No Plan B

by Mark Kiszla

  No Plan B

  No Plan B

  Peyton Manning’s Comeback with

  the Denver Broncos

  Mark Kiszla

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Kiszla

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kiszla, Mark.

  No plan B : Peyton Manning’s comeback with the Denver Broncos / Mark Kiszla.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-58979-853-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58979-854-0 (electronic)

  1. Manning, Peyton. 2. Football players—United States. 3. Quarterbacks (Football)—United States. 4. Denver Broncos (Football team) I. Title.

  GV939.M289K57 2013

  796.332092—dc23

  [B]

  2013017359

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Preface

  Who was the clown who thought throwing a pie in the face of a muscular 330-pound man would be a smart idea?

  Peyton Manning.

  Only the mind of Manning could hatch such a goofball prank, punk an unsuspecting Denver Broncos teammate on live television and live to laugh about it.

  His touchdown passes will someday earn Manning a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But a pie in the face might paint a more revealing portrait of Manning, a pain-in-the-butt perfectionist who is also America’s best-loved quarterback.

  “I’m joined by right tackle Orlando Franklin, in the house,” Root Sports sideline reporter Jenny Cavnar informed her TV audience, as she stood alongside the 25-year-old Broncos offensive linemen in the owner’s suite at Coors Field during the middle of the fourth inning of a scoreless game between the Colorado Rockies and the New York Yankees. “I’m told this is your first baseball game. What do you think so far?”

  “I think,” Franklin excitedly said, “it’s definitely a great experience.”

  Well, this was destined to be a rainy evening that Franklin will never be able to forget. More than 30 teammates, rounded up by Manning for a guys’ night out at the ballpark, stood behind Franklin on the club level, where buttoned-down bankers and beautiful people alike hang out.

  Cavnar asked: “I heard that Peyton Manning got you all together for a little field trip. Is he as bossy on the bus as he is on the field?”

  With reverent praise for his veteran quarterback, Franklin earnestly replied: “Not at all. . . .”

  Then, in an instant, the joke was on Franklin. All over him, in fact. Whipped cream was everywhere, splattered on Franklin’s big, startled mug.

  A mysterious, mischievous left hand had reached around from behind Franklin, and in the grand baseball tradition of interrupting a TV interview with pure slapstick, Denver receiver Eric Decker slammed home a pie to the offensive lineman’s face.

  Direct hit. Welcome to the major leagues, kid.

  “That was my first baseball game,” said Franklin later, chuckling. “Bad experience. Definitely a bad experience.”

  It was a beautiful trick play. It was designed by Manning, instigated by Manning, masterminded in every detail by Manning. But, like any savvy leader in need of plausible deniability, Manning persuaded somebody else to do the dirty deed. And it was a secret so perfectly executed Manning confidently let teammates shoot video of the whole stunt on cell phones as Decker ambushed Franklin.

  “Before the interview, Peyton Manning was right there in the room talking to the crew, directing, orchestrating, doing what he does best: setting it all up. I mean, the guy could be a producer on television when he’s done with his football career, I guarantee it,” Cavnar told me the morning after Franklin caught the cream pie in his eye, up his nose, and on his chin.

  “Manning practically drew up the whole scene on his hand. He was telling me where to stand next to Orlando, and he was telling Decker where to come in the shot and telling our cameraman, ‘Ooh, don’t forget to get the baseball field in the background, because that would look nice!’”

  Steven Spielberg has nothing on Manning. Whenever or wherever Manning shouts “Places everybody!” people not only listen, they jump.

  Franklin never saw it coming. But, in the instant his ego was buried in whipped cream, Franklin knew exactly where it came from and who gave the order to punk him.

  It had to be Manning. Peyton Freaking Manning. “He’s pretty much got everybody on the offense,” said Franklin, noting his quarterback’s proclivity for practical jokes. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

  So here is a book about football that begins with a food fight at a baseball game, with grown millionaires giggling like grade-schoolers as they pulled off a practical joke that bonded the team with laughter. Why try to describe how Manning has changed the culture of the Broncos through the anecdote of a field trip to a ballpark that was organized from the tickets to the hot dogs by a veteran quarterback?

  Here’s why: During 30 years of covering sports for the Denver Post, on assignments from Beijing, China, to Chadron, Nebraska, whether the event I chronicled was a state championship won by the Columbine High School football team in the same calendar year as a deadly massacre at the school, or a bitter defeat as numbing as the overtime loss to the Baltimore Ravens that brought Manning’s first season with the Broncos to an abruptly unexpected end, it seems to me the bigger truths are most often found in a small frame.

  A pie in the face is what makes Manning one of the greatest quarterbacks who ever lived.

  Although the beauty of the scoreboard is how unflinchingly it tells the story, what fascinates me about sports is all the ambiguity between the numbers. While advanced metrics offer new insights into the intricate machinations of the game, what has always interested me more is the raw look in the eye of a quarterback after he gets sacked and knocked hard to the ground.

