CHAPTER 17

MR. INHUMAN

The awkwardly structured dual memoir of Archie and Peyton, published in 2001, was a mostly harmless ego exercise. But it did have a sprinkling of candid personal takes, one of which was Peyton betraying a lingering grudge against Jamie Whited. Just addressing the little-noticed “mooning” episode meant that he was flouting the gag order attached to the 1997 settlement agreement between Whited and the University of Tennessee. Apparently, he, and the lawyers who vetted the manuscript for HarperCollins, believed he was on safe ground by admitting he had acted in an “inappropriate” manner, and that Whited should have nonetheless “shrugged it off as harmless.” Bizarrely, he added that had Cooper done the same thing, his gift for joking would have made it all benign, never mind the crudeness of the act. (Ironically, Eli, a sometime prankster, did moon someone in college—his backup quarterback, David Morris, whom he then spanked while singing, “How you like me now?!”)¹ More bizarrely, Peyton could not stop fulminating about women in men’s locker rooms and about Whited, whom he tarred for having a “vulgar mouth” and for not appreciating how much he “went out of my way” to “be nice to her.”²

If the lawyers didn’t know of the gag order in force, Jamie Whited knew. Now divorced and using her maiden name of Naughright, she was working as an assistant professor at Florida Southern College and suffered more indignity when the school fired her after the book was published, for bad publicity—the second time, as she saw it, that Manning had cost her a job. She then filed a defamation suit in Polk County Circuit Court in Florida, naming as co-defendants Archie, Peydirt Inc., ghostwriter John Underwood, and HarperCollins, for portraying her as “an overly sensitive, predatory woman looking for incidents to bolster a lawsuit against her employer.” The Manning camp, trying to gain sympathy for him, released a letter written in December 2002 from Malcolm Saxon, the track man he claimed he was mooning when Whited got in the way, apparently hoping that Saxon confirming that scenario would obscure that the missive was full of damnation.

“Peyton, you messed up,” it read. “I still don’t know why you dropped your drawers. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not. . . . Please take some personal responsibility here and own up to what you did. . . . Bro, you have tons of class, but you have shown no mercy or grace to this lady who was on her knees seeing if you had a stress fracture. It’s not too late. She has had a tough go of it since leaving UT. . . . Do the right thing here!!”³

Rather than take the advice, the Mannings decided to fight. After hiring big-time New York lawyer Slade Metcalf, they filed a motion to dismiss the suit, characterizing it as an attempt to extort money from a famous athlete, though Naughright originally asked for only $15,000. When pretrial sessions commenced in March 2003, Naughright claimed that since the settlement, Manning had taunted her, re-enacting the incident on two occasions and calling her a “bitch.” She also claimed that, two years before the incident, she had been helping teach a class that Peyton was taking, and when he allegedly cheated on an exam and she reported him, he sought revenge.⁴

Worse for Manning, in pretrial depositions some ex-Tennessee teammates, whom he assumed would back his opinion of Naughright, did not. And when he himself was deposed, the timing could not have been worse. Only months before, during the 2003 Pro Bowl, he gave a most un-Manning-like sideline interview—or, perhaps, one that was more Manning-like than he wanted the public to see. He was asked about Colts kicker Mike Vanderjagt, who had casually critiqued him and Dungy for having restrained emotions on the field. In a lather, Manning called Vanderjagt “an idiot kicker” who “got liquored up and ran his mouth off,” and that “if he still is a teammate, we’ll deal with it.”⁵ Naughright’s lawyers presented the tape of the remarks as evidence of his nasty, vindictive side. Still another hit came when a document was produced in which John Underwood said that not only Peyton but Archie had defamed Naughright—although the words came out of Peyton’s mouth in the book, it was Archie who had said she was “kinda trashy” and had a “vulgar mouth,” and in an unprinted allegation, she had spent time “with a lot of black guys and up in the dorm.” Under oath, Archie admitted he made the derogatory remarks, which hardly did his image any good.⁶

As all this was happening, Peyton began the 2003 season, and the case wasn’t making much news. In one rare exception, Christine Brennan wrote on CNN’s website on November 6, “So you’re a sports fan, and you want to believe, and for quite a few years, you’ve had many wonderful thoughts about Peyton Manning. They’re still there, but now, something else is there, too. You thought you knew the guy. Turns out you’re still learning.” Shrugging off any damage to his reputation, Peyton was prepared to go on fighting to quash the suit. But late in November, Judge Harvey Kornstein ruled that Naughright’s case could proceed to trial, because there was enough evidence to suggest both “that the defendants knew that the passages [from the book Manning] in question were false, or acted in reckless disregard of their falsity” and “that there were obvious reasons to doubt the veracity of Peyton Manning’s account of the incident in question.”⁷

