CHAPTER 18

PEYTON, FINALLY

That year of 2004, with Peyton’s contract running out, Condon struck again. He had already renegotiated the original deal, and by ’03, Manning’s salary had escalated to $9.8 million. When the Colts re-signed him for seven years, he took a minimum salary of $535,000 in exchange for a series of outrageous bonuses—$3.4 million up front, then two more totaling $19 million in ’07 and ’08, the total deal worth $98 million. A year later, Marvin Harrison would be extended for seven years as well, for $67 million. This was corporate capitalism run amok, and Peyton was the poster boy for it.¹ By contrast, Tom Brady seemed relatively indigent. Having come in as a low draft pick, even after two championships he was pulling down a puny $535,000 in salary, though restructuring bonuses pushed his yearly take to $6 million, which would double in ’05. Perhaps that was a motivating factor, one that spurred him to keep his advantage over Peyton.

They had opened the season playing a marquee match on a Thursday night at Gillette Stadium. Peyton had the upper hand early, directing a nine-run drive ending in a Dominic Rhodes touchdown, then after hitting tight end Dallas Clark on a play-fake for 64 yards, flipping a three-yard TD pass to Harrison for a 17–13 halftime lead. But Brady, who out-passed him 335–256, threw two scores in the third quarter. Peyton got one back with a touchdown to Stokley, making it 27–24, but with the clock running out, he screwed up, a blitzing Willie McGinest sacking him, moving a game-tying field-goal attempt back 13 yards. When Vanderjagt missed, the Pats escaped. Manning didn’t pick on Vanderjagt; rather, he blamed himself for playing “like a dog.”

Both teams would rampage through the season, the Colts’ with terrifying ease. They put up at least 30 points 11 times, and five times over 40 points—once 50. Peyton passed early and often, and in the end no one since Dan Marino’s record 5,084 yards in ‘84 had come as close as he did with 4,557; and he beat by one Marino’s single-season touchdown record, notching 49—bettered since only twice—by himself and Brady.

The Manning-Brady tango was, in fact, a strange, distorted reality. Brady, the bland matinee idol soon to win the supermodel wife, was impossible to root for, at least outside of New England, mainly because of his linkage with an assumedly sinister coach who would soon be caught spying on an opponent’s practices, leaving a permanent bathtub ring on both; meanwhile, the guy who dropped his scrotum on a woman’s head, then tried to sully her, the guy whose calculated image was second to none, was the real deal, and if one didn’t look too hard, he fit the bill of the anti-Brady.

As Peyton’s stats grew, so did his status as an icon. Early in his Colt career he had, with Tom Moore, devised a no-huddle system, wreaking mass confusion by hurrying to the line for a series of plays before defenses could even set themselves, with Peyton making the call at the line. Moore called it “Lightning,” but unlike the usual hurry-up schemes, it was actually hurry up and wait, designed to give Peyton extra time to decipher the defensive shifts. Thus did the world come to spend long minutes watching him pointing, moving people around, making weird gestures such as putting an index finger on each side of his helmet, like a toro in a bull ring.

The guy who had to wait out the routine before snapping, Jeff Saturday, explained it this way: “As you are walking to the line, a play is being delivered and you knew from the week of practice before kind of what was coupled with that play. So if it was going to be a check, you knew there were two or three different things that we possibly liked to check to.”² Even after the snap, Peyton would continue scanning the field, waving a hand or giving a quick nod to a secondary receiver to break from the pattern. Manning then executed pump fakes that could momentarily freeze even the most seasoned defender.

This was PhD-level quarterbacking, both an art and a science—because it had to be. Unlike Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, Manning was never a pure passer; less true and firm than Eli’s, his spirals didn’t spin tightly, but wiggled and wobbled. Without knowing exactly where to throw it and when, and with perfect timing, they would have no chance. But the scheme also depended on one man’s judgment, an imperfect element that made it all too human. After an early-season Colts win over the Titans, Peter King waxed that “it is performances like [that] that make Manning watchers believe they are seeing the Unitas of his generation.” But then he added, “As great as he can be, Manning still makes bad decisions at bad times.”³

Indeed, drama seemed to attach to him, on and off the field, much of it built into the family subplot. When the Ravens decimated the Giants before playing the Colts, Paul Zimmerman wrote, “In the movie version of Peyton Manning: Gunslinger, the part of the hero would be played by Jimmy Cagney, looking for the guy who killed my brother.”⁴ He took care of the Ravens, 20–10, throwing for 249 yards and ending their playoff hopes. On the cover of the December 20 SI, Peyton’s eyes burned behind his face mask, “Top Gun” emblazoned across the image. His wingmen enjoyed their own headlines. Harrison caught 15 touchdowns, Wayne 12, Stokley 10. And Manning did all this with a scant 10 interceptions, completing 67.6 percent. His 121.1 rating beat Steve Young’s record by eight points and is still the second-highest in history, to Aaron Rodgers’s 122.5 in 2011. The Colts had the No. 1 offense. Manning, James, and Harrison went to the Pro Bowl, as did Dwight Freeney. Peyton won his second MVP award, one vote short of unanimous. The Colts, at 12–4, winning eight of their last nine, clinched the division going away, SI calling it a “Season to Remember.” They then obliterated the Broncos in the first playoff round, 49–24, with Manning amassing 458 yards, going 27 of 33 with four touchdowns; when Harrison was double-teamed, he simply threw to other receivers, Wayne reeling in two touchdowns.

