CHAPTER 21

ONE DOWN, ONE UP

Peyton Manning now faced a crossroads. While the surgery on his neck, done at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, did not affect his timetable of preparation, he was a year from the end of his contract—which, even with a salary of $15.8 million due in 2010, was a bargain. Now, his client having had two surgeries in service to the Colts without missing a single game, Tom Condon let it be known that the next deal would need to be big: nine figures, a budget buster by all measures. In 2009, Jim Irsay was affably saying, “With Peyton, it’s about the last thing you worry about. You know that he’s going to be with the top guys at the position. It comes down to just getting things worked out and moving things forward.” However, he added, “I expect it to quietly get done, but there are no conversations going on with the season going on.”¹

That was a clue that all the sonnets meant nothing when a quarterback ages another year, even a quarterback who had missed exactly one regular-season play because of injury and taken 11,623 of 12,047 snaps entering the new season. As the roster turned over, young players would need to be kept happy. At the same time, the clock was now ticking on a highly significant factor, the end of the players’ collective bargaining agreement with the league. The union was demanding a higher salary cap, naturally, but the league was starting to stand firm, or firmer. Talk was getting around that there might be another lockout before the ’11 season, which would freeze all expiring contracts, leaving Manning in limbo. To be sure, he wanted to stay a Colt, something Irsay wanted, too. In the sports culture, Manning was inviolate; the Wall Street Journal earnestly reported that there were 106 pets in the US named after Peyton Manning, compared with 32 after Drew Brees.² (It didn’t say how many were named for Tom Brady.) When he came to summer camp for the 2010 season, he was the old Bolshevik, pissed off at every botched play in practice, keeping the workouts going for as long as he deemed necessary.

Already having made the Colts totally pass-reliant, he had a newer agenda for himself, which would not coincidentally help to keep his value high: passing for geyser-like numbers. This was in line with the newest stage of football evolution, the game having become nearly a pass-off between the best quarterbacks trying to keep pace with each other—at first a product of the West Coast offense gone amok, starting with a flurry of short passes, followed by Brees bypassing the shorter stuff to chuck long. Back in Archie’s day, when fewer plays were run, a 4,000-yard season was the unreachable star; Joe Namath got there in ’67 during a 14-game season in the pass-crazy AFL. In the ’80s and ’90s, when it became child’s play—in 2009 alone, 10 QBs did it—5,000 became the new goal, reached only by Dan Marino in ’84. Then came Brees, swinging the 5K door open in ’08, daring everyone else in the brethren to step through. Not one to be left behind, and with his pride and future riding on going higher, Peyton—who had already gone over 4,000 a record 10 times—was prepared to go for it. In truth, he didn’t have much choice, given that, as the Star’s beat man, Mike Chappell, wrote, “the Colts’ running game has hit rock bottom.”³

The season began ominously with a 34–24 loss to the Houston Texans. Next came Manning Bowl II, on another Sunday night, after another round of pregame hype and pain-in-the-neck questions for Peyton and Eli about how consumed they were supposed to be by these matches. This one, Eli said, was “going to be fun,” unlike the first, when he was a bit overwhelmed.

The game was on Peyton’s turf this time, and the Colts had the good timing to show that the “rock bottom” running game had some life in it. Addai and Brown tore up the Giants defense, gaining 160 yards on 43 carries, giving Peyton openings to rack up another 255 yards passing and three more touchdowns, one a 50-yard bomb to Clark. Eli had his own bomb, 54 yards to Mario Manningham, but it was 24–0 Colts at the half, ending not a second too soon at 38–14, cameras encircling the brothers as they embraced at midfield. Both would go on to routinely excellent seasons, though Peyton rose to a level surreal even for him.

