CHAPTER 14

“A GOLDEN STAIRCASE FROM HEAVEN”

Fate is indeed fickle. In Tennessee’s first season without Peyton Manning, they would go undefeated, beat Florida, take the SEC, and at last win the national title. It was a glorious day for the school’s record holder in every passing category, but there had to be thoughts of why it had happened not with him but his former backup, Tee Martin, Tennessee’s first black quarterback. Martin was deferential. “I like being the guy to follow behind Peyton Manning,” he said, writing his epitaph.¹ Down in the Swamp, they would still gloat about those four wins over Peyton, one fan site in 2012 giddily reminding the world that “Peyton Manning Never Beat Florida.”² But nothing could dent the Manning brand, which now would prop up not just a young man but a corporate entity.

The culture that had bred Archie’s son had undergone serious changes, carving another fleeting alliance between North and South when, in 1992, another Democratic president from Dixie charmed his way into the White House with a thumbs-up sign and the cunning to claim the mantle of “the first black president.” Since Archie’s rookie season two decades before, black players had won the majority of Heisman Trophies. The first African-American on Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide, John Mitchell, became Bryant’s first black assistant coach. But even as almost half the players in the NFL were black by decade’s end, Division I colleges employed just 12 African-Americans as assistant coaches, just four as head coaches. (Sylvester Croom was the first in the SEC, at Mississippi State.)³ Peyton Manning had no material effect on any of this, nor on any other pressing issue, except that on an ethereal level he was a rising leader of men in a corporate complex coated in pseudo-militaristic and pseudo-religious imagery, incidentally, as a proud white Southern son. That meant, independent of anything he said or did, the pride and prejudices of his home turf—and faint hopes of enlightened progress beyond the gridiron—could be channeled through him.

And now, just as he punched his ticket to the pros, another son named Manning was peeking through the window. Barely a ripple in his brother’s eddy of headlines, dramas, and dollar signs, 16-year-old Elisha Nelson Manning, known only as Eli, appeared quietly in 1997 as another prototypical long-legged, lean-as-a-two-by-four teenager blessed with an elastic arm. He made the Newman varsity in 1996, like his brother never having played a down of tackle football but ready to take his place in the family line of succession. Frank Gendusa had taken over as the Newman High coach by then and could barely distinguish him from Peyton. “Same size, same arm strength, same work ethic. Peyton did have better personnel around him, and he was more assertive while Eli was laid-back—we nicknamed him ‘Easy.’ But when he had to make a critical play, he’d get that look in his eye that would scare you.”⁴

He was still insular, keeping to himself more than not. But when puberty hit full force, his isolationist tendencies merged with a rebellious streak. All the Manning brothers were independent in their own way, and Eli owned a wanderlust not found in Cooper’s class clowning or Peyton’s “smartass” tendencies. For Eli, the game had almost nothing to do with Peyton, but rather offered an avenue to expand his cloistered life. When he took control of the Green Wave offense, he and his own circle of buddies would find their way to Bourbon Street for a night of whatever. Archie, occupied as he was with trying to guide Peyton into the pros, didn’t keep a close eye on his youngest boy. Olivia would tell him what Eli was doing during those forays, and he would either yawn or lay down the law to a smirking Eli.

In an example of the latter, Archie and Olivia were supposed to go out of town and leave Eli, who promised to behave, alone in the house, whereupon he threw a wild pool party for half his class—not realizing that his parents had decided not to go and were in their bedroom upstairs. When Archie looked down from his window, the yarn goes, the party animals scattered. When Archie brought it up, the kid snarked about being given the third degree by “the Secret Service.”⁵ Getting away with stuff like this had to make his brothers envy him. But to his parents, his late-blooming manhood was a relief, given his mama’s boy childhood. Besides, he knew how to play the Manning stereotype; he could “yes, sir” and “no, sir” like a pro. He was smart, even if in a devious way. Smart enough to know football was going to take him to where he wanted to go.

