CHAPTER 16

ELI’S COMING

Upon Eli’s arrival at Ole Miss in the spring of 1999, retracing steps Archie had taken three decades before, the sacred rites of Saturday afternoons in Colonel Reb country were less racially tinged but still pungent. The pregame walk through the Grove, down paths named for Archie Manning, was still lined with tailgaters and magnolias, and the marching bands inside Vaught-Hemingway Stadium played the same old songs. But the fact that, a year later, a Republican governor from Texas would run for the presidency as a “compassionate conservative” was a telltale sign that it was no longer quaint to cherish Jim Crow. At Ole Miss, the rebel flag and Colonel Reb himself were banned from the pregame pageantry after a student body vote in 1997. The same year, the school—by now attended by students from 73 countries and all 50 states, 12½ percent of them black¹—was granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. No one had to defend that the biggest football and basketball recruits were black men from points far beyond the state.

Young Southern white men like Eli had no investment in representing that heritage, more into white rap than white nationalism. To them, the South was about family, not historical grievances with the North. Archie himself had engendered a subtle change in that culture; Ole Miss, a history professor at the school said, was “a mean and ugly place and then Archie came along. He was Mississippi’s own Tom Sawyer and he gave us all something to cheer.”² Now Eli would lengthen the delayed family chain at Ole Miss, on his back the same number, 10, that Cooper had worn for those precious weeks before fate did him dirt. Eli launched himself into his marketing studies, making the Chancellor’s Honor Roll and the Dean’s Honor Roll twice each, and the SEC Academic Honor Roll every year. As for football, for now it receded as, to Archie’s relief, he wore the red shirt. David Cutcliffe’s quarterback, Romaro Miller, was important to the school, a black man leading onto the field a team called the Rebels. In ’99, he would throw for 2,201 yards and 16 touchdowns, taking Ole Miss to an 8–4 record, finishing with a win over Oklahoma in the Independence Bowl. Not much was heard by or about the Manning boy, though just being who he was might land him in a headline somewhere, even if not the kind he was supposed to make.

On January 31, 2000, tanked up on beer, he stumbled out of his dorm and began puking on the street and causing a disturbance. Cops were called, took him in, and charged him with public intoxication. No real punishment was deemed necessary beyond the embarrassment he caused himself and his family when headlines like “QB Manning Arrested” began hitting the papers that week. Worse, someone took a picture of him in the dorm before the puking, cuddled with a blonde coed, bottle in his hand, eyes rolling, mouth in a salivating half grin. It made its way onto the internet, where it has proliferated since.³ Humiliated, he called Archie with a tearful apology. Cutcliffe summoned him to his office. “I asked him if he really wanted to be a big-time quarterback, or was he just here to play a little football, have a good time and get through,” Cutcliffe said. “And I told him to think about it before he answered.”⁴

He did buckle down, studied film, hit the weight room, and waited his turn without further incident as the Rebels began their ’99 camp, Eli’s first as an active player. Cutcliffe watched him look more and more like Peyton, making all the right throws, the right decisions in practice. In one intrasquad scrimmage, he beat Miller and the first team, driving his side 70 yards to a late victory. And that first team was loaded. Senior fullback Deuce McAllister rumbled for over 700 yards rushing and 14 touchdowns that season, breaking every Ole Miss rushing record. But the Rebels were in and out. Ranked in the top 20 in the preseason polls, they finished at 7–4. Eli got into six games, mostly mopping up, completing 16 of 33 passes for 170 yards. In the finale, the Music City Bowl, they lost to West Virginia 49–16. Late in the game, he grabbed his mop again. But this time he turned heads, throwing three touchdowns, making a 49–38 loss into a minor headline for him and providing a taste of what would begin in earnest the next season, as he stood in the shoes of Archie Who.

In the heartland, Peyton faced the millennium hoping his time had come as a title winner. The Colts entered the 2000 season as favorites in the AFC East. However, after 13 games they were no better than 7–6. They did win their last three, over the Bills, Dolphins, and Vikings, to just scrape into the playoffs as a wild card. It was Peyton who got them there. He passed for a league-high 4,413 yards and 357 completions, sharing the lead with 33 touchdowns, and had just 15 interceptions, his passer rating 94.7. James, an invaluable asset, led the league with 1,709 yards rushing, with 13 touchdowns, and would rack up more yards in his first two seasons than anyone ever had except Eric Dickerson. But Marshall Faulk won the Offensive MVP award, leading Sports Illustrated to say James was “getting hustled,” as some sort of residual effect of his holdout, something that had never affected Manning.⁵ The Big Three—Manning, James, Harrison—were All-Pro selections.