  John Elway retired as an NFL champion, a Broncos hero riding off into an orange sunset. Then Elway began to lose much of what he loved—his marriage, his twin sister, his father—until the old quarterback needed to find a new passion in rebuilding the franchise that had slowly fallen into disrepair after he left it as a player.

  While Tim Tebow became a polarizing cult hero during his brief but loudly sensational stint with the Broncos because he was God’s quarterback, Manning presented a far more compelling protagonist in the love story between Denver and its NFL team, because Manning demanded to be drawn in shades of gray. While filling what is undoubtedly the most high-profile, most scrutinized job in Colorado, Manning privately dealt with his own ego-rattling blow of being cast out by the Indianapolis Colts. He had to quiet his own doubts that lingered from a serious neck injury and looked every day for signs to restore faith that he could again throw a football with the Pro Bowl effectiveness everybody in Denver expected.

  Has there ever been a more beautiful mind
in pro football? I wanted to take a peek inside the obsessive curiosity, the cornball humor, and the quirky insecurities that make Manning tick. Telling the story of a team’s season has been done, and done deftly, by authors whose work I admire, from John Feinstein in A Season on the Brink to Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger. So, taking a different route, what I set out to do is begin mapping the mind, the heart, and all the connections between that allow Manning to see a different game than even the best NFL quarterbacks observe and analyze.

  From the secret code Manning speaks at the line of scrimmage before a third-down snap to his meticulous direction of a prank, the Broncos quarterback unabashedly exhibits the same arrogance of every perfectionist, trying to impose his will on a world that never follows anybody’s script for long.

  This defiant urge to harness the uncontrollable is a source of endless amusement to Peyton’s father. Archie Manning, the only dad in history to watch two sons grow up to become Most Valuable Player in the Super Bowl, is the patriarch of America’s first family of quarterbacks.

  “You might have noticed,” Archie once told me, with the dry wit that must be ingrained in the Manning genes, “that Peyton can be a little bossy. We kid him about it. But I know this: He will never quit.”

  A man lives long enough, and even if he might be the greatest QB who ever lived, life eventually will sneak up and hit him with a pie in the face.

  What happens when the joke is on you?

  A champion laughs. Embraces the folly. And moves on.

  The only way any story can get better is if you’re willing to turn the page.

  Denver, Colorado

  May 2013

  Chapter 1

  Get Lost

  If Peyton Manning can get fired, then it is damn certain the rest of us can be dumbsized, pink-slipped, or kicked to the curb.

  For a National Football League quarterback with 150 regular-season and playoff victories on his resume, the last words Manning thought he would ever hear from the team he loved: Get lost. Players kid that NFL means Not For Long. But, during uncertain economic times, loyalty has become as big a joke in this $9.5 billion annual sports industry as in the rest of corporate America.

  In March of 2012, on the verge of his 36th birthday, Manning joined more than 12 million Americans in the ranks of the unemployed. The Indianapolis Colts fired Peyton Freaking Manning? Are you kidding? The inconceivable became harsh reality.

  Oh, the Colts were polite when they told Manning his services were no longer required. Like being told politely your broken-down old bones have no future in the organization is supposed to make a guy feel better. Yeah, right. Helmet in hand, Manning was forced to pull up stakes and go looking for work. For any man who takes pride in his job, it stinks.

  If the shock and insult of being fired was only about the money, Manning could have gone home and slept easy on a bed of gold. But nobody in the NFL takes his job more seriously than Manning, for whom football is a 10,000-piece puzzle obsessively studied, until every last piece fits.

  Weary from the Great Recession, maybe we were ready for a broken football hero who could show us how to put a career back together again. Enter Manning.

  “You always wish you could be 25 years old and playing football. That’s what you always wish. You wish you never had to stop playing,” said Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, talking from the chair that chains the 52-year-old Broncos legend to an office at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters. Elway now performs his magic as the executive vice president of football operations.

  If not for Elway, there would be no Super Bowl trophies in Denver. If not for Elway, there would be no Peyton Manning in Colorado.

  “Peyton was a friend before he came to work here for the Broncos. And I still look at him as a friend. But I respect the hell out him as a player,” said Elway, who brought the four-time MVP to town on the strength of the bond shared by two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game. The Broncos landed the most famous free agent in NFL history, 13 short days after the Colts dumped Manning.

  “I cannot imagine what it’s like to get cut,” Elway said. From the time he picked up a football as a boy in Montana to the last snap he took with the Broncos, Elway was the most revered player on the field.

  “Peyton told me he planned on ending his career in Indianapolis, no doubt about it. And then to get kicked to the curb like that? He couldn’t believe it happened. So you know he had a chip on his shoulder when he came to Denver. I mean, he’s always had a passion that burned. But when the Colts told him they no longer needed him? That’s when the chimney fire became a forest fire.”