These words shot like poison-tipped arrows into the Manning brand and presaged a humiliating defeat in court. Around Christmastime, he and Archie capitulated, personally settling with Naughright for an undisclosed six-figure sum. The Mannings said nothing to the press, and details of the case were sealed. Even now, the story was hardly mentioned in the media, and for one columnist, the Roanoke Times’s Dr. Reginald Shareef, that in itself was an outrage. Shareef fumed on January 8, 2004, that “the media promotes certain white athletes [and] Peyton Manning is one of the NFL’s most sparkling images. Most football fans were not aware of the defamation suit he recently settled against a woman he has harassed for years. . . . The settlement of the suit makes it ‘go away’ and allows the media to maintain the ‘Perfect’ Peyton image, especially among the NFL’s female fans.”

That image would take more hits in the gossip churn of the internet. In 2005, a former Colts cheerleader who had been fired for canoodling with players on a team trip to Tokyo told Playboy that when she entered her hotel room, “a high-profile player” was “hiding in my shower,”⁸ which many assumed was Manning, since no other Colt at the time matched that description. Another rumor was that when the actress Renée Zellweger divorced Kenny Chesney, she filed papers enigmatically claiming that the singer’s close friendship with Manning had been a factor in the breakup. Deadspin reported on the rumor under the snickering banner headline “Peyton Manning Going All Brokeback Mountain on Us?”⁹

The mooning episode would of course be recycled, with fresh allegations that, as a scion of white privilege, Manning had avoided the scrutiny and opprobrium directed toward black athletes for, say, marijuana use. Headlines ran, such as one in the New York Daily News just after his Super Bowl requiem, reading, “Peyton Manning’s Squeaky-Clean Image Was Built on Lies.”¹⁰ But his ability to insulate himself from this sort of sludge was perfected early. Even back in 2003, he was immune to things mortal men might have to atone for. As if to prove it, even if he had to pay more than he ever made in royalties from the book, he still wouldn’t let the obsession with shaming Jamie Naughright go, and he would have to pay up again.

To most fans, the matter seemed trivial when compared with what he was doing on the field. The Colts blasted out of the gate, winning their first five games. Playing two straight overtime games, they beat the Bucs, then lost to the Panthers. They were 11–3 in mid-December. Most of these games were close, none more than their match against the newly settled AFC power, the Patriots, who had won seven straight behind the maddeningly effective and annoyingly hunky Brady, who came into the Dome and staked his team to a 31–10 lead, aided by a 92-yard kickoff return for a touchdown. Then Peyton went off, throwing three of his four touchdowns in a six-minute span over the third and fourth quarters, to Wayne, Harrison, and Troy Walters, tying it. Brady, who was even slower than Manning but had a preternatural ability to stay upright and complete a pass even in a dense forest, fired a 13-yard touchdown to Deion Branch for the lead.

The game was a killing field, players limping off all day. Peyton kept the offense moving, but when it stalled with 3:27 left, Dungy took a field goal, hoping his defense would get the ball back. They did, and Manning took them all the way to the two-yard line. Three plays gained nothing. Then, on fourth down, 14 seconds left, James tried powering it in. but linebacker Mike Vrabel wrapped his arms around his shoulders and wrestled him down on the one. Game over. Manning won the stats battle—29 of 48 for 278 yards, with one pick, to Brady’s 26 of 35 for 236, with two touchdowns versus two picks—but one suspected that in the many clashes to come between them, beating Brady and Bill Belichick would require more—the big play, over and over like thrusts of a sword, until the beast was slain. The Colts, at 12–4, won the AFC South, and Manning was given his first MVP award. He shared it with the ill-fated Steve McNair, whose numbers paled next to Manning’s but whose 24–7 touchdown-to-interception ratio and 100.4 passer rating were superb. Manning had a league-leading 4,267 yards—making him the first ever to clear 4,000 yards in five straight seasons—29 touchdowns, only 10 interceptions, and a Colt-record 67 percent completion rate. He rang up three 5-TD games, all without one rusher in the top 10. On his arm alone, the Colts had the third-best offense, and the defense was fifth best.