In the playoff game, the Dolphins relied on the run, amassing 258 yards on the ground. That let them control the clock and keep Manning off the field, limiting him to 194 yards, though he did hit Jerome Pathon with a 17-yard touchdown pass to go up 14–0 in the third quarter, and the Colts led 17–10 with under five minutes left. But the defense failed to stop Jay Fiedler, and Miami came back to send the game to overtime. Then Lamar Smith, who gained 209 yards that day—second most in playoff history—took a handoff on the Colts 17, broke free, and carried defensive back Jeff Burris on his back like a mule as he crossed the goal line. With cause, Peyton said afterward, “Everybody is just frustrated,” blaming “missed opportunities.”

Hours later, word came that Jane Nelson “Sis” Manning had died quietly at 81 in the same house where she had raised Archie and where she kept his room tidy and lined with his old trophies. Days before, as if knowing the end was near, she had written a letter to a friend in which the lifelong resident of the town said, “Drew has been good to me,” and that she had spent “the happiest part of my life here.”⁶ Archie and his boys and the rest of her surviving family came home to lay her to rest in Drew Cemetery, next to Buddy, where a grave had been saved for her. Both their names were engraved on the same shale blue headstone marking the plot. Pam Manning, who had gotten a degree from Mississippi State, soon moved with her husband to Oxford, where she could watch Eli channel her father. The family would assemble again a few months later when Peyton finally asked Ashley Thompson to marry him. They did, on March 27, 2001, in New Orleans, after which he bought an abandoned home to renovate on a large plot of land in Indianapolis, and another in the Garden District, though she still did business in Knoxville. They were a neomodern professional couple, the woman not giving up her career for a husband. A sure sign that the South, as Buddy, Sis, and Archie knew it, would not rise again. And good riddance.

Another sign was that, at Ole Miss, a black quarterback had broken almost all of Archie’s records, throwing for 6,311 yards and 43 touchdowns. Now, with Romaro Miller gone to the pros, Eli Manning moved to the fore, amid headlines like “Another Manning Era Begins at Ole Miss.”⁷ Little used as he was as a freshman, he nonetheless was already a BMOC. He was given new digs off campus in the social and cultural hub of Oxford, the South Lamar Avenue town square, marked by the magnificent pillars and snow-white walls of the Lafayette County Courthouse, which was razed by the Union army, then resurrected and declared a historic monument in 1977, its clock tower looming over a statue of an unknown rebel soldier. Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury in an office in the square, a title that might be an epitaph of the Manning family.

Not that Eli had produced much of either yet, or believed he was about to. Coming out of high school, he recalled, “I was unsure of myself. . . . I had doubts because of all the things that Peyton had accomplished. I didn’t think I was as good as him.”⁸ Being blindly named to the 2001 preseason All-SEC team meant little. It did help that his first game as the new Rebel rouser was, fortuitously, against a cream puff, Murray State, at home, all the pregame trappings surrounding him. Cutcliffe had made it easier for him, with a swarming defense and returning tailback Joe Gunn. He also put on the team Chris Collins, a champion sprinter who would now be catching Eli’s passes—including his first touchdown, of 17 yards, with 5:57 to go in the first quarter. His second also went to Collins, for 21 yards. Eli went on to set a school record, completing 18 passes in a row. After three quarters, his mop-up man came in for a final score of 49–14.