The next Sunday delivered the goods—Manning and Brady, mano a mano, in Foxborough, a Super Bowl ticket on the line for the winner. Peyton had come up a loser five straight times to Brady, and the Pats had also toyed with the league, going 14–2, with Brady throwing for 3,692 yards and 28 touchdowns against just 14 picks. They were just as high-powered, and balanced. And that was the rub: the Colt defense was, in a sense, a victim of the offense. As one writer noted, the offense “takes up more than 70 percent on the salary cap, the most lopsided proportion in the NFL,” leaving the defense to be “built mostly from spare parts.”⁵ This left some wondering, as Sports Illustrated asked, “In three or four years will Indianapolis collapse under the weight of fat contracts?”⁶ But Manning was talking big before the game, citing his biggest asset. “My dad used to call it, ‘Refuse to lose,’” he said. Vanderjagt declared that the Pats were “ripe for the picking,” whereupon Rodney Harrison called him “Vanderjerk.”⁷

However, what might have been big pregame news came and went, as similar news had in the past. This was the latest repercussion of Manning’s seeming vendetta against Jamie Naughright. Interviewed for a recent ESPN Sports Century biography of him, he couldn’t keep his lip zipped about the matter, claiming that she had “taken advantage” of him. And, with splendid timing, on the Friday before the Pats game, Naughright filed a motion charging him with breaching the confidentiality agreement. Again. Months later, she would prevail. Again. And he would have to pay an undisclosed sum. Again.

One of the few sportswriters who even heard of the new lawsuit, Mike Freeman, wrote on the eve of the Colts–Pats game, “The idea of saying ‘I’m sorry’ seems like a phrase that Manning does not like to utter. . . . Manning is worth millions, has the massive NFL PR machine at his disposal, and ESPN, the most powerful sports media entity in the world, promotes him as the prince of pigskin, as do other media outlets. Yet a petite personal trainer from Lakeland took advantage of the powerful NFL thrower? If Manning simply ignored the court agreement, then his reaction smacks of entitlement.”⁸

But Peyton could take comfort that the more pressing business on the field that day submerged the story that refused to die. Not long into the game, however, the Pats had gotten the jump. The day was bone-cold, the windchill 16 degrees, and Belichick’s defense, even missing two starters out with injuries, played unrelenting smashmouth ball. They applied sharp elbows to Colt receivers’ backs out of sight of the officials, causing the receivers to flinch, drop passes, and fumble twice. Though the game stayed close and the Colts sacked Brady three times and held him to 144 yards passing, the intense pressure got to Peyton, who also fumbled one and could not complete a pass for more than 18 yards. It was only 6–3 Pats at the half, but Brady took his team 87 yards in the third for a 13–3 lead. The Pats had the ball for 38 minutes in the game, Corey Dillon running for 144 yards, and when Brady led them on a 94-yard march and took it in himself from the one midway through the fourth quarter, it was 20–3, and a wrap. Peyton did get to the Pats 20 before being picked off by Rodney Harrison in the end zone, his 238 passing yards meaningless in a game where he could put only three points on the board. In Sports Illustrated, Michael Silver’s postmortem was that the Pats had “neutered” the Colts offense so profoundly that all of Manning’s records “seem like a mere footnote.”

After grimly glad-handing Brady in the ritual he had come to detest, Peyton put a positive spin on the disaster. “It was an excellent run, a fine year,” he muttered. “Eventually, it will be our time.”⁹

The Pats, whose time it always seems to be, went on to beat Roethlisberger’s Steelers for the AFC title, and then so unnerve the Eagles in the Super Bowl that Donovan McNabb threw up his lunch on the field in the fourth quarter. Peyton knew how he felt, all too well.

During the last days of August 2005, New Orleans braced for the first impact of what meteorological models forecast as one of the most potentially catastrophic hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Hurricane Katrina had battered Florida and was heading across the Gulf of Mexico, bearing right for the home grounds of the Manning clan. On Sunday, August 28, Katrina—now a Category 5 storm—hit its peak strength with 175-mile-an-hour winds and 28-foot surges. On the 29th it made landfall, drenching the city with eight inches of driving rain, the storm surge overwhelming the levees, flooding hundreds of square miles. That was when the images hit the national media of people pleading for help from the roofs of their submerged homes and of lifeless bodies in the rivers that snaked through the streets of mostly poorer, and blacker, neighborhoods. Reports later told of prisoners left to die in their cells as prison guards and officials took refuge.¹⁰ Some of the most gruesome images came from inside the Superdome, which was being used as a shelter and where six people would die.

At the time, Tony Reginelli, who had suffered various ailments since retiring as Newman High’s football coach, was laid up in Memorial Medical Center for treatment of a liver infection. Despite his weakened condition, he crawled from his bed, got down the stairs, and climbed into a National Guard truck with other survivors. “I was the last one to get out,” he recalls.¹¹ He rode the truck to Baton Rouge, where his daughter-in-law, a nephrologist in the hospital, remained there with bedridden patients. Like other hospitals, victims were taken to Memorial, where 45 dead bodies, the most of any hospital, filled the morgue and the hospital’s chapel.

Fortunately for the Mannings, the Garden District was spared from the teeth of the storm. Archie, Olivia, and Cooper all got out, to the relief of Peyton and Eli as they watched their hometown sink under water on TV, the death toll rising to over 1,500. As rescue efforts began to slowly bail out the drowned city, some neighborhoods still not resurrected to this day, the economic toll was placed at $150 billion, devastating the state; over a million people were displaced. Up north, the Manning brothers tried to pitch in as they prepared for the opening week of the season. Peyton, who said, “The whole town is like family, so it’s very much a personal issue,” arranged with Eli, who had also given heavily to charities following 9/11 and the Japanese tsunami—and whose own home in New Jersey would be flooded in the later Hurricane Sandy—to pay for an Air Tran cargo plane in Atlanta to fly up to New York, pick up Eli, then to Indianapolis, filled with relief supplies. With the brothers aboard, it headed for Baton Rouge, where they helped unload the supplies and then checked out their neighborhood.