Still, this was no romp for the Colts. Despite his fireworks every week, the running game and the run defense often collapsed, making for some long afternoons. In November they lost three straight, the first to the Pats, 31–28 in Foxborough—Manning nailing four touchdowns to Brady’s two, but also throwing three picks in a comeback that fell just short. Another late comeback, against the Cowboys, was lost in overtime with Manning having thrown four interceptions. At that point, they were 6–6. They saved their season by winning the last four to take the division, but three were close calls. The first playoff round, the wild-card game against another of Rex Ryan’s overachieving Jets teams, looked like a mismatch. Manning, even after losing Dallas Clark during the season with a broken wrist, had ravaged the league, having thrown for 4,700 yards, averaged 42.3 passes per game, and completed 66.3 percent, with 33 touchdowns against 17 interceptions.

But the Jets posed a danger because their running game was fourth-best in the league, while the Colts’ run defense was in the bottom 10. New York’s defense gave up the sixth-fewest yards. And so it was that, after Peyton put the Colts ahead with a 57-yard touchdown pass to Garçon, the Jets controlled the clock, running for 169 yards. Trailing 14–10 late in the fourth quarter, the Colts inched back and took the lead by two on a 50-yard field goal with 53 seconds left. Yet it was the maligned Sanchez who made the big plays, the last an 18-yard pass to Braylon Edwards with 29 seconds left to put the Jets in field-goal range, Peyton visibly angered on the sideline. As Bob Kravitz wrote in the Star, before the play, an “exasperated” Manning—not knowing why Caldwell called time, thereby giving the Jets a chance to discuss the play—“lifted both arms into the air, a clear gesture that said, ‘What are we doing?’”⁴ The field goal won it with three seconds left, 17–16.

Even by the standard of crushing Manning losses, this one was excruciating. Here was Peyton Manning, on his own field, having to congratulate Mark Sanchez for beating him in a big one. However, things happen for a reason, and for numerous reasons this inglorious nadir would turn out to be more significant than anyone thought that day. Because no one thought it was the last time they would see Peyton Manning in a Colts uniform.

Neither Manning brother made it past the first week of January. Like Eli, the Giants of 2010 were an enigma wrapped in an interception. They had a high-voltage offense and a stingy defense. Eli had his second straight 4,000-yard season, with 31 touchdowns. Ahmad Bradshaw rushed for 1,235 yards, and he and Brandon Jacobs combined for 17 touchdowns. Hakeem Nicks caught 11 touchdown passes. They began 1–2, but at mid-season they seemed to be cruising, their record 6–2, their fifth straight win a 41–7 blowout of the Seahawks—on the road, no less. But then they drooped, losing four of the next seven games and finishing at 10–6—good, but not good enough for a playoff berth. If one had to pinpoint the most revealing stat, it was Eli’s 25 interceptions.

For Peyton, this winter would be eventful. Ashley, who had become pregnant before the last season, found out she was going to have twins, and on March 31 she gave birth in an Indianapolis hospital to a son, Marshall Williams, and a daughter, Mosley Thompson. Suddenly, Peyton had a brood of his own, and he took them home to the Garden District, beseeching Eli to give him advice on fatherhood. But he had scant time to learn before he would find himself in a hospital again. When the brothers were throwing a ball around in the backyard one day, Eli told Peyton he was short-arming his tosses, not completing the motion. Peyton said it was because he was feeling pain that started from his neck and ran down his back. He had been putting off seeing a doctor, but now he did, fearing that, as doctors warned him long ago after Cooper’s diagnosis, his own latent spinal deformity had risen up. An MRI of his spine did not show stenosis but confirmed that he had a herniated disk and would need surgery on his neck.

He tried to believe it was not a big deal. The doctors said the surgery would be minimally invasive, and he only told the Colts about it in late May, days before he went into Northwestern Hospital again, to be operated on by the same surgeons who had relieved the pinched nerve in his neck. It all went fine. He woke up in his room without the neck pain he had lived with so long, and although his right arm was still numb, doctors explained that the disk had been pressing on a nerve, and it would take time for residual numbness to go away. Impatient that it was still there weeks later, he went back in for follow-up surgery amid such secrecy that there were no press reports of it. Doctors reassured him he’d be good to go when the season began.