Eli’s numbers made one gulp: 20 of 23 passes complete, 271 yards, five touchdowns. Archie could relate, but to see this in his boy’s first start must have been something almost psychedelic. People came away from Vaught-Hemingway humming Eli’s name. And Cutcliffe, who had been cautiously saying that Eli and Peyton’s paths would be “very different,” had instead seen their paths merge. Of course, Eli had lots more to prove. The next game was his SEC debut as a starter, against Auburn on the road. He was harassed and hurried; 11 times he threw a pass out of bounds or in the dirt, another to the other team. By halftime he had hit on just 6 of 10 for 39 yards, never moving beyond his own 42-yard line. “The crowd noise made it hard to communicate with my receivers at first,” he said later, “and the Auburn defense was sitting on all of our curls.” After that, he got on track, but it ended 27–21, Auburn. Archie, who was there, was philosophical. “Eli got a little banged up today,” he said. “Last week was rosy, this week wasn’t. You learn from both.”

All of which became speck-of-dust insignificant three days later—September 11, 2001—when the Twin Towers came down and lay in smoking ruin. In the aftermath of those terrible hours, no one would feel like playing games that week, and the NCAA, like the NFL and Major League Baseball, postponed its next round of games, one of which would have pitted Ole Miss against Vanderbilt. During that week of grief and mourning, and the next, with the Rebels on a bye, the Mannings spoke for hours on the phone to each other, dealing with the common feeling of helplessness by retrenching to the comfort of family. When Eli was back on the field, he tamed the Kentucky Wildcats 42–31, then pulled off another two-TD performance in a 35–17 blowout of Arkansas State. These were walkovers, but not the next, against Alabama, whom the Rebels hadn’t beaten since 1988. Stymied most of the game, down 24–14 in the fourth quarter, Eli directed a long drive capped when Charles Stackhouse ran it in. Then, from the Tide 38, with under two minutes left, he moved to the three with 46 seconds left. He rolled out, drew defenders toward him, spotted Gunn open in the end zone, and tossed the winning score.

His spectacular game, 325 yards and eight completions to Collins for 110 yards, moved the New York Times’s Joe Drape to breathless prose: “From the juke joints of the Delta to the feed stores of northern Mississippi, he is called Archie’s boy, a son of one of sports’ most famous Sons of the South. In Tuscaloosa, Ala., in Knoxville, Tenn., and in every other castle in the Southeastern Conference football kingdom, he is Peyton’s brother. . . . Last Saturday, Eli Manning followed his father into Ole Miss lore [and] looked a lot like his older brother Peyton . . . coolly slinging passes over and between Crimson Tide defenders on that final drive. [He then] hugged his parents, did not want to talk much about the game and attended to his friends and the guests of his parents. Later, he put on a pair of boots and a cowboy hat to attend a country western concert.”⁹

After two more blowouts, against Middle Tennessee State and LSU, the Rebels were a Cinderella at 6–1. Next came 4–3 Arkansas, at home. A tight contest, it was tied at 17 in the fourth quarter. The Razorbacks went up by a touchdown, then Eli took the Rebels 72 yards, hitting Jason Armstead from the three with 4:50 left to tie it. The game went into overtime . . . and then some. It was still tied after one OT, then another, and still another. After the third OT, NCAA rules prohibited any single-point touchdown conversions, and neither team could score the required two points after six straight touchdowns, whereupon the game went to a sixth OT. No one dared leave what had become a national curiosity, with people all across the country tuning in to the game on ESPN.

Wearily, the players trudged out again, and Eli threw touchdown number five, 12 yards to Doug Zeigler. This time, the Rebels made the two-pointer to go up 50–42. But the ’Backs scored from the two and they too made the two-pointer—sending it to OT No. 7, which was unprecedented. Now Arkansas scored first. Down to another last shot to tie and move on to perhaps an eighth overtime, Eli guided the Rebels on a nine-play drive and tossed a three-yard pass to Armstead. Needing to make the two-pointer, he floated one out to Ziegler, but the ’Backs pulled him down on the two to end the wild, near five-hour marathon at 10:20 p.m. The stats of the 58–56 spectacle were appropriately outrageous. With a 106–92 edge in plays, Arkansas ran 80 times for 271 yards, two players going over 100. Eli went 27 of 42 for 312 yards, six touchdowns, and zero interceptions. Amazingly, there were only eight penalties, and the teams made all five fourth-down conversion plays.