As a result of the disaster, Eli’s team would catch a break. With the now-mortuarial Superdome out of commission, not to be made available for a full year, Saints games were shifted to the Alamodome and LSU’s Tiger Stadium. But their first home game, against the Giants on the second Monday night, was too soon to secure grounds, and so the league decreed that it would be played at the Meadowlands, an extra home game that had Giant-haters howling. It turned out to be Eli’s second straight win to start the season—one in which, as Kurt Warner had foreseen, Eli would take every snap.

Even though the Giants had traded two high draft picks to get him, Accorsi made the most of his picks. His third-round selection, Notre Dame’s defensive end Justin Tuck, would be a vital third-down pass-rush specialist. Accorsi also lured free agent Plaxico Burress away from the Steelers with a six-year, $25 million deal. A first-round pick out of Michigan State in 2000, at six foot five and 230 pounds, Burress was long and lithe, a perfect jump-ball target who had once gained 253 yards in an overtime game. But he was also a gamble, having been involved in a variety of misdemeanors, bounced checks, and traffic incidents for which he would be sued at least nine times.¹² In 2004, he had been suspended for going AWOL the week before a game. The Giants bet on him to keep out of trouble.

Eli’s work was also made easier by Tiki Barber, a first-team All-Pro that year with a career-best 1,860 yards rushing and 54 receptions. As it happened, the opener was against the Cardinals, meaning Warner was looking for retribution. And he did outgun Eli, passing for 264 yards and a touchdown, while Manning went 10 for 23 with 172 yards and two interceptions. But Eli put the game away in the fourth quarter, finding Burress for a 13-yard score to send the Giants to an eventual 42–19 win. That led them to the “bonus” home game, in which the Saints wore their home colors even as Giant fans cheered their team’s 27–10 win. Now, though, Eli had to go where he had mortally offended an entire region—San Diego—sure to take more verbal abuse. While Charger fans were satisfied to see LaDainian Tomlinson trample the Giants with 192 yards on the ground and Brees throw two touchdowns in a 45–23 rout, Eli didn’t bow down. He threw for 352 yards and two touchdowns. The next week, he threw for 296 yards and four touchdowns, two to Burress, beating the Rams 44–24. The Giants then lost in Dallas in overtime—one of three OT contests they would play that season, losing two.

But what seemed a blow became a rallying point. On October 25, Giants owner Wellington Mara died at 89. His life had paralleled that of the team; he started as a ball boy in 1925, when his father, Tim, founded it, then was given the roles of treasurer, secretary, and vice-president. When Tim died in 1958, Wellington became co-owner with his brother Jack, who died in 1965. It was then that the team went into a long dry spell while Wellington and his nephew Tim, who with his mother and sister owned 50 percent of the team, feuded. But Mara guided a renaissance in the 1970s, ceding authority to powerful general managers, and championships in the ’80s and early ’90s restored the Giants to their status as the bedrock franchise of the league.

The grief over his death, however, ignited the Giants’ season. Charged up, wanting to “win one for Well,” they won the next three, beating the Redskins and 49ers on consecutive Sundays, 36–0 and 24–6. With a 6–2 record, Burress was paying off big, and Shockey had become the third-down receiver in the league. They would run off another three-game winning streak in December, including dumping Parcells’s Cowboys. Looking up after finishing 11–5, they had won the NFC East with a quarterback no longer wet behind the ears, who had meshed beyond expectation with his receivers—Burress, Shockey, and Amani Toomer each had at least 60 catches and six touchdowns. Eli did have his foibles, his 17 picks and completion rate barely above 50 percent keeping him from the Pro Bowl. And in the first playoff round, against the wild-card Panthers, he never had a chance. Exposing the Giants’ weakness against the run, fullback DeShaun Foster ran wild, gaining 151 yards as the Panthers kept the ball for almost 43 minutes. Rarely getting the ball, Eli could only manage 18 passes, completing 11 and, behind all game, heaving three interceptions in a 23–0 slap in the face.

As Peyton could have told him, progress was measured in pain. Indeed, both Manning brothers could vouch now that ending a great season in the shame of defeat was about the lowest a man could sink and still be able to get up and think straight again. But he had to, no matter how often.

After the physical beating the Colts took from the Pats, Polian drafted some rough-tough Big Ten defensive backs, Marlin Jackson and Kelvin Hayden, to complement his already hard-hitting safeties, Mike Doss and Bob Sanders. Dungy would use a four-tackle rotation that would blunt the rush, and linebacker Cato June had more leeway to roam around and lay people out. But nothing changed on the other side of the ball. The passing attack was the Colts’ signature, with schemes built on precise Manning play-action fakes, a quick squaring up, and a perfectly thrown lead to a receiver running patterns without deviation.

This was what had made Manning unstoppable—except, it seemed, to the Patriots. As it happened, though, when Indianapolis faced them midway through the 2005 season, in Foxborough, the tide had shifted. The Colts had ripped through their first seven games, giving up fewer than 10 points in four of them, running up 437 yards against the Houston Texans. The Pats, again racked by injuries, were only 4–3. For a change, the weather was good. Dungy, making a subtle but important distinction, called the game “probably a must-win for the Patriots, and more of a must-win for us from a mental standpoint.”¹³

And so it was that the world turned upside down. Manning had the Colts ahead on the first drive, which ended with a one-yard touchdown toss to Harrison. With nine seconds left in the half, he found Wayne with a 10-yard scoring pass to go in leading 21–7. The icing was a fourth-quarter, 30-yard strike to Harrison, making the final tally 40–21. The Colts outgained the Brady bunch 453–288. Peyton, with time to set up and throw and the Pats’ elbows a safe distance from the receivers, went 28 of 37 for 321 yards and three touchdowns, making Brady’s three seem trivial. The title of the Sports Illustrated game story was trenchant: “Peyton, Finally.”

