“Has it ever struck you, Connie, that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?”
—MRS. GOFORTH TO THE WITCH, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Like the other famed Southern family dynasty of the last half century, the Bushes, who actually came by way of New England and not the Deep South, the three-headed Manning football dynasty, its roots in the Mississippi mud, seems never to go gentle into that good night. Witness the self-perpetuating saga of Eli Manning, the baby of the family, who still plays on Sundays, upholding the tradition built by his father, Archie, and updated by his brother Peyton—though Eli may have wished he too had retired before the 2017 season, when the weekly travails of the carnival act from hell known as the New York Giants won him three games and the kind of headlines no player with his achievement would want. Indeed, by the time this surreal nightmare was over, he found himself on a bad acid trip into the underbelly of his career, courtesy of a team without blocking, defense, or running, and a coach without a clue. The latter, a mustached mannequin known as Ben McAdoo, who had gotten to the playoffs the previous season with the same team almost solely on Manning’s interception-prone but clutch arm. He then seemed to conspire with equally feckless team management and ownership to crucify their quarterback of distinction, keeping him from starting his 211th consecutive game, having bettered his brother’s streak of 208 to trail only Brett Favre’s record 297.
If this was meant as a power struggle that would climax with a Manning trade, it was the worst plot since the cork in the middle of the island in Lost. After one game, and in the midst of a backlash in the city not seen since a president told it to drop dead in the 1970s, the Giants brainless brahmins did an about-face, gave him his job back, and sent the coach packing, possibly to a gulag—but leaving open the question of whether the third Manning would stay or go, capping his career with a real team or, as his brother was prevented from doing, ending it with the one he began with so long ago.
By the new year, it was clear he would stay, less clear if he would be throwing to Odell Beckham Jr., a wildly talented receiver with the impulse control of a six-year-old, who surfaced over the last off-season in a video cavorting in bed, a funny looking cigarette in hand, with a woman holding a credit card in front of lines of white powder. That made it seem likely Beckham would be pawned to the highest bidder, leaving Eli’s path back to the Super Bowl after five years in the woods even less likely. If so, his now long-ago victories over Tom Brady’s New England Patriots in that event will always stand as Eli’s only edge over Peyton, who lost to Brady 11 of 17 times, forever leaving his legacy unfairly damned by faint praise—as the best regular-season quarterback in history.
But give him props, Peyton Manning was great enough and charmed enough to beat Brady in their final clash, with a Super Bowl appearance as the reward and the chance to close out a fairy tale few believed was possible, retiring with his second NFL championship. Four seasons before, he too had been 36 and had undergone four neck surgeries that left the nerve endings in his right hand unable to feel the ball he was throwing. But, leaving the Indianapolis Colts for the Denver Broncos, his knees wobbling and joints groaning, he made it to his fourth Super Bowl, against the superior Carolina Panthers and their preening quarterback, Cam Newton, the avatar of a new generation of mobile, ultra-athletic quarterbacks. It was a generational settling of scores if ever there was one. And even if it was because he was lifted by his defense, the old boy sure did finish in style. The last pass of his career, the two-point conversion that made the final tally 24–10, put away his 200th career victory, a nice, round all-time record he held for less than a year before Brady bettered him (as he has in most metrics, including their head-to-head matches).
His 2007 championship ring from the Indianapolis Colts was now part of a matching set. Peyton could have gone on as a shell of himself, either in Denver or somewhere else, but a Manning has too much pride for that. And so, even though signed for another year at $19 million, he bowed out, battered and reduced, but on top. Of course, the last thing either Manning brother needed out of football anymore was capital, having socked away the kind of green that their old man—who in his day was the most celebrated college quarterback and the highest-paid NFL rookie ever—could only have imagined. Both sons have also eclipsed the on-field numbers Archie slaved to achieve. After playing 18 seasons, Peyton held 21 records, including: most MVP awards (5); consecutive seasons with 25 or more touchdowns (13); games with four or more touchdown passes (35); 4,000-yard seasons (14); touchdowns (539); passing yards (71,940); 300-yard games (93); seasons with 350 or more completions (10); comeback wins (45); game-winning drives (56); playoff appearances (15); Pro Bowl appearances (14); touchdowns in a single season (55); and passing yards in a season (5,477). Besides Brett Favre, he is the only other quarterback to have beaten all 32 NFL teams.*
As important, he positioned himself as a commodity, a man of prodigious talent and intellect—like his dad and brother, earning both Phi Beta Kappa and All-American honors. Not incidentally, he also won sympathy (as had his father) for failing—specifically, in big games (his playoff-record was a tepid 14–13). Devastation humanized him, elevating his commercial appeal and neutralizing the old debates about Manning versus Brady, debates that were abjectly silly and are by now clearly settled: Brady is the better quarterback, but Manning is the better icon.