Eli won more praise in defeat, something Archie—who watched the agonizing game, seeing his son beat his old Ole Miss single-game touchdown record—could surely relate to. Normally, he had no such agita at Eli’s games. “Archie told me that he doesn’t get nervous when Eli is quarterback because Eli is so relaxed,” said a family friend, Pat Browne Jr., a champion blind golfer. “Peyton is very intense and Archie feels that.”¹⁰ But he and Eli knew the defeat was costly. The next match was against No. 23 Georgia, and the Rebels were trampled, 35–15. Then came Mississippi State and a 36–28 loss. The finale, a 38–27 win over Vanderbilt, only made the 7–4 season a touch more respectable. For Eli, however, there was no real downside. In his first year as a starter, he had completed 63.5 percent, racked up 2,948 yards, and thrown for 31 touchdowns with only nine picks, good for a 144.8 rating. Not enough to push him past guys like David Carr, Rex Grossman, Luke McCown, and Heisman winner Eric Crouch, but well into the big boy quarterback club.

Up in Indianapolis, meanwhile, the 2001 season was again frustrating for the older Manning sibling, and signs of strain were beginning to show. Jim Mora, now 66 with a postseason record of 0–6, had lost his rosy glow. He’d gotten snappish about Manning ever since he was late for a team meeting the year before, when a TV interview ran long. Once again, Peyton found himself “having words,” as he recalled it, with a coach, whom he blamed for scheduling the practice at the last minute.

“Dammit, Coach,” he yelled, “if we’re gonna play in big games around here, I think we should go about it without changing everything.”¹¹

But if there was an increasing tension between them, it was overshadowed by Edgerrin James’s more overt problems with the team. When spring camp began, James, feeling underappreciated, was a noshow; then, in the summer, he feuded with Mora about the need to even come to practices. Six games into the season, leading the league in rushing, he tore up his knee and was done for the year. By then, the season was pretty much done as well. Arians had left to become offensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns, and Peyton, who on Arians’s advice took to wearing a knee brace for protection, clearly missed him. The Colts started unevenly—one of their early games, against the Patriots on September 30, marked the first start of Tom Brady’s career, after Drew Bledsoe had gone down the previous week. Before this game, Peyton encountered the gawky-looking Brady during warm-ups. “Hi, Tom,” he said pleasantly. “I’m Peyton.”¹²

Manning outpassed him that day, 196–168, but threw three interceptions, two taken back for touchdowns. The Pats romped to a 44–13 win. Three weeks later, in the return match, Peyton rang up more yards again, 335–202, but Brady threw three touchdowns and the Pats swept the series with a 38–17 rout, two games that helped send the Pats to their first championship season under Bill Belichick. In midseason, the Colts stood at 4–3, then went on to lose the next five and seven of eight, thrice giving up 40 points or more. After one of those, a 40–21 clinker against the 49ers in which Peyton threw four ugly interceptions, one returned for a touchdown, Mora had another of his memorable postgame snits. Asked whether the team could make the playoffs, he contorted his face and hissed, “Playoffs?! Don’t talk about—playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs?! I just hope we can win a game!” He got his wish: they won the last game to finish 6–10, buried in fourth place in the division.

Not culpable for any of this, Peyton had passed for over 4,000 yards—second to Warner, who won his second MVP—but with just three fewer interceptions, 23, than touchdowns, a good reason why he received no MVP votes. He did make Harrison an All-Pro by feeding him 109 passes and 15 touchdowns. But with the Colts wobbly, Jim Irsay let Mora go. The new man was slender, erudite Tony Dungy, who as coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had lifted that doormat team into the playoffs four times in six years, mainly on the backs of his defenses. This was why Irsay wanted him, but the risk was that Dungy, a former defensive back and longtime defensive assistant, had little expertise about offense. That was why the Bucs fired him after the 2001 season and hired Jon Gruden, who juiced it up and took the team to a championship the next year.

Dungy, an almost inanimate evangelical Christian, as muted as Mora was manic, believed that as a black man he was not only a victim of racism on the street (he had once been hauled to jail in Kansas for not signaling a lane change), but in NFL front offices as well. He expressed uncompromising anger at the prejudice that he believed had kept teams from hiring him for so long. Sometimes, he said, he’d be asked in job interviews if he planned to hire black assistants.¹³ The Colts gig was a no-brainer for him. After eight seasons squeezing all he could from Mark Brunell, he now had a chance to coach the best quarterback in football. Dungy retained Tom Moore as offensive coordinator and would leave the Colts attack to him. He also brought his quarterbacks coach in Tampa, Jim Caldwell, who had been the first African-American head coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference, with Wake Forest. But it would be up to the serene, Zen-like Dungy to calm and motivate a team full of fraying nerves.