Indeed, he was making people at Newman forget Cooper and Peyton. Four times each he would letter in football and basketball, twice in baseball. College recruiters began to make their way to the same field where many of them had seen Peyton star. The Friday night lights that burned bright for his brothers now shone on him. In that bright light, he looked much like Peyton, but he could run a bit faster—4.8 in the 40, a tenth faster than Peyton—and jump higher. Eli hit it hard in the gym and he took direction well. But he was not the demon of film-room preoccupation; more like Cooper in this respect, he just wanted to go out there on game day and cut loose. Where Peyton and Cooper knew enough about the NFL as kids to have their own favorite players who were not named Archie Manning, Eli didn’t bother to follow pro games. “He’s just not overly impressed about things,” said Cooper. “He doesn’t care, one way or the other, about stuff other people care about.”⁶ That sophomore season, he threw five touchdowns in a game against Fisher High. Afterward, Archie told him he was getting ready for “the next level” of big-time college ball.

“Aw, I was just having fun,” his boy said.

Archie never had to shoo Eli away from watching old game film to go out and chase girls. All Eli ever said about those grainy old films, or perusing his dad’s stats, was, with future irony, “Geez, Dad, you threw a lot of interceptions, a lot of interceptions.” Rather than bubblegum cards, he collected Metallica and Nirvana tapes. On Super Bowl Sundays or during a big college game—even Peyton’s—he’d get bored and put on headphones and blast “Lithium” or “Wherever I May Roam,” or play Grand Theft Auto on the GameCube. One day he was a metalhead, the next a straight arrow and straight-A student. Probably, he didn’t know what he was. Most of all, says Gendusa, “It didn’t seem to me that he was trying to outdo what Peyton had, or that he resented being in his shadow.” Nor, for that matter, his father. Eli was an ’80s kid; by that time, Archie’s day was over. Archie tried to be there for every game, but the next morning he’d be on his way to Peyton’s games, leaving Eli to his own routines, which were less about white privilege than selfish conceits. In his senior yearbook, he chose as the quote under his photo not a biblical or historical citation, but a facetious one from the Saturday Night Live “Deep Thoughts” segment that went, “Broken promises don’t upset me. I just think, why did they believe me?”⁷—a shape-shifting of moral responsibility and reversing of blame that perfectly codified Generation X’s amorality and cynicism.

The first time his name made the papers—beyond the local high school scores—during that junior season was in a small AP item that noted, “With Tennessee idle this weekend, quarterback Peyton Manning had a chance to come back home and cheer his kid brother and alma mater to victory. Wearing a green Newman High School baseball cap and a big button with brother Eli Manning’s picture on it, Peyton watched Eli throw for 341 yards and two touchdowns to beat St. Bernard 45–14 Friday night.”⁸ Already six foot four and a sinewy 190 pounds, he was a monster that night. In the first half alone, he hit 13 of 18 passes for 257 yards, one a nine-yard touchdown to tailback Justin Seale. He then lofted a 51-yard TD pass in the third quarter to receiver Devin Wakeman, finishing 16 of 25. Gendusa, as Tony Reginelli had done with Peyton, let him throw freely and he went 139 of 245 for 2,340 yards, with 24 touchdowns and seven interceptions as a sophomore—beating Peyton’s first year at Newman in all but completion percentage. Freed up even more as a junior, he went 142 of 235 for 2,547 yards—again, more yardage than Peyton—with 23 TDs and nine INTs.

Because Eli seemed not to have to turn his head from side to side while reading the defense at the line, while still seeing the entire field, Gendusa deduced that he had a “slow” eye, the left one, which moved a minuscule one degree behind the right. Gendusa recalled the time when “Eli looked like he’d be sacked; this guy swung him around and [Eli] threw a little sidearm pass to the running back. I don’t know how, sometimes, they see people. It’s an uncanny knack good quarterbacks have, [and] he has it.”⁹

Archie was pleased with Eli’s progress. During the week, he sometimes came to shoot the breeze with the coach. “With Archie, he doesn’t say anything unless you ask him,” said Gendusa. “I asked him one time how we could get it to the tight end more. He showed me a couple things they did back in the day and we tried some stuff, but it was really a matter of Eli getting more confident. And Archie just wanted to be there for him. That was his favorite place, sitting in the bleachers at our stadium. One of our assistant coaches’ father and his brothers were Ole Miss alumni from Archie’s days there. They knew him, how much his dad’s suicide hurt him. It didn’t matter what the boys did. If he could watch Cooper’s business meetings, I’m sure he would.”