It matters not if Peyton doesn’t use Nationwide as his insurance company or eats much pizza; only that every slice sold in 21 Papa John’s franchises in Colorado delivers him a slice of the profits. After Peyton won that Super Bowl and his Broncos were feted at the White House, President Barack Obama stood right in front of him and riffed, “And then there’s this guy from the commercials. It doesn’t matter whether you need insurance, pizza, a Buick, you basically can stock your whole household with stuff this guy is selling.”1 Or, as a sportswriter put it, “The man sells everything from crappy pizza to Outlaw Country, and comes off the screen somehow not having cheapened himself.”2 The Manning brothers know all about marketing themselves. They come from money, surround themselves with it, reek of it. Even Peyton’s wife, Ashley, a Memphis native, bought into the ownership of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies in 2012 with her own money. Both Mannings have hosted Saturday Night Live, their episodes the highest-rated of their respective seasons. Peyton has made $267.7 million from the game, and around $12 million or so outside of it in each of the last few years alone.3 Even in a millennial-dominated culture that began to pass him by half a decade ago, he is a hip sort of dinosaur. And don’t expect him to be extinct any time soon.
Blame Archie—who, despite thriving in more penurious times for athletes, has a net worth of around $10 million—for nurturing this national ubiquity. Though fewer fans each year seem to know it, for three years he was the Southeastern Conference (SEC), and beyond that, “the most fabulous athlete ever produced by the state of Mississippi,” wrote the incomparable Paul Zimmerman in 1981. Directing the Ole Miss offense from 1968 through 1970, running and passing in a frenetic haze, he won the SEC Player of the Year award in ’69—the same year he had to endure his father’s suicide. On the Oxford campus, where he led teams onto the field carrying the Stars and Bars to racist chants from the stands, they set the speed limit at 18 miles per hour because Archie wore that number. They wrote songs about him, like “The Ballad of Archie Who.” Sportswriters called him Ole Miss’s “One Horseman.” Fans named their children after him. He was deified as the SEC’s Quarterback of the Quarter Century (1950–75). Expected to be a messiah with the New Orleans Saints when they drafted him in 1971, he instead became a symbol of neo-Southern failure. Through no fault of his own, the Saints were abysmal, and no one—not Archie Manning, not Robert E. Lee, not Jesus Christ himself—could save them. In both success and failure, Archie was a symbol of Southern manhood and white male privilege, or as one writer has put it, the South’s “fusion of history and reality, of myth and memory.”4 His sons share some of that legacy.
Following Archie by a decade, Peyton made his name while the family name was still so familiar. When he had proven himself as a pro, in 1999, Sports Illustrated wrote that he was “more than living up to his pedigree.”5 Eli shared his brother’s carnivorous competitive and mercenary instincts, and they took him to two championships—a remarkable achievement for a guy his own center once called “one of the most unathletic quarterbacks in the NFL.”6 More impressive was whom he beat to get them, both times taking down Brady’s Patriots—the unbeaten Patriots—in the first meeting, Super Bowl XLII, when he made the play of the millennium, the long heave caught by David Tyree against his helmet. Both times, Eli came away as Super Bowl MVP. Less well remembered is that, to get there each time, he had to best the Green Bay Packers in the winter wonderland of Lambeau Field, against guys named Favre and Rodgers.
Eli is a hero and antihero at once. He is only the seventh quarterback in NFL history with at least 50,000 career passing yards, the sixth with at least 330 touchdowns. He’s made four Pro Bowl appearances. He is also arguably the best fourth-quarter QB in the league, and one of the most durable of all time. He’s currently working on a contract that guarantees him $67 million, second only to Andrew Luck’s $87 million. His endorsements pull in $8 million more; his net worth is around $115 million. But no one can quite figure him out. During Peyton’s farewell triumph, the Manning brood, gathered in a VIP box, celebrated. The beautiful and regal matriarch, Olivia Manning, clapped wildly. The forgotten Manning, Cooper—the eldest son, who was supposed to be the best athlete before he was felled by spinal stenosis, hoisted one of his children onto his shoulders. But Eli barely reacted. When Olivia tried to high-five him, she had to grab his hand. Some thought he looked “miserable.”7 But then, as Peyton says, his baby brother always looks like that. Or worse.
To be certain, Peyton was the only Manning who could have turned the family royal, his personality fine-tuned to please everyone despite either self-inflicted or concocted damage to his image. Indeed, he could not take his final bow without the scent of scandal, or maybe pseudo-scandal.
Even so, while New Orleans turned on Archie during his hellish years there, Peyton was Lancelot in the contrived pro football Camelot. This helps to explain why, even in his retirement, his orange Broncos jersey is still the second best-selling piece of NFL merchandise, outselling even the jersey of that other white knight, Brady. Eli perpetuates and accentuates the royal lineage, but the dynasty itself is bigger than either of them, because the Mannings’ grip on the modern American sports id and popular culture was funneled through the American South, with football a conduit through the tides of still-incomplete social change. In the formative years of Archie Manning and, to a slightly lesser degree, his sons, each was the beau ideal of Southern manhood and its high-and-mighty traditions of arrogant grandeur, even though when Eli got to Ole Miss, the grandeur was more pitiful than powerful. From backwoods and dirt farms to blue skies and mansions, the lure of the gridiron has been irresistible.
For many of these reasons, football heroes from the South, like great novels from the South, seem to resonate more deeply than others. They transcend region and feel, instead, national. As with any great American success story, the story of the Mannings is at times complicated and dark, but it inexorably lurches forward, driven always by football and surrounded by the protective cloak of family.
* A feat made possible by not playing solely for one team. Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger have both beaten 31 teams—all but the clubs they’ve played on for their entire careers, the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers, respectively.