In the spring of 2002, with Ole Miss having sunk millions into expanding Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, Eli had certainly cleaned up his act. There were no further drunken episodes, and he had found a girl. She was a sophomore, Abby McGrew, a native of Nashville who, like the other Manning women, was beautiful in an elegant, manicured way. Whatever it was about these smart and centered women, the Manning men were instantly hooked. Eli was ready to tell his family he had met his future wife, and that when the time came for a wedding, he would let them—and Abby—know. Until then, as Peyton had done with Ashley, he would string her along as he made the same climb upward on the football stairway to heaven.

The ’02 Rebels started 5–1, reaching a milestone in a tight win against Vanderbilt in which Eli rang up a personal-best 368 yards passing—and his record fourth 300-yard game, putting him one ahead of Archie. He also did what Peyton never could, beating Florida, now coached by Steve Spurrier’s former assistant Ron Zook. The Gators were ranked No. 6 at the time, and it was the first time since ’97 the Rebels had beaten a top-10 team, putting Ole Miss in the top 25. They then moved up to No. 21 by razing Arkansas State 52–17.

But the fun ended there. They lost their next three, to Alabama, Arkansas, and Auburn at home. There would be two more defeats—to a pair of ranked teams, SEC champion Georgia and LSU—with two more Manning interceptions in each, before the bleeding stopped. The season was partially salvaged by wins over Mississippi State and Nebraska—the latter by a 27–23 score in the Independence Bowl, Eli copping the game’s MVP award by going 32 of 52 for 313 yards. At 7–6, the Rebels had fallen from contenders to also-rans, and Cutcliffe’s job security was suddenly in question. Eli’s stock dipped too after he threw 10 fewer TDs and six more picks. Cooper didn’t pull his punches, saying of his brother, “I don’t think Eli has tapped his full potential. . . . The last couple of years on offense Eli has panicked because he felt if he didn’t put up a lot of points, he was letting the team down. . . . [W]hen people say, ‘I think Eli’s going to be the best [of the Mannings],’ they’re full of it. He might end up being great, but I don’t see how you can be better than Peyton.”¹⁴

But that presumed Peyton would reach his ultimate potential in Indianapolis. It still seemed a good bet. The Colts’ first-round draft choice in 2002, All-American defensive end Dwight Freeney, a 270-pound monster out of Syracuse, would set a rookie record, forcing nine fumbles. On the other hand, Edgerrin James was back, but not at peak level; he would gain 989 yards rushing, but with only two touchdowns. As for Manning, he was already deep into a streak of starting every game as a pro, one despite a broken jaw. The Colts won four of their first five games, then lost three straight. But he pulled them up again, beating the favored Eagles 35–13 with a 319-yard, three-touchdown game—two to Harrison, one to Reggie Wayne. They would win six of their last eight, Manning’s apogee a 417-yard passing show, including two touchdowns to Harrison, in a 28–23 victory over the Browns.

At 10–6, a game behind the Titans in the newly realigned AFC South, they clinched a wild-card playoff spot and were six-point favorites against the Jets in the first playoff round—and were promptly run off their own field. The Jets led 24–0 at the half and cruised to a 41–0 stunner. The Jets quarterback, Chad Pennington, threw three touchdowns. The Colts, managing just 10 first downs, were outgained 396 yards to 176 by a team blown away the next week by the Raiders. James gained 14 yards on nine carries. And Manning lost his cool. He forced 31 passes, completing 14, putting two in the hands of Jets defenders. He had wasted one more fine season, having thrown for 4,200 yards, 27 touchdowns—one behind the leader, Tom Brady—a manageable 19 interceptions, and completing 66.3 percent. He had five game-winning drives and his rating was 88.8. He was 27 now, moving to the top of his craft, keeping pace with Brady, who had already won a ring. Brady, a natural cover boy, seemed just a bit cooler and more than a bit better in the big games. But both were awesome enough that it seemed as if the next decade and a half already had its two main protagonists, and a theme: Brady versus Manning.