Tom Condon and Frank Crosthwait, springing into action after the draft, hit a brick wall with the Colts. Naïvely, Peyton thought the contract would be dispensed with quickly. Instead, just as with Archie in his time, negotiations stretched on. This was standard procedure in football, but Peyton was drafted just as the NFL’s new TV contract increased the salary cap by nearly $13 million, to $54.4 million, and all players were demanding higher contracts, with even linemen upped to an average of $4 million a year, receivers $3 million. Peyton was miffed when he went to the Colts’ spring camp, still unsigned. When he put on his jersey, it was with a new number—18, as if he had at last accepted the insignia worn by his heroic, if failed, father and then, abortively, by Cooper.

Even before he threw a pro pass, he was being mass-marketed. Condon had set up a corporation for him, and he gave motivational speeches—which he downplayed as “basically, 20 minutes’ worth of ways to say, ‘Work hard.’”¹⁰ They also began a charitable foundation called PeyBack, its charter to aid underprivileged youth. He unveiled a website, PeytonManning.com, at a time when few athletes believed this was necessary. Condon signed him to an endorsement deal with Adidas. He made appearances with country singer Kenny Chesney, singing—to be generous—a duet they recorded on a CD called NFL Country, while slinging an unplugged guitar he had no idea how to play. His image was as calculated as Joe Namath’s, his polar opposite. He had, after all, studied communications, and it was no accident that he spoke in measured, humbled tones, at least for public consumption. Of course, no fans were allowed to see the Manning who had sat on Jamie Whited’s head. Even in private, he had learned to keep the heat off of himself. As a friend of his said, “He might tell you to do something stupid, but he’s not going to be the one to get nailed for it.” The image he laid down demanded that he say things like “I’ve tried to keep myself out of bad situations, and if that means I’m a Goody Two-Shoes, so be it.”¹¹

The Colts, who in an earlier life rode Johnny Unitas’s arm into the modern age of pro football, and Earl Morrall’s to their last title in 1970, had not featured a prominent quarterback since the last years in Baltimore, when Bert Jones was the league MVP in ’76. The resulting lack of success, and dwindling crowds, sent Bob Irsay to Indianapolis, where poor Jeff George spent five seasons in the early ’90s scraping himself off the turf. While Jim Harbaugh quarterbacked them to the playoffs twice, and to the AFC title game in ’95—blessed with a receiver like Marvin Harrison, the team’s first-round pick out of Syracuse in ’94—the ream relapsed the next year to 3–13, and that was the seed that developed into Peyton Manning.

Based just on what he saw of him in the spring workouts, Jim Mora was sold. “You’re my starting quarterback, no matter what,” he told him.¹² That put immediate pressure on Peyton. Mora, an ex-Marine, was very hard on all the players.¹³ At 61, gaunt and crazy-eyed, the salt-and-pepper-haired former NFL tight end began his coaching career in the mid-’80s in the USFL, winning two titles in that upstart league’s fleeting three-year existence. Mora then turned the Saints around, taking them to their first playoff appearance in ’87. But he became legendary mainly for some all-time sports meltdowns, scolding sportswriters, calling fans “disgusting” and “shameful.” He made the playoffs four times with the Saints, winning the team’s first division title but not a single playoff game, finally quitting midway through the ’96 season after a profanity-filled tirade.

Mora did have sound ideas, and his players appreciated that he could foam at the mouth in defending them. The rub for Manning was that he was more of a ground-and-pound coach, and he brought with him from the Saints Tom Moore, who had coached in the NFL for two decades, as offensive coordinator. Bruce Arians, his quarterbacks coach, had overseen a big running game under head coach Mike DuBose at Alabama before that program was wrecked by recruiting violations. Peyton recalled hearing that Arians wasn’t a passing coach, which he later said was “unfair” and “all wrong. It just goes to show what people think they know when they don’t.”¹⁴