The rub was that the regular season was such a breeze that, other than routing the AFC’s other big power, the Steelers, 26–7 on a Monday night late in November, there was no other game that was crucial. This was a problem for Dungy, who could sense a decreasing intensity. They would finish a league-best 14–2, scoring the second-most points and giving up the second fewest. Peyton, first-team All-Pro for the third straight year, had the lowest passing yardage of his career, 3,747, due to frequently playing with the lead, but with 28 touchdowns and 10 picks, had a 104.1 rating. James ran for 1,506 yards, Harrison caught 12 touchdowns. But there were ominous signs, and one kick to the gut administered by another cold, hard, irrational dose of reality.

On December 22, Dungy’s 18-year-old son James was found dead by his girlfriend in the bedroom of his Tampa college dorm, a belt tied to his neck, hanging from a ceiling fan. As with Buddy Manning, there was no explanation that would suffice; two months before, depressed, he had overdosed on hydrocodone, but after recovering seemed to be okay. Coming as it did just before Christmas and the new year, his death seemed particularly tragic. Dungy’s soft-spoken words could have made the hardest man weep. “I would want America to know our kids need us,” he said. “Spend as much time with your kids as you can. Enjoy them. Be with them.”¹⁴ Something Buddy probably would have wanted to do more than anything.

The Colts vowed to win for the coach. But unlike the Giants’ response to Mara’s death, the tragedy may have taken the brine out of them. Two days later, they lost their second straight, 28–13 to the Seahawks. And they still were not right entering the playoffs. The first round would bring in the Steelers, itching for revenge and having won five in a row, including their first playoff game, against the Bengals. Pittsburgh’s fist-faced coach, Bill Cowher, had a team suited to its home city—tough, rusty nails and trench players—and in Roethlisberger a jumbo-sized quarterback as skilled as Manning (and similarly flawed; after a more serious transgression than Peyton’s, he would be suspended for six games in 2010 after being accused of, but never charged with, rape).¹⁵

When the game began, the Steelers got the jump. Big Ben threw two first-quarter touchdowns and controlled the ball. Peyton, sacked five times—twice by linebacker James Farrior—and his running game stuffed, could not get untracked until it was 21–3 entering the fourth quarter. Mounting a furious comeback, he sent a pass soaring to Dallas Clark, who snagged it for a 50-yard touchdown. Another touchdown and it was 21–18 with 4:29 left, the crowd up and screaming. The Colts held, but Peyton, from his own 18 with 2:31 left, faltered and was sacked twice—the last on fourth down at the Colts two. All the Steelers needed to do was take it in from there—but the ridiculously reliable future Hall of Famer Jerome Bettis fumbled, and Nick Harper—who the night before had been stabbed, fortunately not seriously, by his wife in a domestic dispute—ran it the other way, stopped only by Roethlisberger, who lumbered down the field after him and just did trip him up at the Colts 42.

With stunning capriciousness, this had become one more insane game involving the Manning family. Given another chance to tie or win, Peyton hit Wayne for 22, Harrison for eight more, to the Steelers 28. Two passes to Wayne were incomplete. Now, with 21 seconds left, on fourth down, in came Vanderjagt, the guy savaged by his own quarterback. From the 46, he sent the kick on its way . . . and it sailed wide right. As Colts cursed and crumbled to the ground in agony, Vanderjagt went mental. In a rage, he yanked his helmet off and slammed it on the turf, incurring an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, lamenting later, perhaps tweaking Dungy, “I guess the Lord forgot about our football team.”

Peyton, who threw for 290 yards in vain, barely knew which cliché to dust off about his latest failure, though he did know he wasn’t going to condemn Vanderjagt. He, and all the Colts, echoed Dungy in saying they couldn’t have been any better positioned. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said, eyes glazed, in the morgue-like locker room, “how much I studied these guys over the last two weeks. It’s disappointing. . . . At this point, it is hard to swallow. But I’m going to keep trying, that’s all I can say.”¹⁶ The reporters wouldn’t let it go at that. One asked about the lack of protection he had received from the Colts’ offensive line. His jaw tightening, he seemed for a second to think of how to respond, then just gave up and ducked it.

“I’m trying to be a good teammate here,” he uttered with a faint grin, saying more than he likely intended. Then, needing to go a step further, “Let’s just say we had some problems in protection. I’ll give Pittsburgh credit for the blitzes and their rush. Those guys rushed. But we did have some protection problems.”

That didn’t sit well with some crowded into that locker room. One, the Los Angeles Times’s J. A. Adande, wrote that the response, guarded as it was, “sold out his offensive line” and “whether you’re a good loser or a bad loser, the problem is you still go down as a loser. There has never been a more sympathetic figure in defeat than Indianapolis Colt Coach Tony Dungy. . . . But his quarterback, Peyton Manning, lost points by his willingness to point fingers everywhere but at himself. Different vibes, same unavoidable conclusion. They didn’t get it done in the playoffs. Again.”¹⁷

One barometer of where each Manning stood when the 2006 season commenced would be the very first game of the season, when the Colts invaded Giants Stadium. Not only would this be the first time brothers had faced each other in an NFL game at quarterback, but never before had the two of them competed against each other in a real game, let alone an NFL marquee game on Sunday night. They did now because the league knew how high the TV ratings would be, and it would be in the Meadowlands, in the eye of the New York media circus, guaranteeing what Sports Illustrated touted as “pro football’s most hyped season opener, ever.” The magazine’s story, titled “May the Best Manning Win,” cleverly paired photos of the brothers to make it seem like they were pointing at each other.¹⁸