With the owners having locked the players out in February as negotiations on a new CBA limped along, he would have the luxury of privacy as he worked his way back into shape. “There is plenty of time for recovery,” he said, downplaying the surgery by saying that, had it not been for the lockout, he wouldn’t have gone under the knife at all.⁵ Privately, though, the doctors—who were not affiliated with the league or the Colts and, in the interest of medical confidentiality, could not exchange information with the team—changed their rosy tune and told him he had maybe a 50-50 chance of playing again, and that the surgery might not work at all.

At the time, he was prohibited from contact with the team, anyway. In fact, no one knew when or if football would be played again. With spring minicamps padlocked, the players had to find other ways and places to practice on their own. Eli and the Giants receivers did it on a high school field in Hoboken, New Jersey. Peyton found refuge all the way out in Colorado. As it happened, Todd Helton, whose brief, thorny bisection with him at Tennessee truly was a lot of water under the bridge, was in a similar situation, dealing with a degenerative back condition just as he signed his last contract with baseball’s Colorado Rockies. Reading of Peyton’s surgery, Helton invited him to Denver to work out with him at Coors Field during pregame and off-day hours and get treatment from trainers who knew how to rehabilitate throwing arms. He did, with a zipper scar on his neck. To keep from prying eyes, he and Helton began working out in an underground batting cage. The first time Peyton tossed a football to Helton, just 10 yards away, it bounced halfway there. Helton, believing Peyton was joking around, laughed.

“C’mon, man, quit kidding,” he said.

“Man, I wish I was,” Manning replied.⁶

He quickly grew despondent when the numbness in his arm refused to subside. Rather than the cocky character Helton had known, Peyton seemed a sad, even pathetic figure—“He walked different. He carried himself different”—who was so embarrassed about his throwing that “he had a hard time turning around to look at you.”

Back in Indianapolis, Irsay stalled on offering Manning a new contract. He had not kept his promise to make his quarterback the highest-paid player in history before the end of the previous season, and now that reports were drifting in about Peyton’s condition, he seemed to waver, saying, “No surgery is minor if it’s on you or your franchise quarterback.”⁷ Still, back in February, Polian had attached the franchise-player tag to Peyton, with the “exclusive” designation that prevented any other team from negotiating with him, and locked him in at $23.1 million for one year if a long-term deal wasn’t reached. But even before the surgery, the Star’s Mike Chappell, going off the reservation, had pondered, “Is it too early to start looking down the road?”—meaning drafting a quarterback, since the team had no viable alternative for a future without Manning.⁸

Irsay didn’t want to look down that road. He wanted to re-up Manning. He had to, lest he become the enemy in his own town, having invested $146 million in him so far. There was also Polian’s encomium about Manning after the championship Super Bowl, how he had saved the team from relocating. They did owe him, big. As a sop to Manning, Polian, now vice-chairman and grooming his son Chris to take over as GM, used his two top picks in the April draft on offensive linemen, leaving the likes of Andy Dalton and Colin Kaepernick on the board. Irsay put an offer of $100 million for five years on the table, saying hopefully, “He’s had things tougher than this before.” But then things started getting complicated.

First, there was the pertinent fact that Peyton was not recovering nicely. In fact, he wasn’t recovering at all, not that he and Tom Condon had any qualms about keeping that quiet. After quitting the humiliating workouts with Helton, Peyton had gone to Thibodeaux for the Manning Academy, mainly because those young quarterbacks had paid good money to mingle with him. But he never picked up a ball. One high school kid asked him to toss just one pass to him. “I just can’t,” he told him. “Eli will throw you one.”⁹ His depression was obvious to Archie and his brothers. “He’s not very good at disguising how he feels,” Cooper said. “You can hear it in the first hello and the last goodbye. I saw him vulnerable for the first time. And then I saw him get emotionally around the idea that, Hey, this may be too much to battle back from.”