The new Colts regime was committed to tailoring the team to Manning, drafting fleet receivers like Washington’s Jerome Pathon and Florida State’s E. G. Green. They already had a headliner in running back Marshall Faulk, who in his first four seasons cleared 1,000 yards thrice and had added value as a receiver. And best of all, there was Harrison, a sphinx of a man who did all his talking with his hands and feet. Slender and shifty, Harrison was an All-America running down Donovan McNabb’s passes at Syracuse. Terribly shy but with a hunger for practicing the same minutely precise pass routes, he was clearly the kind of player Peyton longed for. At the minicamp, the veterans were impressed with Manning’s command, his grasp of the system. Faulk raved, “He’s picking up the offense so quickly. He’s getting his reads, making quick decisions. He’s not back there indecisive. . . . I’m expecting a lot from him.”¹⁵

He had a lot to learn. The Rubik’s Cube of plays, checkoffs at the line based on formations and keys, and down-and-distance probabilities in a typical NFL playbook made the Vol system seem like a Sesame Street lesson. Green, who held the Florida record with 29 touchdowns, said, “I’m really struggling with the plays. If I know what route to run, it’s great. But I’m confused and I have to adjust to it.”¹⁶ And Peyton, appearances to the contrary, confessed, “My head is kind of swirling. I’m thinking about a whole lot of things. I probably am getting a little too impatient, trying to get my reads too fast. I didn’t call the plays right a couple of times. I know I can do better.”

When the Colts opened training camp in July, Manning still was unsigned, the team’s offer $10 million less than Condon and Crosthwait were willing to accept. As uncomfortable as Peyton was that he was one of those guys he’d hated when he was a kid reading about player holdouts, Crosthwait said Peyton actually wanted to take the deal—prompting Archie to scold him, saying the first deal he signed would determine the value of all future ones.¹⁷ That was the cold reality of sports capitalism. Nor were rookie holdouts anything new. In 1986, Marvin Demoff held out Rod Woodson, the Steelers’ first-round pick, for 95 days, during which Woodson ran in track meets in Europe. In the end, he signed a four-year, $1.98 million contract, at the time the largest rookie deal in the team’s history.

What’s more, Ryan Leaf was also a holdout, as was the No. 3 pick, Florida State defensive end Andre Wadsworth, taken by the Arizona Cardinals. Unlike Manning, the latter two were leaving a trail of hard feelings with their teams, especially Leaf, who had flown to Las Vegas on Alex Spanos’s private jet and partied into the night. During the negotiations, he said things like “I didn’t leave college early so I could sit on the bench for a year.” He missed the first six days of camp and was fined $10,000 for each day he was out. Then Steinberg raked in a deal for $31.25 million over five years with an $11.25 million signing bonus. The bonus and his $6.25 million salary set rookie records. When camp opened without Manning, Robin Miller, in the Indianapolis Star, reflected the front office’s spin that Manning was at fault, since the team had “gone out of its way to promote a new spirit and a fresh start when its central character isn’t on the payroll.”¹⁸ They had also made promotional deals based on him being there, one of them with Coca-Cola. Sticking up for the young QB, Joe Montana blamed the team, saying, “They’ve already put Peyton in a tough situation by making him the starter, so don’t compound the problem and cost him valuable time” by pinching pennies.¹⁹

On Tuesday, July 28, after four days, they shook on the contract—six years, $38 million in base salary, an $8.4 million signing bonus (spread out over three years to lessen the tax burden), with incentive bonuses that could boost the total to $48 million. That worked out to 96 times Archie’s then-record rookie deal, and it gave him bragging rights over Leaf by a slight margin, as well as the same salary as three-time MVP Brett Favre. Naturally, Peyton had a deft one-liner. “People ask me what I plan to do with my money. I plan to earn it,” he said in a statement, passing up a press conference to hurry to camp at Anderson University in eastern Indiana.²⁰ Numbers like those would go a long way in establishing the new football order, and Condon would be the most rewarded. Manning “changed the landscape for me. I knew after that everything would be different.”²¹ By 2006, he would be named by Sporting News as the most powerful agent in sports; today, his client list of NFL players and coaches is arm-length, including Drew Brees, Matt Ryan, Tony Romo, Matthew Stafford, Sam Bradford . . . and Eli Manning.