Publicly, they professed no particular emotional investment in the game. “For the other 52 guys on each team,” said the poker-faced Eli, “it’s a football game, not a [story].” Peyton also had other matters to worry about. Edgerrin James had taken a $30 million deal from the Cardinals—although this was good timing for the Colts, since James was never again the same and they mined a gem in the draft, LSU fullback Joseph Addai. Peyton, a year older, had one fantasy football columnist pronouncing, “His stock has dropped slightly from last year,” though he was still rated the top QB.¹⁹ And Eli was being given little chance. A former Giant player was anonymously quoted before the game as saying that Coughlin and Hufnagel—in words that echoed Accorsi’s criticism of the Ole Miss coaches—“have him thinking so much at the line, I don’t even know how he gets through his reads. How can you not play stiff?” Eli admitted that, upon reaching the pros, Peyton was no longer a tutor. “Before, I would study him on film and ask him questions about what he saw and compare notes about other defenses,” he said. “That’s all stopped.”²⁰

The New York hype-makers were typically loopy. Steve Serby predicted that Eli would best Peyton in the Super Bowl that year and that, given the pressures of the New York market vis à vis Indianapolis, the heat was more on Eli to win.²¹ Diplomatic as ever, Archie, who would watch with Olivia from a VIP box, said he’d be happy with a tie.

As the game rolled out, Peyton went up 13–0, but Eli battled back, finding Burress from 34 yards out, then Shockey from 15 to make it 16–14 after three quarters. But Peyton was always a step ahead. A 20-yard completion to Harrison and a face mask penalty set up a Rhodes touchdown. Eli then led a long drive capped by a touchdown run by Brandon Jacobs, who was drafted that year out of Auburn to replace the retiring Tiki Barber and at six foot four and 265 pounds was a human SUV. That cut it to 23–21, and Adam Vinatieri—who had bolted the Patriots and signed as a free agent with the Colts, who were quite willing to let Vanderjagt go as a free agent—booted a 32-yard field goal with a minute left, but it wasn’t over until Eli’s bomb to Burress fell incomplete on the last play. Peyton, who passed for 276 yards to Eli’s 247, had cause to say he was proud to be Eli’s brother that night. He could see up close how Eli could make a team, any team, sweat bullets.

The two of them went their own ways. The next week, Eli had another thriller, against the Eagles. Down 24–7 at the half, he again proved how good he was at coming back, going 31 of 42 for 371 yards and three touchdowns—his 31-yard dart to Burress winning it in overtime, 30–24. By midseason the Giants were 6–2. But then it all crumbled. Eli was awful in a 38–20 mauling by the Bears, then lost the next three, the last a soul crusher to the Cowboys. Down 20–13 in the fourth quarter, Eli took them a 17-play, seven-minute drive, tying it on a five-yard pass to Burress with a minute left. However, the Giants failed to cover a 47-yard heave by Tony Romo to Jason Witten, and a field goal won it with one second on the clock.

Further hobbled by Burress’s groin injury, they ended at 8–8, a step back that a cheap wild-card playoff berth couldn’t salvage, though the Eagles had to endure what the Colts had gone through in the opener. After they pulled ahead 20–10, Eli once more clawed back, his 11-yard pass to Burress tying it with five minutes to go. Now, though, veteran journeyman Jeff Garcia, who took over when McNabb was injured during the season, handed off to Brian Westbrook six times and completed one pass to move close enough for another field goal with three seconds left—to nail it down, 23–20. The closeness of these matches was in itself a marker of how close Eli—who passed for over 3,200 yards and 24 touchdowns, but with 18 interceptions—was to crossing over into Peyton territory. But if few were ready to recognize that, it was only because the season would play out as Peyton’s own deliverance, at long last.

The ’06 season was a reckoning for Peyton and Harrison, who in December would become the fourth player to catch 1,000 passes and was behind only Jerry Rice, Cris Carter, and Tim Brown on the all-time list, all while possibly not speaking 100 words. “I’m not going to be loud, but I do talk,” he insisted, amusing teammates with superstitions like sitting in the same left-row seat on planes and placing a white towel on the sideline bench, marking his—and only his—spot. His work habits in practice were even more maniacal than Manning’s; his favorite line was “I get paid to practice. I play the games for free.”²² He, Manning, and Jeff Saturday were the gravitational center of the team, the latter a real rags-to-riches story. Cut by the Ravens in ’98, Saturday was a 325-pound undrafted free agent who was working in a hardware store when Polian rescued him; he would play with the team for 12 years, an All-Pro six times, Offensive Lineman of the Year in ’07.

But the big buzz of the year was Addai. Not starting any game that season, he swiveled and slithered for over 1,000 yards, leading all rookies and tying a rookie record with four touchdowns in one game. Of Ghanaian descent, his braided hair streaming down his back, he was a picaresque sight blasting through or around the line. He was of much help to Peyton, who wasn’t quite as sharp as the year before but, like all the Colts, used the too-early peaking the year before as a lesson to hold something back in the tank for when it really counted. They still won their first nine, but many were close, including the most satisfying—27–20 over Brady, again in Foxborough. Not only did he outpass Brady 326–201, but the latter was intercepted four times. A new trope emerged, that the Colts had Brady and Belichick’s number. But this didn’t seem of great significance when, in their next game, they just squeaked by the lowly Bills 17–16. They were 9–0 at that point, making a joke of the league—and then, going into safe mode, they lost their way, falling in four of the next six games, blown out in one, 44–17, by the Jaguars, who rushed for an amazing 375 yards, forcing Manning to throw 50 times. Bill Polian was so despondent afterward that he told Jim Irsay, “It’s over.”

“What are you talking about?” Irsay shot back. “We’re in the playoffs. It can’t be over.”

