more hit might have left him paralyzed. The doctors laid it out: not only were his football days over, but he was not to engage in any sports, period, with friends or, in the future, his own children. Archie bit his lip hard when he heard it, knowing that for Cooper this would be something like a death sentence, requiring a complete change in lifestyle. What’s more, living a regular life was not assured; he would need delicate spinal surgery. With all the pounding Archie had taken, it was his oldest son who would suffer the most; if he could have traded places with him, he would have.

The worst of it was having to tell Cooper—and Peyton. He and Olivia put it off all that day, though if they wanted Peyton to keep his bearings for his game, he was on edge waiting for the doctors’ report. Against Fisher High, in a downpour, he went 8 for 32 for 35 yards, Newman losing 8–3. Then, while Cooper hung with friends, Archie and Olivia went to meet Peyton outside the locker room and told him the terrible news. He was shaken, nearly unable to speak. Archie asked if he wanted to be there when they broke it to Cooper. “I can’t,” he said, jaw tight, eyes welling up. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”¹⁶

Archie and Olivia still couldn’t, either. They kept stalling until, alone with him in the house that night, they gave Cooper the news, emphasizing that he could have been crippled already, and he’d be able to live a healthy life. But as they knew, it would be small solace. “Cooper cried when we told him,” Archie said, “but for the most part he was a trouper. It was Peyton we really worried about. He was near depression . . . he didn’t think life was fair at all.” Peyton stayed out late, avoiding coming home. When he finally did, everyone was asleep. Still unable to face Cooper, who would be leaving early Saturday morning for Oxford, he went into his room and wrote a long letter.

What I’d do to have you back again as a receiver I don’t know. But this is all part of growing up—learning to cope with change. I’ll be seeing you plenty, I know, but things will be different. I know other people have gone through losing their older brother or sister before, but I think me and you are different. We’re not average. We’re Coop and Peyt. We always have been and we always will be, thank God.

Your bro and pal, Peyt.¹⁷

As Peyton says now, speaking for the family, “Nothing . . . has ever been as devastating,” with one exception. “I know Dad has always said that he hadn’t had those kind of awful feelings since his father’s suicide.” The family did a lot of crying during those days. And for Peyton, the worst of it was when Cooper, his fate decided, told him, “Peyt, I’ll be playing my dreams through you.”

On September 29, the Ole Miss athletic department released the news that the little-known son of Archie Manning would not play again due to a “congenital problem and a bulging disk in his neck.” Reached for comment by the press, Archie said, “What hurts the most is knowing how happy he’s been the last two months being in the Ole Miss family.” The shock of it was traumatic for the family and for people around town. Peyton had to somehow suck it up and get his head into football, and he did so by wearing his tribute to Cooper on his back—changing his number to 18. He went out and threw for 2,335 yards, 30 touchdowns, and—incredibly—just four interceptions, earning Louisiana High School Player of the Year honors for 1992.

Cooper remained in school, his scholarship honored because of a medical stipulation, and, as if in semi-denial, kept coming to football practice, to hang out and schmooze with the players. During games, he was allowed on the sideline. Then, before a practice, defensive end Jack Muirhead wondered, “What the hell are you doing here? You should be out fishing, you should go play golf or something, go chase some girls.” At that moment, Cooper said, he realized he had no reason to be there, and from then on wasn’t. In June of ’93, he had the spinal operation at a New Orleans hospital, a procedure that stretched three hours, the first of three such operations. Peyton had a baseball game that day and Archie told him to play, but his mind was elsewhere and in the third inning he left, driven by Billy Fitzgerald’s wife to the hospital. There, he joined Archie, Olivia, Peyton, and Eli, who were in a waiting room with a chaplain. “We prayed, we prayed a lot,” Peyton recalled. Seeing Archie ashen and sobbing was especially unnerving. “He doesn’t [cry], not very often, but then he couldn’t seem to stop. It was just so scary.”¹⁸

The surgery done, Cooper awoke, groggy but sentient enough to be alarmed that his whole body was numb, his left leg tingling. As Eli remembered, “The back of his head was shaved, and there was a big, long incision. . . . He needed a wheelchair and then a walker and a cane to get around. I try to picture myself in his situation—and to picture Peyton in his situation—and I’m telling you he dealt with it a thousand times better than either of us would have.” Cooper turned to a difficult rehab. When he went back to Ole Miss for his sophomore year, he had to use a cane to walk, though the worst part was being pitied around campus. Unable to feel his legs at times, he would buckle. Hearing people around him speculate that he was drunk, he didn’t correct them. Being smashed was easier to live with than being infirm.

He would stop feeling sorry for himself, work hard in therapy, and go about his studies. He conditioned himself not to roughhouse with his brothers. If there was one consolation, it was his hope that, just as at Newman, his brother would enter Ole Miss triumphantly as the scion of Archie Manning. But as the Manning family tree grew, at least one of the branches would grow in a different direction.