The first playoff round brought in the wild-card Denver Broncos, who had beaten the Colts 31–17 in December. But by this point, Manning almost literally could not have been better. This was his apogee, beginning on the first drive, when he hit Brandon Stokley with a 31-yard touchdown pass. At the end of the quarter, he found Harrison with a 46-yard strike for a 14–3 lead. In the second quarter, he hit paydirt with Harrison and Stokley again, the latter galloping 87 yards for a 28–3 lead. He tacked on a fifth TD, seven yards to Wayne, in the third quarter before retiring to the bench. The final score was 41–10. Of his 26 passes, only four touched the ground. He threw for 377 yards. He wasn’t sacked once. He won his first playoff game, and according to the NFL’s passer rating system, he scored a perfect 158.3. Before that game, 48 men had achieved that grade, either in real time or applied retroactively. Peyton himself had done it twice in regular-season games, against the Eagles in 2002 and the Saints in 2003, but only Terry Bradshaw and Dave Krieg had done it in the playoffs.

The second round was tougher, against the Chiefs in Kansas City. But he was still on fire. A 29-yard touchdown to Stokley and a two-yard touchdown to Tom Lopienski, sandwiched around a short touchdown run by James, had the Colts up 21–10 at the half. A 19-yard touchdown to Wayne in the third quarter made it 31–17. It ended at 38–31, with Manning putting up 304 yards. That sent the Colts to the AFC title game against, who else, Brady and the Patriots—in Foxborough, on a raw, snowy afternoon. Up to now, Manning had engaged Brady three times (post-’01, they were in different divisions), and had come away losing them all. Moreover, the Pats had motivated themselves by pouting that the media were biased against them. During the week, citing one of the many exemplars in the press about Peyton’s last two games, Patriot players took to sardonically calling Manning “Mr. Inhuman.”¹¹

When the game began, Brady struck first. With Belichick going for it on a fourth down, Brady floated one to David Givens for a seven-yard touchdown. The Pats’ blitzing, hidden by unfamiliar defensive sets, kept Peyton out of sync; he would throw four picks, three to cornerback Ty Law, who covered Harrison like a blanket. The other pick, by safety Rodney Harrison, was in the end zone, after which Peyton stomped to the sideline, cursing, arms flailing, head shaking. Indeed, as it shaped up, the Pats’ strategy, as one writer put it, was to “torture Manning and the Colts instead of just soundly beating them,”¹² citing the fact the Pats had gotten inside the Colts 16-yard line seven times but settled for five field goals as evidence that they wanted to keep the game close enough to keep beating him up.

That was preposterous, but the Patriots certainly did beat him up. The Pats’ defensive coordinator, Romeo Crennel, often inserted backup defensive end Jarvis Green as a second tackle beside veteran Ted Washington. As a result, paths opened for Green to sack him three out of the four times he went down. As Sports Illustrated saw it, the defense “contained more wrinkles than a Rolling Stones tour jet.”¹³ Even so, Peyton hung tough and made it a game, his seven-yard TD to Pollard cutting it to 21–14 with 2:27 left. After regaining possession with 46 seconds left, Peyton tossed short passes aimed on third and fourth downs for Pollard in the flat. Both times, Pollard was jostled and probably held by linebackers Willie McGinest and Roman Phifer and couldn’t get to the ball. Pollard and Manning screamed for a penalty each time, Peyton ostentatiously miming a holding gesture. “It ain’t a call unless they call it, right?” a sheepish Rodney Harrison chuckled afterward.

When it ended, Brady and Manning—each of whom had, eerily, passed for 237 yards—engaged in the ritual man-hug at midfield that Peyton hated so much. But the agony of his own failure, of being jerked around by the officials, and the personal nature of the beatdown ate at him like battery acid. The snarking of the normally protective media was widespread; one story, about the Panthers’ Ricky Manning intercepting three passes that day in another playoff game, led with “This Manning was busy grabbing interceptions instead of throwing them.”¹⁴ Michael Wilbon in the Washington Post, referring to Peyton, wrote, “Sometimes it’s painfully obvious when one player is overwhelmingly at fault for losing a football game. . . . He didn’t have to be perfect yesterday, nowhere near it. All he had to be was good and he wasn’t anywhere close to that either.”