Archie recalled Peyton asking him, “Am I gonna throw like a 40-year-old man?” According to Archie, “He didn’t want to be out there if he didn’t belong.” Archie was preparing to comfort his son if he chose to retire right then. Olivia, however, was more of a fighter. She told Peyton he owed it to himself to do all he could to get back, knowing how miserable he would be if he gave up without trying. There was no denying the task before him, which perhaps was the most burdensome any quarterback ever had to contend with, given his age and the perilous nature of spinal injuries. “The frustrating part,” Peyton would say, “was there was no one to call who had this, no other thrower. There was no protocol.”¹⁰

But the good son did as his mother told him. Virtually alone, he would be making it up as he went along, needing to relearn the mechanics of throwing, not to mention getting back that old confident swagger. When he decided he’d give it a shot, some around the league thought he was nuts. At first, however, the decision was made for the easiest of reasons: money—specifically, the money in the contract negotiations with the Colts. Talks had continued during the winter and spring, with the $100 million offer on the table. But then came the second complication. In July, the players and owners agreed to a new CBA, ending the lockout. The big change was that the salary cap would be limited to $120 million. That meant the $100 million was off the table, since it would leave little room for other signings. So Peyton did Irsay a favor. Brimming with altruism, he said he would take less—the proverbial “hometown discount,” for the good of the team. Brady, he said nobly, could have the league’s top salary, which, per his four-year, $72 million deal the year before, averaged out to $18 million, though he too had taken less on occasion for the same reason.

The deal was signed at the start of training camp, for $90 million over five years, with a $28 million signing bonus and $3 million roster bonus. It was $10 million off the nine-figure plateau Condon had once set as a floor, but not gruel, either; contrary to Peyton’s comments about ceding the top salary to Brady, he would own it, at least for a year. Irsay took to Twitter to proudly announce that Manning would make $69 million over the first three years of the contract, for a yearly average of $23 million—$26 million in ’11—highest in the game, as promised, leaving out that the last two years would each carry a salary of $10 million, dipping the average over the full life of the contract to $18 million, the same as Brady.¹¹ (These figures included bonuses; his actual base salary was kept low for cap purposes, at $3.4 million the first year. Brady would have a 2011 base of $5.7 million, bonuses bringing it up to $19.7 million. By this metric, Eli’s salary of $8.5 million would be the highest, but he was due to receive almost no bonuses.)¹²

The numbers were also temporary. When the league signed a new TV deal in 2014, it would raise each team’s income—and the salary cap—and permit contract renegotiation. All in all, then, it was a very good day for a quarterback who still couldn’t throw, and a very risky move for the Colts, who didn’t know that the man signing that contract could hardly feel the pen in his hand. The nerve connected to the disk that ran to his right arm still left his arm so numb that he could neither grip a ball nor a three-pound dumbbell in the gym. During the lockout, so desperate for relief, he had flown to Europe to consult doctors he had learned of online, boasting of miracle cures for spinal injuries; trying some with no luck, he would call the methods “voodoo.”

Now, in camp, feeling useless, he stayed in bed in his room in the dorm some days rather than doing anything else. Bob Kravitz had already written that Manning wouldn’t be ready to start the season. And now, with him kept out of practice and out of pads, working on throwing in private but with no good news ever coming out of it, the big issue in the media was the Colts’ failure to draft or trade for a reliable quarterback rather than having to go with the middling Curtis Painter. Although Peyton still went along with the con job about maybe, perhaps being ready at some point in the season, he knew better. Looking back, he recalled, “It’s hard to explain but I kind of lost awareness of my arm in space. When you had the same throwing motion for so long—golfers talk about repeating their swing—well, quarterbacks repeat too. But I couldn’t repeat. That was scary. Just discouraging.”¹³

