by Mark Kiszla
Peyton Manning
Peyton Manning
The Last Rodeo
Mark Kiszla
TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING
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Published by Taylor Trade Publishing
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Copyright © 2016 by Mark Kiszla
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ISBN 978-1-63076-285-8 (electronic)
LCCN 2016033160 (print) | LCCN 2016033652 (ebook)
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Printed in the United States of America
Preface
The high-pitched screech of a circular saw startled Peyton Manning. The awful noise shot straight through him, causing his broad shoulders to flinch. We stood backstage at Manning’s final act as quarterback of the Denver Broncos. And no different from the 293 game days he had worked as a quarterback in the NFL, Manning was still wound tightly after his work was done, as the adrenaline began to dissipate slowly from his body upon the conclusion of a retirement ceremony he had carefully pondered and meticulously planned for weeks, ever since the 39-year-old quarterback cradled the Lombardi Trophy, his reward for Denver beating Carolina in Super Bowl 50.
Only 45 minutes earlier, Manning had stared intently at his script, trying very hard not to get all weepy in an auditorium filled to capacity, as No. 18 announced his retirement after 18 record-breaking professional seasons to a crowd that spanned in age from his 66-year-old father to his 4-year-old twin children, and everybody in between from the quarterback’s large NFL family.
Think of how hard it must have been. For 293 days—nearly a full year of Manning’s life—he had buckled his chinstrap and gone out to play quarterback in the NFL. And now it was over.
Jeff Saturday, the Colts center who snapped Manning the ball more than 10,000 times during the dozen years they played together in Indianapolis, couldn’t stop grinning. He had bet former teammate Brandon Stokley that Manning would not cry, and Saturday was winning.
Broncos president Joe Ellis, the man who first proposed this bold idea of bringing Manning to Colorado, had no such luck controlling his own emotions, though. Sitting off to the side of the podium where Manning spoke, Ellis dabbed at the tears making a puddle of his eyes.
Demaryius Thomas, the receiver who told Manning he loved him after each of 40 touchdown passes caught in Denver, gave gentle hugs to young Mosley and Marshall Manning, while their Daddy talked about his greatest gift from playing in the NFL: the people sitting in front of him.
With an early March storm roaring like a lion outside the team’s Dove Valley headquarters, friends, relatives, teammates and too many reporters to count had taken assigned seats in the theater. All gathered to hear Manning utter the one word that nobody who loved the sound of him shouting “Omaha!” at the line of scrimmage ever wanted to hear.
Goodbye.
“I revere football. I love the game,” said Manning, his voice choking on all the memories the retirement speech stirred in his heart. “So you don’t have to wonder if I will miss it. Absolutely. Absolutely I will.”
After the television cameras from the NFL Network and ESPN stopped rolling, Manning drifted off to a hallway outside the Broncos locker room, where the ear-piercing sounds of construction work—from the whirring of an electric saw to the sledgehammer’s heavy thump—made it clear the team was already getting on with life without him. Yes, during four seasons in Denver, Manning had completed passes that traveled nearly 10 miles, rewritten the NFL record book on what seemed like a daily basis, been named the league’s most valuable player for a fifth time and won the 200th game of his brilliant pro career with a stunning 24–10 upset of Carolina in the Super Bowl, which the Panthers had entered as 5½-point favorites.
But nothing is forever in sports. And now a pain-in-the-butt perfectionist had no game plan to master and no practice to attend for the first time since Manning joined the NFL as a rookie from the University of Tennessee in 1998. With his 40th birthday lurking, it was time for the legend to go home.
Outside, as the rain turned to snow, Manning peered down the hallway through the glass panes of double doors, looking one more time at the practice field where he taught the Broncos how to be an elite franchise again. Big, wet flakes splattered on the sidewalk, and Manning dreamed of getting away to play golf at a famous course way down south in Dixie with his brothers, Cooper and Eli.
Standing five feet from him, however, I could distinctly sense the gears grinding Manning’s brain, still crammed with a humming energy that radiated heat. “I’m totally convinced that the end of my football career is just the beginning of something I haven’t even discovered yet,” Manning had vowed during his 11-minute, 45-second retirement speech. “Life is not shrinking for me, it’s morphing into the a whole new world of possibilities.”
So I wanted to know: What was next for Manning? Football behind him, how would he fill the void during the next 40 years of his life? The possibilities are endless. Could his competitive juices be stoked by buying a stake in an NFL franchise, maybe as an owner-operator of the Tennessee Titans? Does he harbor political aspirations? Or did his Saturday Night Live appearances foreshadow a future in front of the television camera?
“I don’t know,” replied Manning, setting up a punch line with the aw-shucks humor that made him America’s favorite quarterback. “I might put an ad in the newspaper.”
Let the record show Manning retired on March 7, 2016, exactly one month after earning a championship ring with Denver in what proved to be his final game. His long goodbye had caused consternation in Broncos Country and speculation to run rampant throughout the Twitterverse that Manning might not be done playing, and maybe he would take a job with the Rams, newly relocated to Los Angeles and in need of a marketable star, or another franchise desperate for a quarterback.