As always, Peyton was courtly and platitudinous in defeat. While saying the Pats “did nothing super special” on defense, he conceded, “I didn’t play the way I wanted to play. I made some bad plays and bad decisions.” It was, he said, “frustrating, disappointing, all of the above.” But that was a front. Suddenly, it wasn’t business but indeed personal; winning it all now was predicated on leaving the prone body of Tom Brady in the dust along the way. Knowing it would be unbearable to watch Brady win his second ring in the Super Bowl, he passed up attending or even watching it on TV. Neither was he pleased when, during George W. Bush’s State of the Union address days after the AFC championship game, Brady was seated for all to see beside the First Lady in the gallery, apparently to tweak John Kerry, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts who had surprisingly won the Iowa caucuses. It would not be the last time Brady allowed himself to be used as a political prop. Not that Peyton, a Bush booster, wouldn’t have been there had he been invited. But Brady had more upside, more pizzazz. He was the sexy one. The winner.

Eli had one season left at Ole Miss in which to do something big himself, and his draft position would depend on it. As one headline in the spring of 2003 read, “Manning Has Last Chance.”¹⁵ David Cutcliffe, entering his fifth season at the Rebel helm, the last on his contract, knew on whose arm his future rode. He gave Easy more incentive by naming him senior captain of the offense, a position of added responsibility for a guy who would prefer to listen to metal music than get all rah-rah with teammates. As Peyton had done, Eli had already earned his degree, his last college season no more than an NFL tune-up. He was being projected as the first quarterback to be picked in the next draft and already held 24 school records, many of which had been Archie’s. Yet his phlegmatic manner kept him on a low flame, nowhere near Archie in terms of emotional attachment among Rebel fans. He had all the tools, but it seemed doubtful he could inspire a team—as it was, he had only beaten two high-ranked SEC teams: LSU in ’01 and Florida in ’02.

Cutcliffe had 17 returning seniors, but in the opener against doormat Vanderbilt the lowly Commodores, led by quarterback Jay Cutler, took a 21–14 lead in the fourth quarter. Eli then directed a 75-yard drive climaxed by a 23-yard touchdown pass to Mike Espy to tie it. A subsequent drive and 54-yard field goal by Jonathan Nichols saved the game, and a lot of shame. At least for a week. Against Memphis, who hadn’t beaten Ole Miss in a decade, the Rebels took a 34–21 lead on Eli’s fourth TD pass, but then Memphis scorched them for 23 points. Eli, who wound up throwing 48 times, served up two picks in that span, an old bugaboo he just couldn’t shake.

The Rebels split the next two games, but now came an impressive run. First, Eli led Ole Miss past No. 24 Florida at the Swamp, 20–17, conducting the game-winning drive as the clock was dying. Then they blasted Arkansas State 55–0 and Alabama 43–28, with three more TD passes from Eli in each game. Next, they clocked No. 20 Arkansas 19–7 to grab the SEC West lead and make the Top 20. In high gear, Eli fired passes for 398 yards and three touchdowns in a 43–40 win over South Carolina. And against Auburn, down 20–17 late, he took the team 80 yards, three times converting on third downs before the Rebels ran in the winning score.

During this streak, Ernie Accorsi, the New York Giants GM who had broken into the game watching Johnny Unitas as the Baltimore Colts’ PR director, filed a glowing scouting report on Eli. In it, he wrote that Manning was carrying “an overmatched team entirely on his shoulders . . . so much so that he doesn’t trust his protection. Can’t. No way he can take any form of a deep drop and look downfield. With no running game [and] no real top receivers, he’s stuck with the three-step drops and waiting til the last second to see if a receiver can get free. No tight end either. No flaring back. So he’s taking some big hits. Taking them well.”

Accorsi drew some heavy conclusions. Eli, he concluded, was “a little like Joe Montana” and had “courage and poise. . . . [M]ost of all, he has that quality you can’t define. Call it magic . . . Peyton had much better talent around him at Tennessee. But I honestly give this guy a chance to be better than his brother. . . . If he comes out early, we should move up to take him. These guys are rare, you know.”¹⁶

Ranked 15th at 8–2, the Rebels hosted the biggest match of the season, against No. 3 LSU, who were 9–1 and had taken the SEC West lead. A record crowd of 62,552 crammed Vaught-Hemingway for the nationally televised game, and Eli was given a deafening ovation in the introductions. But the Tigers made their mark on defense and zeroed in on him, sacking him three times and disrupting his timing. He would just get to 200 yards, but go only 16 of 36 and throw a pick. LSU took a 17–7 lead in the fourth quarter, and then Eli found Brandon Jacobs with a 10-yard touchdown. He got the ball back late and drove to the Tiger 18, but Nichols missed the tying field goal.