All during the preseason, Peyton held a clipboard beside Caldwell on the sideline. Though Irsay coyly spoke of perhaps signing the retired Brett Favre, he wound up bringing in none other than 38-year-old Kerry Collins on a two-year deal. The Manning watch was still on, however; in late August, the Star reported that Peyton “hopes to be ready in week 1.” But then ESPN’s Chris Mortensen learned that Manning, “concerned over the slow healing . . . is being re-evaluated by several doctors.”¹⁴ And the bad news shook the Colts down to their cleats. The problematic disk in his neck was now reherniated, necessitating another operation, the fourth procedure to deal with the same nagging problem. The previous ones had taken a conventional approach, decompressing the disk by widening the nerve passageway in the spinal canal. Now, major surgery awaited him, the kind never performed on an athlete, especially one in a brutal contact sport seeking to continue playing in a brutal contact sport: a single-level anterior fusion to stabilize the neck by removing the troubled disk and replacing it with a tiny bone graft, welding two vertebrae into one solid bone, a metal plate screwed into it for reinforcement. This would finally relieve the nerve in his arm and allow free movement. It was a common but delicate procedure that can take hours and requires around four months of inactivity afterward.

The surgery was scheduled for September 9, to be performed by a top spinal neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Watkins, co-director of the posh Marina Spine Clinic in Marina Del Rey, California. Before he flew to the coast, Peyton detoured to New Orleans to be with Ashley, the kids, and his parents, perhaps giving himself one last chance to be talked out of the operation and simply retire. For his part, he was as close to doing that as he could have been. “I’ll listen to the doctors,” he said. “If they say after this that I still can’t play, then it’s been a good ride.”¹⁵ Even so, there really was no escape from the operation; like Cooper, he would need to have it done simply to get through life without pain and numbness. And when Ashley told him, “You’ve got to try,” he packed for the trip to L.A.

The operation came two days before the Colts began their season against the Texans with Collins at quarterback, unable to ring up a point until the fourth quarter, when Houston had run up a 34–0 lead, ultimately winning 34–7. In his Marina hotel room, Peyton put the game on the TV and winced. “It was hard to watch,” he said, not just because he knew his team was moribund, but because of the uncertainties he faced. “I was disappointed, I was down, because I wasn’t able to do what I love and I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to perform again. I had those thoughts. They were real.”¹⁶

Back home in New Orleans, he would not be cleared to pick up a football for three months but would try to throw anyway. David Cutcliffe, now the coach at Duke, dropped in on him. Seeing him struggle, he barked, “Stop throwing!” lest he damage his elbow or shoulder—or get further depressed. He had good days and days when he wallowed in self-pity. While his movements were free of neck pain and his arm regained its elasticity and strength, the fingers of his right hand were still numb, and doctors said they always would be. The only thing he could do was condition himself to “feel” with those fingers through familiarity with routine sequences; he would grip the laces of the ball with his fingers just by knowing where they should be. He also had to adapt to throwing at a different angle, at a slightly different release point, the range of motion in his arm and shoulder limited by the lesser stretch of the nerve running down his right side. To help do this, he would simulate his throwing motion in front of a full-length mirror—looking at someone he now had trouble recognizing.

The upside was that he was a full-time father, which offered him a greater perspective about life without the game. “I had a real peace,” he would say, sounding like a Hallmark card. “I don’t know if many people believe that, but I had a peace if this was not to be. . . . The one year the Lord took my greatest physical gift, he gave me the greatest gift you could have in children.”¹⁷ Sentimental, even weepy at times, he went over to the first house he lived in and knocked on the door.