The grand farewell was staged only hours before Elway, who had zero intention of honoring the $19 million due Manning in the final year of his original five-year contract with the Broncos, would have been forced to cut a distinguished quarterback with 539 career touchdown passes on his resume. We all understand it’s never easy to hang up your cleats, but why had Manning waited until the last minute to retire?
“I wanted to be an NFL quarterback as long as I possibly could,” Manning joked.
Understand this: Manning does nothing by accident. As a quarterback, no detail was too small for him to memorize with an obsessive need to ace every test. So believe this: It was not by happenstance that the tie Manning wore to his retirement ceremony was Colts blue. He cherished every day of his 14 seasons in Indianapolis until the bitter end, when a team Manning put on the NFL map fired him.
That’s why when Manning saw March 7 on the calendar, he instantly recognized the poetry in the timing of his goodbye. It was the fourth anniversary of the exact date in 2012 when the Colts cut him.
Now, four years later, Manning could retire as a champion in Denver, and the redemption in his departure was as perfect as the spin on his most gorgeous spiral. “Grateful is the word that comes to my mind when thinking of the Denver Broncos,” he said. “Thank you for what you’ve done for this old quarterback.”
His appreciation, and the story in this book, began with one little phone call Manning received from Colorado on the worst day of his football life. Let’s take you back to March 2012. Recovering from four neck surgeries and with a $28 million roster bonus coming due, Manning was cast aside by the Colts for a hot prospect named Andrew Luck.
The move made dollars and football sense for Indianapolis. It also left a hole in Manning’s heart. He went home and sat on the sofa like a zombie.
Then, in his darkest hour as an athlete, the phone rang.
“It was John Fox,” Manning recalled on the day he retired from the Broncos. “With Fox, of course it’s a fun conversation. It’s upbeat. It kind of got me in a good mood again. Then, John [Elway] got on and just said: ‘Hey, when you’re ready, we’d love you to come out.’”
Denver was the first team to reach out and contact a suddenly unemployed quarterback. There was no hard sell. The Broncos merely wanted Manning to know they felt his pain and were there to help make it go away.
“Four years ago, when the unimaginable happened—and that Peyton Manning was going to be a free agent—at first, did we actually think we had a shot? You know what, I didn’t think we had a shot,” Elway said. “But, fortunately, we got the first call in and we got the first [recruiting] trip.”
There was No Plan B.
“When I visited Denver four years ago, if John Elway had sat me down and said: ‘Peyton, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to win over 50 games, win four straight division championships, lose only three division games in four years and none will be on the road, we’ll beat the Patriots in two championship games and you’re going to win NFL comeback player of the year, another MVP, your offense will set a single-season passing records, you’ll break a couple more all-time records, and we’ll go to a couple of Super Bowls,’ I think I would have taken that deal,” Manning said, before adding a friendly little dig, just to remind how much he helped the Broncos achieve.
“John, you did tell me that, didn’t you?”
The four years in Colorado weren’t always perfect. There were embarrassing losses in the playoffs. There was a time during his 18th pro season, with Manning stuck on the Denver bench with an aching foot, when everybody who really cared about him was uncertain if he would ever play another snap for the Broncos.
We always remember the fairy-tale ending. We forget the muck on the boots during the journey. The last rodeo of Manning was one bumpy ride. In the end, with his talent diminished by age, he held on with little more than a stubborn refusal to quit. The one rap against Manning was always that his game was too pretty, too technical . . . too soft. But almost nothing went according to the script in Manning’s last game, when he struggled to complete 13 passes for a meager 141 yards against Carolina in the Super Bowl. The grit and the resolve of Manning is what made his last rodeo so beautiful.
This time, on March 7, Manning got to say goodbye from an NFL team on his terms. His validation was complete. And the irony was not lost on him, because committing every little detail to memory is what made Manning great. “It was a difficult day going through that press conference in Indianapolis,” he said with a knowing grin, “which I think was four years ago today.”
The NFL Nation stood and applauded Manning on March 7, 2016, precisely four years to the date when a broken quarterback’s career was left for dead in Indianapolis.
The Last Rodeo ended in an orange sunset.
“Pundits will speculate that my effort and drive over the past 18 years were about mastery and working to master every aspect of the NFL game. Well, don’t believe them. Because every moment, every drop of sweat, every bleary-eyed night of preparation, every note I took and every frame of film I watched was about one thing, reverence for the game,” Manning said. “When I look back on my NFL career, I’ll know without a doubt that I gave everything I had to help my teams walk away with a win. There were other players who were more talented, but there was no one who could out-prepare me and because of that I have no regrets.”
Where did the time go? And how did we get here, in a room at Broncos headquarters, with everyone standing and clapping and dabbing tears of joy as Manning said goodbye to the game he loves?
It all started with one phone call on a dark winter day, when what a Hall of Fame quarterback needed most was a friend.
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 M
anning 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.