It was yet another soul crusher, but Eli did throw three touchdowns the next week to beat Mississippi State 31–0 and finish with Ole Miss 9–3 and ranked No. 16. It also earned him a high-visibility finale to his Rebel career, in the Cotton Bowl against No. 21 Oklahoma State. He killed it there, throwing three touchdowns and running one in himself to go up 31–14 in the last quarter. The Rebels held on, 31–28, Eli winning the game MVP on 259 passing yards. It had taken 32 years for Ole Miss to have a 10-win season—the last time was the year after Archie left—and with the Cotton Bowl win they had a final ranking of No. 13, saving Cutcliffe, if only for one more season.

For Eli, the numbers from his senior year were dizzying: 3,600 yards, 29 touchdowns, 10 interceptions, 62.4 completion percentage, 148.1 passer rating. In his four active years, he compiled over 10,000 yards, 81 touchdowns, and a 137.7 rating and left with 45 school records. Cooper, who had worried that his baby brother just didn’t have what it took, had no doubts now, saying he was now “a little more in awe of what” he turned into.¹⁷ Archie, who had burned thousands of miles on a crazy quilt of travel getting to 31 of his sons’ games that fall, said he’d never had as much fun. One writer called those overlapping months the Mannings’ “near-perfect season.” But not quite near enough. Eli came in third in the Heisman voting to Oklahoma’s junior QB Jason White and Pitt receiver Larry Fitzgerald. While he was first-team SEC, the conference MVP, and won the Maxwell Award, he didn’t make All-American—not that he cared much. He was, by all indications, going to be the No. 1 draft pick. And, confirming that it’s the quiet ones you have to watch, he was going to make a loud commotion.

Draft day was April 24, again at Madison Square Garden. But the plot had thickened two weeks earlier when word broke that the Chargers, who had the first pick, were talking to the Giants about swapping picks, the latter holding the fourth slot. Both teams were awful, though in retrospect their quarterbacks were quite adequate; the Giants’ 31-year-old incumbent, Kerry Collins, was a future Pro Bowler, and the Chargers’ 24-year-old starter, Drew Brees, was a diamond in the rough. Indeed, the Chargers could get more value from Eli as barter. Eli was not eager to play in Southern California, where the living was too easy for a guy who needed to feel the heat of battle to keep his eyes focused. This, of course, was a crazily ironic twist, the exact reverse of what Ryan Leaf had wanted the last time a Manning headlined the draft. During the spring, Eli kept mum about his preference but had a simple calculus: he may have wanted to play in the bright lights of New York simply because Peyton hadn’t. It has also been speculated that Eli—and Archie—saw a lot of the old Saints in the Chargers; and, like John Elway decades before wanting to avoid the Colts, Eli didn’t want to end up like Archie. Then, too, the Giants had glamor and glory. But not even Eli seems to have known the reason why he was turned off to the Chargers. In 2013, asked what it was, his answer was hidden behind pure Eli-speak.

“I forgot, I think,” he said. “I just can’t remember. . . . Been 10 years. It slipped my mind.”¹⁸

The first hint of intrigue arose two weeks before the draft when Accorsi—likely prodded by Tom Condon, whom Eli had also hired as his agent—held a private meeting with Chargers GM A. J. Smith. Given Accorsi’s high regard for Eli, he was prepared to make a deal to obtain him. This was doable because in Smith’s mind the key get wasn’t Manning but Philip Rivers, North Carolina State’s four-year starter who had thrown 95 touchdowns and set a record with 51 consecutive starts. In a bit of subterfuge, Accorsi pledged to take Rivers fourth and then swap him for Manning, along with a third-round pick in the current draft and a first and a fifth in the next year’s—a heavy price to pay, but worth it, as Accorsi swore to owner Wellington Mara and the Giants’ new coach, the ruddy-faced Tom Coughlin.