“Hi, I’m Peyton Manning,” he told the owner, “and I’d like to see my room.”¹⁸

Manning mojo moved in mysterious ways. Eli and Peyton’s respective fates in 2011 suggested John Coltrane’s “One Down, One Up,” though it would take some doing for Eli to keep going up. When the season began, the Giants sprinted out of the gate, winning five of their first seven games before meeting the Patriots at Gillette Stadium. The Pats, who hadn’t been back to the Super Bowl since that maddening defeat by the Giants, came in 5–2 and were nine-point favorites. The Giants’ top rusher and receiver, Ahmad Bradshaw and Hakeem Nicks, were both out injured, and Eli’s receiving corps was mostly new, including Brandon Stokley. But the Giants stymied Brady early, intercepting him twice.

It was a back-and-forth game that came down to the last minute. With 1:36 left, trailing 20–17, Eli launched a drive, picking up an enormous third-and-long play with a 28-yard completion to tight end Jake Ballard. Now the Pats cracked, interfering on a pass to the end zone, and from the one, Manning found Ballard for the touchdown that won it, 24–20. It was a real statement game, the victory achieved even without key players and with the satisfaction of hearing spoiled Pats fans, perhaps for the first time ever, booing Brady despite his passing for 342 yards.

However, the Giants would falter, sliding to 7–7. Their shot at a playoff spot rode on the outcome of the last two games. In the first, a crosstown tilt with the Jets, Eli was subpar, hitting only 9 of 27 passes, while Mark Sanchez threw 59 times, completing 30. But it was Eli who pulled off the play of the game, maybe the year. Trailing 7–3 in the second quarter, on a third-and-10 from his own one, he took the shotgun snap five yards deep in the end zone and fired one to Victor Cruz, who caught it at the 11 between two Jets, hip-shifted through both of them, and beat the only defender left down the sideline for a 99-yard touchdown. The Giants won 29–14. Now, needing to beat the Cowboys, who were also 8–7 and with a win would reach the postseason, all the forces of the universe came together. With Eli going 24 of 33 for 346 yards and three touchdowns, they won in a walk, 31–14, gaining 437 total yards.

Finishing atop the NFC East at just 9–7, the Giants seemed one-dimensional, a pass-heavy team with the worst running game in the league and the sixth-worst defense. In this framework, they really did live and die with Eli. Yet, as in 2007, they gelled when they needed to. Indeed, the postseason was a virtual replay of the cosmic climax of that season, with the team sent into the fray having yielded just 14 points in each of their last two games—the surprise of the season being defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul, the first-round pick in 2010. The son of Haitian immigrants, he was a remarkably quick 270-pound man whose sack total exploded from 4½ as a rookie to 16½ this season, earning him first-team All-Pro honors. One lingering memory of the season came in the first tilt with the Cowboys, when he stretched up and blocked a game-tying field goal in the last seconds of a 37–34 win. And Eli was money, nearly hitting 5,000 yards with 29 touchdowns, a 92.9 rating.

In the wild-card playoff, the Giants brushed aside the Falcons, 24–2. Then they would need to win on the road, their next stop—just like the last time—in Green Bay against the defending NFL champs, who went 15–1 in Aaron Rodgers’s first MVP season. The Pack were eight-point favorites, but their weakness was a defense that was last in yards allowed and against the pass. And on a sultry 31-degree afternoon at Lambeau Field, Eli tore them apart. Racking up 330 yards, he threw three touchdowns, one spookily similar to the helmet catch, when, from the Packer 37, six seconds left in the half, he flung a Hail Mary that Nicks grabbed and held against his face mask as he fell to the turf.

Rodgers, the reigning Super Bowl MVP, threw for 264 yards, but, playing from behind, he never had a chance, harried and sacked four times. The score was 37–20, a victory Sports Illustrated’s Damon Hack called “a postseason splash fit for a Leviathan.” As Archie, who was hopscotching the map to be at each game, said afterward, “He was tired of people talking about how many interceptions he threw last year. What he was saying was, I’ve been around for seven years. I know I can play this game.”¹⁹ The title of the SI story confirmed that opinion with sweet nectar:

“Eli, as in Elite.”