Peyton arrived right on time. The top echelon of NFL quarterbacks was thinning out. John Elway was 38 and facing his final season—eventually retiring as MVP of the Super Bowl. A year later would be it for Steve Young and Dan Marino; two years later, Troy Aikman. Warren Moon was a 42-year-old backup. Favre, who won a Super Bowl in ’96 having beaten a serious addiction to painkillers, was pushing 30, and while he would be given a 10-year, $100 million contract extension in 2001 and amass records, he would age fast and hard. Tom Brady, meanwhile, was a junior at Michigan, still battling Drew Henson for the starting job, two years from being a ho-hum sixth-round pick by the Patriots. The leftover QB crowd was a mélange of good but not great (Drew Bledsoe, Vinny Testaverde) and just not great (Scott Mitchell, Tony Banks, Todd Collins, Gus Frerotte, Elvis Grbac). It seemed like the field was being cleared for the next really great one, and the question remained: Manning or Leaf? A closer look would have revealed the answer immediately. While Leaf partied, Manning was launching a brand. When Leaf ended his holdout, he had ballooned to 260 flabby pounds and was grousing about the workload. Peyton was lean and hungry, burying his nose in homework. And the buzz around Colts was instant; as the Star put it, “Manning-Mania Hits Colts’ Camp” and “Fans Flock for Brush with $48 Million Man.”

Not that there weren’t vipers lying in wait. During Peyton’s holdout, he, Archie, and Olivia had dinner in New Orleans at Mosca’s Restaurant, where Peyton was seen chugging beer. The next day in the paper, there was a giddy blurb about how, while his team labored in the heat, their first pick was knocking back cold ones. When he made his entry at camp, the Star’s Bill Benner wrote with a smirk, “Let the record show that Manning officially joined his teammates at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, arriving not in a Brinks truck, a silver Rolls or even on a golden staircase from heaven.”²² Despite trying to tone down some natural instincts, Peyton couldn’t hide his displeasure with pro-style showboating and laziness in practices, which he said was “worthy of an ass-chewing.” Media observers referred to his “throwback brashness,” not all of it sitting well. When he made known another of his pet peeves—how players from both sides fraternized after games on the turf they’d fought over, saying, “Just get the hell off the field. You just lost; what are you smiling about?”—the veterans laughed, knowing he would be expected to be the first one out there to congratulate or be congratulated by the opposing quarterback.²³

Student of the game that he was, he knew the tides of history he was challenging; rookie quarterbacks were almost always duds, stuck as they were on bad teams. Of the 10 QBs among the top picks in the regular or supplemental draft during the 1990s, only Bledsoe had made the Pro Bowl. The eldest, Jeff George, had won neither a playoff game nor made All-Pro. But Manning seemed to stand apart from that sorry litany.

Getting into the role of a savior, he would work the rope line after practices, signing autographs, sweating in the sun. He fulfilled constant requests for interviews. On the field, he quickly adapted to Moore and Arians’s mid-to-deep passing game, meshing with jumbo tight ends Ken Dilger and Marcus Pollard over the middle, something he’d rarely done with his tight ends at UT, and Harrison, a ticking time bomb on long throws. But the offensive line was patchwork, and he tried hard to forge a symbiosis by insisting that his locker be in the same block as theirs. He wasn’t reluctant to admit, “I’ve put a lot of thought into being a leader.”²⁴

The preseason games offered the cynics more opportunity to prick him. Against the Seahawks in Seattle, his first pass soared into the hands of Marvin Harrison for a 48-yard touchdown. But after three more sloppy series—it didn’t help that the telemetry system in his helmet carrying the plays from Moore upstairs shorted out—yielded a fumble and an interception and he came out trailing 24–7, the angle of the game story was, as one reported, “Manning looked like an ordinary NFL rookie,” outshone by middling Seahawk QB Jon Kitna.²⁵ Moreover, Leaf did better in his debut, prompting the headline “Early QB Edge to Leaf,” with the observation that “Manning looked more like a backup than the No. 1 draft pick,” while Leaf “looked like he’s ready to step right in.”²⁶ That apparently went right to Leaf’s head. He began dissing Manning openly, mocking “Perfect Peyton” and boasting that he was “more marketable than the Golden Boy on the endorsement end of things; I got personality.”²⁷