These terms were leaked to the press, but it would not be a done deal until draft day, when the Chargers drafted Eli and the Giants Rivers. It was an awkward scheme, even more so for Eli, who would remain in limbo and need to feign being happy to be going to San Diego, and then wait out the next three picks before he was traded. Meanwhile, Collins, a crowd and team favorite, felt like he had been kneecapped. He had bled for the Giants after being traded there in ’99, twice leading them to double-digit-win seasons and to the Super Bowl in 2000, where they were mashed by the Ravens 34–7. Now, feeling betrayed, Collins was disconsolate. “I feel accountable to the tradition, to the history, to all the seasons and all the players who’ve been involved with the Giants,” he said.¹⁹ He said he would even play behind Eli if need be. But since that would require a large cut to his $8 million salary, he wouldn’t be that accountable.

Clearly, Eli was no naïf. Two weeks before the draft, after Condon made an endorsement deal with Reebok, Eli had filmed his first TV commercial. Spoofing himself, and exploiting the hubbub he had created, he made the spot holding a Chargers cap in one hand, a Giants cap in the other. When he arrived in New York for the draft with Archie, Olivia, and Peyton, all of them were wary that something might happen to scuttle the deal and leave Eli to somehow get along in the warm sun, near sandy beaches and French bikinis—“Woe is he,” commiserated a sportswriter.²⁰ Seeing to it that it would not go down that way, at a press luncheon the Thursday before the draft, Eli revealed he had notified the Chargers that he did not want them to pick him. He had also, Elway-style, begun to drop threats about sitting out the season if they did—or even quitting football altogether and going to law school. Smith, whatever his team’s intentions, took these threats as proof that it was the Mannings who were queering the deal, and he blamed Archie for controlling his son’s thoughts. Years later, Archie would still deny the allegation. The threat, he said, “was a decision that Eli and Tom Condon kind of made. . . . I can’t say it was pleasant from our end. Most people thought I orchestrated it, but I didn’t. I don’t tell my kids what to do or make their decisions.”²¹

Whoever called the shots, Archie felt he needed to step in, insisting Eli wasn’t trying to manipulate the draft. In fact, the Mannings felt the deal was falling apart. Smith was hemming and hawing, saying that he would do what was best for his team. Just as with Peyton, things were still in limbo come Saturday morning. The plan was still on the table, but neither team was sure it would be carried out. The first move was the Chargers taking Eli, who was seated in front of the stage, carefree as usual. When Paul Tagliabue called out the first pick, Eli did his best to grin while biting his lip. As the second Manning brother to be so anointed rose to the stage, hoots from Giant fans unconvinced the trade scenario would play out filled the theater. As Eli stood on the stage with Archie and Olivia, all of them looked like hostages posing with a smiling Tagliabue. Someone gave Eli a Chargers cap and jersey, which he held in his hand rather than putting them on. Other fans, anticipating the swap, showered him with boos for his gall in trying to force a trade before throwing an NFL pass. As the family left the stage, with Eli repeating his law school threat, they walked through the crowd toward an interview room. One guy shouted, “Peyton is great, but Eli is bush!” Surreal as it was, Eli shrugged off the “venomous” reaction, as Sports Illustrated described it. “When you play in the SEC,” he said, “you get booed.”²²

In the side room, Eli handed Olivia the Charger gear and refused to stand with anyone from the team. Reporters peppered him with questions about sitting out, which he deflected, saying, “It’s an honor to be selected with the first pick, but it’s not what we wanted.” Everyone’s attention then turned to the next step, watching on a TV as the second and third picks went by. When the Giants’ turn came, they kept to the plan, taking Rivers, who exhibited the same ambivalent reaction. Now, the conditions met, the Chargers tried to squeeze even more compensation out of the Giants. As the tense minutes ticked on, Archie, feeling stressed, was clearly upset that people were so turned off to his son.

“I heard one person say Eli was a punk,” he said. “Well, he’s not a punk. We’re nice people, and we tried to do the best we could in a tough situation.”

Finally, after a very long hour, as one reporter wrote, “The Chargers blinked . . . unwilling to call Manning’s bluff.”²³ Closing the deal, the teams broke the news to the media people. Accorsi handed Eli a Giants cap and he quickly slid it on. “Obviously,” he said coyly, “we wanted something of this nature to happen. I’m excited about the whole situation.” Olivia asked if she should give away the Chargers stuff. Eli told her to keep it, acknowledging with a smug laugh, “It might become a collector’s item one day.”

Among the reporters waiting to interview Eli was Peyton, who had been hired for a day by DirecTV to cover the draft. When he pulled his brother over, he conducted a semi-serious colloquy, putting Eli’s ability to deadpan to an early test. He grinned awkwardly, but was game.