Polian persisted. “Too many injuries. It’s over.”²³

Winning their division was a given—since 2002, they had led the AFC South all but seven weeks. Despite losing three of the last five games, Peyton finished the regular season with the usual Pro Bowl numbers—4,397 yards, 31 touchdowns, nine interceptions, and a league-best 101.1 rating, feeding Harrison 12 touchdowns—though he only garnered two MVP votes, putting him well behind LaDainian Tomlinson. But while the Colts had the third-ranked offense, the soft spot was their defense against the run, which was dead last. Clearly, people in Indianapolis were nervous when the wild-card Chiefs rolled in for the first playoff game. The game was no blowout, Peyton allowing the Chiefs to stay close with three picks, but the Colts did put the pieces together. Peyton went 30 of 38 for 268 yards, his late touchdown to Wayne clinching a 23–8 victory. The suspect defense, meanwhile, yielded just 126 yards, a mere 44 rushing, and had four sacks.

They now had to go to Baltimore to play the 13–3 Ravens, whose defense could make grown men tremble and its offense make them giggle. Giving up just 12.6 points a game, at their core was their linebackers’ shifting, disguised sets. All were Pro Bowlers, anchored by the scabrous man in the middle, Ray Lewis, who could psych you out just doing his pregame war dance, which looked more like a full-body seizure. If receivers could get to the secondary unmolested, they would encounter two more All-Pros, Ed Reed and Chris McAlister. They were a mouthy bunch, Lewis and fellow linebacker Bart Scott taunting Addai, whose gentle demeanor and ancestry apparently translated into being not tough, smart, or even American enough to beat them. Scott blathered, “It’s going to be a painful day for Joseph Addai.”²⁴ Defensive coordinator and circus clown Rex Ryan added, “If you don’t disrupt Peyton’s timing and his rhythm, you have no chance. But as big a challenge as we face in Peyton, he faces a bigger challenge in us.”²⁵ Doing their part, Ravens fans showered the Colts with verbal abuse when they arrived for the game.²⁶

Peyton busied himself watching film—but not just of the Ravens. Because they used a plethora of finely tuned defensive formations, he ordered up the film of the Patriots’ first-round playoff win over the Jets, who also used a lot of sets only to be flummoxed by Brady with a hurry-up offense. “I came in and told [Jim Caldwell], ‘Let’s look at the film to see how Brady did that,’” he recalled. “I knew that against the Ravens if you don’t throw changeups, you can’t win.”²⁷ Of course, the Colts used their own no-huddle scheme; now, though, Manning would forgo all the crazy signal calling. That week, it went into the playbook under the name “The Quick.”

Played in balmy 63-degree weather, the defenses swarmed. Both Manning and Steve McNair were intercepted twice. But the Colts, four-point underdogs, kept the edge, with Peyton indeed quick, keeping the Ravens from having time to alter defenses or bring in substitute players. He didn’t throw much, and his stats were mundane against that brutal defense. His biggest passes were, at times, completed even with Ravens hanging off receivers. But the Colts never trailed, aided immensely by a running game that gained 100 yards, while the defense read and reacted almost perfectly. With the only scoring coming from field goals, Vinatieri’s five kicks—the fourth giving him a record 33 in playoff games—certified the 15–6 victory. That, however, seemed a lark compared with the next test looming for Manning: the AFC title game, January 21, which fate decreed could only have been played against his blood enemy.

This time, the Colts would meet Brady and the Patriots in the controlled climate of the RCA Dome, and it provoked hysteria around town. For Peyton, the game required a balancing act, ego against history. There was no way he could be overconfident—not when history reminded him of the heartaches he had suffered in two playoff games against Brady and Belichick, and certainly not with his middling numbers against the Chiefs and Ravens: one touchdown, five picks. Meanwhile, the Pats beat the Chargers in the divisional playoff round 24–21, a San Diego fumble and missed field goal letting New England survive Brady’s three interceptions.

Dungy said he never saw Peyton put more effort into practices than those preceding that game. Manning and Harrison had a pact in practice: the ball never could hit the ground; if it did, they would do the same pass over and over. None did, but they reran every pattern numerous times anyway. This, of course, was his meat: preparation, execution, an almost extrasensory feel for where to throw and when. “Whoever they play,” Ravens cornerback Corey Ivy had said, “Peyton will be ready. He’s the best out there. He knew what we were going to do before we did. How do you prepare for that?”

Few knew, however, that he wasn’t too proud to borrow from Brady’s methods. Or that in the off-season they had sent emails back and forth and played golf together. Amusingly now—though not so much to Brady—they had persuaded the league to change how game balls were prepared. “We’re both kind of football junkies,” Peyton said. When they met up on those occasions, “we’re usually discussing football, trying to improve our games.”²⁸

The Colts wouldn’t play hurry-up in the game, since the Pats were prepared for it. In fact, it seemed that the Pats had the fates. Early on, Brady tried to run it in and fumbled, but teammate Logan Mankins fell on it in the end zone. Down 14–3 in the second quarter, Peyton threw short for Harrison—but it was intercepted by cornerback Asante Samuel, who ran it back for a 39-yard touchdown. Behind 21–6 at halftime, Manning began the first possession of the second half with a 14-play drive that took it to the Pats one. He then ran it over himself. On the next drive, a pass interference penalty again put it at the one, and on a tackle-eligible play, he flipped a touchdown to Dan Klecko; the two-point conversion tied the game, 21–21.

So now it was a new game. The kickoff was returned 80 yards and Brady threw a six-yard TD pass. That should perhaps have, well, deflated the Colts. But in the fourth quarter, in a remarkable turnabout, Rhodes fumbled into the end zone—only this time, Saturday pounced on it for the tying touchdown. The Pats’ new kicker, Stephen Gostkowski, and Vinatieri matched field goals. Then Gostkowski nailed another, and Peyton took the ball at their 20 with 2:17 to go, yet another unbearable defeat awaiting failure. He passed to Wayne for two first downs to get into tying field-goal range, but after Addai ran it to the doorstep, on third-and-two from the three, 1:02 left, he shot up the middle through a massive hole excavated by a Saturday block that drove nose tackle Vince Wilfork out of the play—a wipeout that had a giddy Saturday trying to convince reporters to officially call it “The Block.”