Originally, Mora thought rooming Manning with veteran quarterback Bill Musgrave would aid his education, but then he cut Musgrave, realizing that the best thing for Peyton was just to let him alone with his film and playbook. Manning moved into a room at the preppy Indianapolis Athletic Club on North Meridian Street, which he rarely left. When he did, he would flit over to the posh St. Elmo Steak House on South Illinois Street, a few blocks from the RCA Dome, and wolf down shrimp cocktails saturated with the house-special horseradish, and then talk with Archie on the phone, as he did each night. When Musgrave left, to be hired as the Carolina Panthers’ quarterbacks coach, it was with the impression that Peyton was a rare superstar in waiting, in that “he comes across as being very mortal.”²⁸ Polian was cautious about presenting him as a savior. The team hung murals outside the Dome pimping Faulk and defensive back Jason Belser, not Peyton. There was some grumbling when Peyton—who, like all quarterbacks, was not to be hit during practice—pushed for and got more full-contact scrimmage time for the offense, meaning contact for everyone else.²⁹

More serious rumblings were coming from San Diego, where Leaf’s bluster ate at his teammates—one of whom, All-Pro linebacker Junior Seau, laid Leaf out during a scrimmage. One writer began a column by calling Leaf “the punk.”³⁰ As if on cue, the Colts’ third preseason game was against the Chargers, a match that filled the RCA Dome. Not that it mattered, but both were awful, though Leaf could massage his ego when the Chargers won 33–3, inspiring headlines like “Leaf Outshines Manning.” Manning’s final prep, against the Lions, was tantalizing; he threw two long touchdowns to Harrison.

Now the games were for real. One player from Archie’s era remained in the NFL: 36-year-old journeyman quarterback Steve Bono. Meeting Peyton before a game, the Rams quarterback, like many with long memories, said, “Man, this makes me feel old.”³¹ Yet for Archie—who, with Eli, Olivia, and her parents, came to Indianapolis for the season opener against the Miami Dolphins—it must have seemed like only yesterday that he had thrown passes from the veranda to the son whose debut was the biggest story in the NFL.

The late Sunday game, aired on national television, was a stern test. Jimmy Johnson, in his third season as the Dolphins’ coach, had built a defense that would give up the fewest points in the league that year, and he smugly warned the kid he was in the big leagues now. Sold out for weeks, the game drew 60,587, the first opening-day sellout at the RCA Dome since 1989. Bettors, believing the hype, made the Colts only a three-point underdog. The Star headline on that morning read, “Colts Ready for New Journey.” The fans, many of whom lined the downtown streets the day before for a parade for the team, were in full throat as the offense was introduced and the savior jogged out of the tunnel across the field. After the kickoff, the excitement crackling, he stuck his hands under center Jay Leeuwenburg, took the snap, dropped back three steps, and floated a soft pass to Faulk for a 15-yard gain. The fans had a shared thought: Super Bowl, here we come.

But it was a tease. The Dolphins fed Peyton a blizzard of defensive looks and blitzes. And while he hung in, the besieged offensive line crumbled, leaving him sacked four times and hurrying way too many passes, three of which were intercepted—all of which, it was reported, led Archie to “hang his head.” The ugliest, from his own three with 1:32 left, was forced over the middle to Harrison, but was picked and run back for a touchdown. Not until the Colts were down 24–9 did he complete a drive, finding Harrison with a six-yard touchdown pass to close it out at 24–15. The stats weren’t bad—21 of 37 for 302 yards—leading one Star writer to insist Manning was “impressive” and showed “considerable progress.”³² But even though Marino was a modest 13 of 24 for 135 yards, the consensus was that the veteran and future Hall of Famer had given him a lesson.