Q: It’s been rumored that you have said you are better-looking than Peyton. That’s a bold statement.

A: It is a bold statement. That is my opinion, and I feel very strongly about that opinion. And people I’ve talked to feel strongly about it, too. Peyton may not agree, but I don’t think he’s a high [ranking] person who can answer that question.

Q: It’s also been reported, and I can’t believe it, that you feel you also have more natural talent than Peyton.

A: I don’t know if I said it in those exact words. Yes, in basketball, tennis, and Ping-Pong. He beat me at football when I was six and he was 11. But that wasn’t really fair.

Q: What will happen when you play against each other?

A: It’s not like he’s gonna be playing cornerback. If he was, I’d throw there every single time, and he would try to give me some cheap shots. Peyton thinks he knows me. But I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.

The interviews done, the brood then headed across the river to Giants Stadium for a draft-day party of 3,000 Giants fans who chanted Eli’s name as he stood atop a platform clad in blue Giants gear. Archie, who looked particularly relieved, said afterward, “It felt good to see Eli and our whole family happy. This situation took a toll on everybody.”²⁴ That Eli had taken heat for what he deemed a principled stand was proof that, as one writer put it, “Manning may look as fresh-faced as your paperboy [but] he had a toughness that he’ll need to play quarterback in the Big Apple.” Archie could only hope so. Having suffered slings and sacks after he vaulted into the pros, he predicted that his enigmatic youngest son was walking into a “hornet’s nest.”

Condon won another sweet contract for the Mannings. When Eli came to training camp, the Mara family had signed off on five years and $46 million, including a $3 million signing bonus, his rookie salary set at $1.74 million. In the second year, a $9 million bonus would kick in on a salary of a mere $305,000; the third, $7.3 million on a $1.6 million salary; the fourth, $6 million on a $6.5 million salary; the fifth, $2.5 million on an $8.5 million salary. (Much of this structuring, as with any other team’s contracts, was done to allow the Giants payroll to fit under the salary cap.) Although it is now submerged in history, a number of Giant players believed that Accorsi had gone in the wrong direction, paying a fortune for a new quarterback instead of filling other needs. Doing so, said All-Pro defensive end Michael Strahan, had “changed the game” and “throws a little bit of a wrench there,” meaning the team’s stability.²⁵

Neither was Coughlin sold on Eli. A former receiver eons before at Syracuse, he had put in years as a college assistant and then as Bill Parcells’s receivers coach on the Giants’ second Super Bowl championship team in 1991. He took his able quarterbacks coach in Jacksonville, John Hufnagel, with him to New York as offensive coordinator and rehired Kevin Gilbride, who had once been his offensive coordinator in Jacksonville and would now be his quarterbacks coach, and coordinator again three years later. He was no softie, apt to blow his top over very little, his face turning beet-like as he sputtered at players and officials. Fifty-eight now, he was called “Colonel Coughlin” for imperious ways that included mandating that players be at meetings five minutes before the scheduled time or be fined. On the sideline, he sometimes seemed too wound up to think straight, losing awareness of the down or the clock. Players never knew if they measured up in his eyes, since he rarely praised them directly. Eli certainly appealed to him, physically and intellectually, having scored a record 39 correct answers on the Wonderlic IQ test at the combine, where, despite his seemingly slow feet, he ran the 40 in 4.7 seconds.

After Collins was traded, a cautious Coughlin convinced the Giants to sign Kurt Warner, who had broken his hand in ’03 and had been let go by St. Louis. Given a two-year deal, Warner was told he would be expected to help tutor Eli, but as a past league and Super Bowl MVP, he regarded the job as more than a placeholder and did little tutoring. Eli’s progress in practice would be slow. At the team’s May minicamp, he fumbled a couple of times and threw a pick, prompting a typically New York tabloid headline: “All Eyes on Eli in a Dud of a Debut.”²⁶ Warner started in the season opener against the Eagles and was awful, the game ending with Eli mopping up in a 31–17 loss, his first two pro passes incomplete before he got one right, a 34-yard strike to running back Tiki Barber. He threw five, completing three, then was sacked and fumbled.