  The football gods must have a wicked sense of humor. On the road to the Super Bowl with the Broncos, riding high with the number one seed in the American Football Conference entering the playoffs, Denver was stunned by a 38–35 overtime loss at home against Baltimore on January 12, 2013. As a consolation prize, Manning was sent off to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. It might be a dream vacation spot, but definitely not where Manning wanted to be at the time.

  During a week of practice for an all-star game where the final score counts for nothing, Manning was stuck on the island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a rookie named Andrew Luck. Yes, the same hot, young quarterback who made Manning expendable in Indianapolis. Welcome to paradise, big guy. Grab some SPF 50 from the beach bag. The sun is not the only thing that can make a man do a slow burn.

  It had to be surreal, watching Luck wear the Indianapolis blue and the horseshoe of the Colts that Manning represented so well, for so many years, since he joined the NFL out of the University of Tennessee as the number one overall selection in the 1998 draft.

  Irreverent curiosity is sometimes poured with a side of sarcasm. With apologies for my lack of respect for a potentially touchy subject, I had to ask Manning: “Do you ever look at Luck and think: ‘What the heck? Who does this guy think he is, anyway? That’s my Indianapolis Colts helmet that this dude Luck is wearing’?”

  Without a second of hesitation, Manning sternly replied: “No.”

  The answer, however, hurt Manning more than it did me. He showed unmistakable displeasure at the question, and did it without adding a single word. How? Manning shot me the most famous frown in professional football.

  Any NFL official who has blown a call and receivers who have run the wrong pass route know the look. The angry red blotch on his forehead where the helmet rubs Manning the wrong way can sear a hole in a man’s soul. It can be such an intimidating yippee-ki-yay glare that it could make NYPD cop John McClane think maybe this would be a good day to die hard, rather than risk the wrath of Manning. The quarterback’s nose crinkles into a snarl that could scare a whole pack of wolves. Actress Bette Davis was known for her eyes. Jennifer Lopez danced her way to fame backed by the most famous booty in the world. Without a doubt, one of the greatest motivating forces in the sports universe is Peyton frowning Manning.

  On any given Sunday, or the other six days of the week, for that matter, you can get hit with a bad case of perturbed Manning face with the mere mention of two words: Indianapolis Colts.

  The obvious pain of the memory of how it all ended in Indy is what reveals the vulnerable heart of Manning. Sure, he might be called “MacBook” by Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard, because here is a quarterback who processes and analyzes every detail on the football field like a freaking computer. But, contrary to myth, Manning is not a cyborg under center. He can be hurt. And getting cut hurts to the bone. Not making the team hurts just the same, whether you are a veteran quarterback turning in your playbook to an NFL team or a disappointed teenager checking in your shoulder pads to the equipment manager of a local high school.

  The scars will never heal. Four medical procedures on Manning’s injured neck have left a jagged, ugly mark that is impossible to miss even now, when he bends over center at the line of scrimmage as quarterback of the Broncos, shouting “Hurry! Hurry!” in anticipation of the football being snapped.

&n
bsp; The scar emerges from under his helmet and darts toward his shoulder pads beneath the number 18 jersey. Those surgeries turned a quarterback known as P-Money in Indianapolis into a health gamble the Colts were unwilling to back with a $28 million roster bonus due Manning early in 2012. Nerve damage had robbed Manning’s famous right arm of the most amazing, on-the-button passing touch the NFL has ever seen. Imagine, at the height of his powers, legendary pianist Sergey Rachmaninoff losing all feel in his fingertips for the ivories. A stretch? Not by much.

  After turning Indianapolis into an elite city on the NFL map and then leading the Colts to victory at Super Bowl XLI, Manning was reduced to a helpless bystander on the NFL sidelines in 2011, when chronic arm weakness required a father-and-son surgical team led by Dr. Robert Watkins Sr. to perform a single-level fusion of the veteran quarterback’s spine in September. Tissue as soft as crabmeat between two vertebrae was removed, so the spine could be fused, with a chunk of Manning’s hip bone used as mortar and a piece of titanium added for support.

  But just as the quarterback’s body was finally starting to heal, a beautiful business relationship between Manning and Colts owner Jim Irsay began to fall apart. As Indianapolis plummeted toward the bottom of the league standings, the possibility of drafting Luck out of Stanford with the number one pick moved closer to reality for the Colts. An end game that Manning long had regarded as unthinkable quickly became unavoidable: A four-time winner of the Most Valuable Player Award would be shoved out the door.

  Once upon a time in America, maybe loyalty in the workplace really did matter. But in a sport ruled by the harsh economics of a salary cap, football teams profess to be family only until business intrudes on the charade, and then money counts for more than love. The Colts did the right thing from a football and financial standpoint. Certainly, Manning saw the breakup coming. But he covered his eyes.