The touchdown nearly tore the dome off. Now it was Brady who was reduced to a desperation fling, and his interception ended it, 38–34, Manning having led the biggest comeback in conference title game history, completing 27 of 47 for 349 yards to Brady’s 21 of 34 for 232. With the Indianapolis Colts punching their first Super Bowl ticket, Peyton could now console Brady—whose luck ran out, several passes muffed by receivers—on the crowded field, oozing the same clichés Brady had so often dispensed to him. After both teams had left their locker rooms, they met up again to shmooze; Brandon Stiley took a picture of them on his cell phone, smiling in unison. So it was left to the Patriots defensive backs to grouse, Ellis Hobbs insisting, “We let them off the hook.”²⁹

It had taken Peyton nine years to get to the summit. Only a fool would have wondered if he was ready. As Dungy said, his time was now. The local papers were dutiful courtiers, the Star blowing kisses with headlines like “Manning, Colts Break Through with 2:17 of Magic” and “Magic Manning.” Wrote the AP, “A comeback, a drive, a legacy. And, yes—finally—Peyton Manning gets his Super Bowl trip.” SI, a Manning courtier from way back, gave him the cover again, with the line “Yes, He Can.” And yet, there was lingering doubt that could only be removed by him, in Super Bowl XLI in Miami’s Dolphin Stadium on February 4, with 100 million pairs of eyeballs trained on his every move.

The last remaining obstacle would be the NFC champion Chicago Bears. Not nearly as fierce as the Ditka-led team that had last gotten to the summit, the Bears, embodied by middle linebacker Brian Urlacher, a hot-wired madman, still had the best defense in the conference, but the surprise was quarterback Rex Grossman, who had avoided his usual mistakes and injuries and thrown 23 touchdowns. The big boy in the backfield, fullback Thomas Jones, rushed for 1,210 yards. After going 13–3, they edged the Seahawks in overtime in the first playoff game, then blew away the Saints. Much like Dungy, Chicago coach Lovie Smith was a low-key motivator who had been Dungy’s linebackers coach in Tampa Bay. Not only were the two men close, but this would be the first time both Super Bowl coaches were African-American, and, as one scribe noted, “two nice men who have shown the world a head coach doesn’t have to be a raving lunatic to reach a Super Bowl.”³⁰ The bettors made the Colts 6½-point favorites. And, in truth, the Colts’ biggest problem was overconfidence, combined with a natural letdown after the Pats game. As the team leader, Peyton felt he needed to go full Bolshevik. Before the trip to Miami, after Bill Polian ruled the hotel off-limits to all but players’ families, he stood up and objected, “I don’t think we should let anyone up in the rooms,” he intoned. “This is a business trip, and I don’t want any distractions. I don’t want any crying kids next to me while I’m trying to study.”³¹

This was not a popular position. As cornerback Nick Harper recalled, “We were heated. People were saying, ‘We’re grown-ass men. We’ve got wives and kids, and we’ll make those decisions for ourselves.’” But they knew the deal. On the Colts, the show tune was Whatever Peyton wants, Peyton gets. Indeed, when he demanded a film-study room at the hotel, the swank Harbor Club Resort, team brass rented another floor and set one up. Among themselves, some Colts began to grumble about the “Peyton Rules” and that the team should be called the Indianapolis Peytons.³²

As it was, Manning, while a popular teammate, was never really one of the guys. Players liked to prick him for his cultural retardation—in the iPod era, his idea of high tech was a cheap CD player he took onto bus and plane rides, listening to the same country tunes. Reggie Wayne even took pictures of it, in disbelief. A good sport, Peyton would suck up the jokes, pronouncing himself that his tastes were “retro.” But when some Colts took to South Beach, no one asked him along, not only because they knew he wouldn’t go, but because they liked it when he wasn’t around. As assorted Manning relatives partied at the South Shore Club—Ashley telling him she was “having the best time of my life”—he ate room service, studied the game plan, and nursed a sore thumb he kept quiet about.

The day of the game, it was a very un-Miamian 67 degrees, rainy, and gusty. After waiting around in the rain for the endless pregame pomp and introductions to wrap up, the Colts went out as if in a funk, doing little but watch as the opening kickoff was returned 92 yards by the Bears’ Devin Hester. As the heavily pro-Bear crowd hollered, the Colts made a profusion of misplays, with receivers running the wrong routes and Manning underthrowing Harrison and being intercepted. It took half the first quarter for them to awaken. On a third-and-10 from his 47, Dungy allowed Manning to call the play. He chose, in Colt parlance, 66 DX Pump, a fake to freeze the secondary, followed by a deep middle bomb to Wayne. A fraction of a second before he was hit, he let fly. It wobbled a bit but was true. Wayne, running an in-and-go slant, later said the pass “seemed like it hung in the air forever.” It came down in his hands and he streaked into the end zone—a 53-yard bolt.

The Colts were still a bit skittish, though. Vinatieri missed the extra point, and after the Bears fumbled away the kickoff, Manning did the same, coughing it up under pressure, and Grossman promptly hit Muhsin Muhammad for a TD and a 14–6 lead. Paul Zimmerman called this mess of a first quarter a “freak show.” But thereafter, the Colts’ game plan began to grind the Bears down, applying a championship formula: ball control. Both teams used variations of the Cover 2 defense, which drops a linebacker into deep zone coverage. Knowing this, Peyton again kept his throws primarily short to medium-range. Over the game, 13 went short left, 12 short right, and seven short middle—of the 32 attempts, 23 were completed. Of the remaining six, three were thrown into the deep middle, two for completions—one for 17 yards to Clark, and the big strike to Wayne for 53. Rhodes ripped out 113 yards on 21 carries. Addai had 77 on 19 and 10 catches, the most ever by a running back in a Super Bowl.