But Warner then won five of six, with the overhyped rookie, his No. 10 jersey unsullied, riding the pine. After losses to the Bears and Cardinals, Coughlin, feeling the pressure to make a move, handed Eli the ball for the next game, November 21 against the 7–2 Falcons in Atlanta. “You Da Manning” was the headline in the New York Post. In another story, the paper’s sometimes delirious football writer Steve Serby dubbed him “Heir to the Throwin’,” “New York’s new diaper dandy,” and “Eli Messiah,” a man “born for this moment” who “wasn’t afraid of New York. He won’t be afraid of any grits blitz today. Because Mannings just aren’t.”²⁷ The Falcons, led by quarterback Mike Vick, were coached by, of all people, Jim Mora, who during the week sounded loath to fawn over another Manning, sneering that his team had more to worry about than “Eli Manning and his personal tendencies.”²⁸ Eli seemed imperturbable—less so than a nervous Peyton, who had clobbered the Bears in Chicago 41–10 in an early game and called to wish him luck from Mike Ditka’s restaurant, where he and Cooper would catch the Giants game on TV. But Eli played jittery, his throws erratic, suffering a pick to defensive end Brady Smith, who dropped into coverage as Eli was confused by a zone blitz. “I thought I had the slant open,” he said later, “but I threw it right to [Smith]. I guess you’d call it a rookie mistake.”²⁹

But then, down 14–0 early in the third quarter, Eli began at his own 28 and led a remarkable, 16-play, nearly eight-minute drive. Converting four third-down plays with pinpoint passes, he found tight end Jeremy Shockey from the six for a touchdown. He did much the same in the fourth, with a 12-play march, though he overthrew Ike Hilliard on third-and-goal from the eight, settling for a field goal to cut the lead to 14–10. He got the Giants close on their final drive, but he was suckered by linebacker Keith Brooking, who feigned leaving Shockey open, but then quickly closed in on him and batted the ball away to preserve the win.

His numbers—17 of 37 for 162 yards, two picks—weren’t the story as much as those two drives, with high praise liberally dished out by teammates and opponents, especially for his quick reads and reactions. Shockey said the receivers had “betrayed” Eli with dropped passes. Magnanimously, Mora chimed in: “I’m glad we got Eli in his first start and not his fourth or fifth. I think he’s going to be just like his brother in a few years.” Paul Zimmerman judged his game as “a triumph if you look at the big picture [and] the players seemed to get a lift from the kid.”³⁰ The rabid tabloids went easy on him, the Post calling his debut “shaky” but allowing that he “shows promise.” It was pointed out that of the last 13 No. 1–drafted quarterbacks, nine lost their debuts—including Peyton Manning.

However, the positive spin went bad fast, as Big Blue became Big Black and Blue. Over the next five weeks, they lost, mostly big, and the initial rush about Manning dissipated into a dull ennui. Paying his dues, in the Eagles game he was sacked five times, hurried, and shoved by Jeremiah Trotter into the Giants bench, causing a sideline skirmish. He wasn’t booed often at home the way Archie had been, but the media love affair turned colder, with words like “overmatched” and “mistake-filled” freely appearing in game stories.

Eli accepted that he was indeed in a hornet’s nest. He eased into the cultural clash of being a city slicker, moving into an apartment in blue-collar Hoboken, New Jersey, and mourning that he could not find a single good Southern-style restaurant. He thought it might be a good idea to mingle with tailgating fans before games at the Meadowlands. That didn’t last long. Back at the Grove, he said, “I could go there after games and not get harassed or bothered that much.” What did he think of Giants fans? “I’ve heard,” he deadpanned, “they can turn on you really quick.”³¹ A 28–24 win in the finale against the Cowboys, Barber running one in with 11 seconds left, closed out a 6–10 season. Eli could not brag about his stats—1,043 yards, six touchdowns, nine interceptions, a 55.4 rating, all inferior to Warner’s numbers. But Warner knew the score. As hard a lesson as the season was, Manning was, wrote Peter King in SI, “a force to be reckoned with.”³² Warner, caught in the revolving door, would soon void the second year of his contract and sign with the Cardinals, where his renaissance would run uninterrupted.

Another victim of Eli, the Chargers, had a happier ending. They made the playoffs at 12–4, not with Rivers but Brees, who went to the Pro Bowl. Rivers, who held out in camp before signing, sat that season and the next before Brees inked a huge free-agent deal with the Saints. Meanwhile, the big rookie story that year was Ben Roethlisberger, who won the Rookie of the Year award with the Steelers. But when the postseason rolled around, rookie quarterbacks were forgotten. It was time for the elder Manning to get his next shot at Tom Brady.