Sports Illustrated’s Marty Burns wrote sympathetically of Peyton leaving the field, his jersey soaked with sweat and his eyes moist with tears: “[He] didn’t seem to hear the cheers raining down on him from the stands, and he barely noticed when Colts coach Jim Mora gently patted him on the back as they walked together to the locker room. . . . After he had changed out of his uniform and into a pair of brown slacks and a white golf shirt, he met his father outside the Colts’ locker room. Peyton wore a look of disappointment on his face, and it remained there even as Archie put an arm around his shoulder and they walked out of the building together.”³³

Burns noted accurately that he had “displayed poise, confidence and a passing touch seldom seen in a young quarterback.” Marino agreed, saying, “He’s going to be a good quarterback for a long time. He showed a lot of guts. He hung in there against a lot of pass rush in tough situations.” And yet, Peyton looked back at the game with a wince. “I didn’t realize how out of sync I was,” he said. “Very seldom do I make a throw where the ball comes off my hand and I immediately think, ‘Interception!’ Most of the time I feel like I’ve made a good decision, and when something bad happens, it happens. But everything I did . . . was too fast. My footwork, my passing, even my demeanor.”³⁴

His rookie season was going to be a trial. The second game, against the Patriots in Foxborough, was a 29–6 defeat, with Peyton going 21 of 33 for only 188 yards, a late touchdown pass to Torrance Small, three more picks, and a fumble. Said Pats safety Willie Clay, “He’s a rookie quarterback, and that’s exactly how he played.” The press was snarky—“If Peyton Manning wants to learn from his mistakes, he has plenty of material to cover,” wrote one reporter.³⁵ Another posited that, in a league where quarterbacks were “falling like flies,” Manning was Exhibit A in terms of “youngsters [being] thrown in too early and tak[ing] a beating,”³⁶ exactly what had been written about Archie.

Next came a 44–6 crushing by the Jets, which reportedly left Polian “furious,” mainly at his sievelike defense.³⁷ Then there was a sentimental journey to play the Saints in New Orleans, his family and dozens of relatives in the stands. He seemed poised for his first win as a pro, a flare pass to Faulk breaking open for a 78-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter, putting the Colts up 13–6. But then Danny Wuerffel, again getting the best of him, threw a touchdown with the clock running out to tie it, and the Saints won in overtime with a field goal. The pattern was holding, as Peyton’s 309 passing yards were nullified by three interceptions. Then, in a harbinger of things to come for both men, in the first official clash with Ryan Leaf, again in the Dome, he got some satisfaction. Leaf had played marginally better than him in the early weeks, but Peyton’s 19-yard touchdown toss to Faulk set the mood. Neither he nor Leaf was impressive, but in a field goal–dominated affair, the Colts prevailed 17–12.

The season played out with more nice numbers but precious few victories, prompting the headline “Manning Growing, but, Oh, the Pain of Learning on Job.”³⁸ The offensive line did begin to congeal along with him, the sacks trailing off—by season’s end, he had gone down only 22 times—and he was becoming more nimble, dancing away from pressure. Accordingly, games became, well, games. There were close losses, one a 34–31 squeaker against the haughty 49ers in San Francisco, lost on a field goal with eight seconds left, and the Jets disaster was avenged when they met again. Down 23–10 after the Jets’ Aaron Glenn returned a missed field goal 104 yards, Peyton hit Harrison with a 38-yard touchdown, then, with 30 seconds to go, Marcus Pollard from the 14 to eke it out, 24–23. However, the Buffalo Bills demolished them 34–11, followed by two more close defeats to the Ravens (despite 357 yards by Manning) and the Super Bowl–bound Falcons. In a 39–26 win over the Bengals, he went 17 of 26 for 210 yards and three touchdowns, breaking the NFL rookie record for TD passes—held for decades by none other than Chuckin’ Charlie Conerly, an honor Peyton called “special.” The season closed with two more close defeats, the last 27–19 to the Carolina Panthers after the Colts lost a double-digit lead for the fifth time over the season.

For all the excitement, hype, hyperbole, and money, the Colts’ season ended as it had the year before: 3–13. The only quarterback in the league to take all of his team’s snaps, Manning’s numbers were nifty. He led the NFL in attempts, with 575, was second to Favre with 326 completions, third with 3,739 yards (the first Colts quarterback with 3,000 yards since Bert Jones in ’81), fifth with 26 touchdowns—but first with 28 interceptions, his passer rating a tepid 71.2. On the plus side, almost every rookie passing record was now his, though all but the TDs (tied by Russell Wilson in 2012) would be bettered in the future by other rookies. Harrison, who missed the last four games with a shoulder injury, and Small each had seven receiving touchdowns. Mora, who deemed his quarterback’s performance “pretty incredible,” was smugger than a 3–13 coach had a right to be. But he had seen the future.