The Bears took a different approach. While Jones put up 112 yards rushing, they came on only 15 carries because Grossman believed he could beat the Colts deep. So the Colts blitzed like crazy, at times using defensive backs on blitzes. Grossman sent deep spirals through the wind and rain seven times, completing exactly one. He went 20 of 28, but for a mere 165 yards, only two of his 20 attempts clicking for more than 14 yards. He was intercepted twice. Unable to sustain drives, they were run ragged by the Colts, who controlled the ball for 38 minutes. Meanwhile, gradually racking up numbers, his linemen and backs walling him off from the Bears’ pass-rushing stunts, Peyton threw 38 times, completing 25, for 247 yards. Like a slowly invading army, long drives led to three Vinatieri field goals and a short Rhodes TD run. By the fourth quarter, it was still close, 22–17, but the Bears were gassed, and a 56-yard interception return by the Colts’ Kelvin Hayden and a subsequent pick by Sanders iced the 29–17 triumph.

Up in the VIP boxes, Archie, Olivia, Eli, Cooper, Ashley, and all the family who could fit let loose—even Eli, though typically with less relish. The Colts gathered at midfield—the absurdity of doing these rituals on the field made obvious by everyone’s desire to get out of the rain—for the ceremonies presenting Jim Irsay with the Vince Lombardi Trophy and Peyton with the MVP. After the presentations, Peyton bundled both trophies and embraced them as the rain poured. Naturally, the postgame scene revolved around him. His face a mix of relief and redemption, sweat seemed to mingle with tears forming in his red eyes. “Everybody did their part,” he said, a statement he had only dreamed about making so many times before. “We worked together. I’m proud to be part of this team.”³³

Ghosts hung heavy in the locker room, tempering the joy with sadness. During the season, prompting memories of James Dungy, Reggie Wayne’s brother died in an automobile accident, and defensive tackle Montae Reagor was out for most of the season with injuries sustained in another car crash. The rumbling about the Peyton Rules notwithstanding, Irsay took to the podium and said, “We’re so tight-knit. Our bonds have been forged through some real-life tragedies, and those things make you stronger.” Then there was Dungy, testifying to the power of prayer and his quarterback, no less than an instrument of God, as he made it. “I don’t think there’s anything you can say now, other than this guy is a Hall of Fame player and one of the greatest players to ever play the game.” No one would have argued the point. Bill Polian went further. “There is no Super Bowl held here without Peyton,” he said. “There is no Lucas Oil Stadium without Peyton. Without Peyton, the Colts would probably be [relocated] in L.A. right now.”

Long after everyone else had cleared out for a victory party at the hotel and the streets back in Hoosierland had been jammed in celebration, Peyton put on his dark suit and tie and shuffled out, a winner. Outside of the stadium, the Colt bus waited for him, his teammates beyond impatient. But he lingered a last minute when he saw in the dim light Archie and Cooper, who had also waited for him in the rain. Cooper began trotting toward his brother. “Dad! Come on!” he yelled to Archie, whose knees made him lag behind. Together, they all hugged in silence, a puddle at their feet. They said a few words and parted. Now, his suit ruined, Peyton was finally ready to climb aboard the bus.

The best part may have been reading the now-unanimous verdict in the media that, as the AP game story read, “Peyton Manning answered the final question. Yes, he can win the big one—and yes, he can do it in a big way, too.” Sports Illustrated hailed the “Colt Heroes” on its cover, under yet another vibrant shot of Peyton, who was on that cover so often, the magazine might as well have been called Peyton Illustrated. There was, however, a mild clucking of irritation among the Colts that he was hogging the spotlight. “Everyone thinks this is about Peyton’s legacy,” said Dwight Freeney, “but listen—this is a 53-man team. Peyton doesn’t do everything by himself, and at the end of the day defense wins championships.”

He was kidding himself. For a quarterback with self-promotional skills, to win one of these things is a windfall. Even before, Manning had established his entrepreneurial pipes. Now, noted one business writer, his “endorsement price could jump 10 to 20% [and] marketers say . . . he still can increase his appeal with the non-sports audience.”³⁴ To the NFL writ large, he was the main attraction. Not Brady. Not the crumbling Favre. At 30, he had gone where no Manning had, and as the one with the most to gain—but also the most to lose. Like any other addiction, winning had diminishing returns; it was more fleeting than losing, and set up the deepest falls from grace, far deeper than any mooning scandal could have ever precipitated. Even as he left Miami with that shiny trophy and all those headlines, about to spend the next months on a treadmill of appearances and supplemental award banquets, he felt under the gun to keep winning.

At the apex of his career, he went to the Pro Bowl a week later in Honolulu, perhaps a bit too full of himself. Joining in on some locker room byplay, he began ribbing Michael Strahan about his recent divorce. Hearing this, the bull-necked Fox football analyst Jay Glazer, a New York guy friendly with Strahan, wasn’t amused and cursed out Manning, who, with a friend, started coming at him until a buddy of Glazer’s, a mixed martial arts fighter, came over and Peyton quickly backed down. Glazer would later smirk that if the fight had happened, Peyton would have lasted “about six or seven seconds.” He added that he and Manning put it behind them.³⁵

Indeed, it seemed that no one—at least in the game or the media—could stay mad at Peyton Manning for long. Not teammates, not opponents. Even Ryan Leaf looked back and conceded that, unlike himself, Manning “handled everything just like he was supposed to.”³⁶ For the Manning brand, nothing could have been a better selling point.