Forget the questions about Peyton Manning’s legacy: No matter what happens at MetLife Stadium Sunday afternoon, those inquiries will live on in the places where such arguments never die: inside saloons, alongside water coolers, on long drives where the front-seat categories range from “Best 1970s sitcoms” to “worst 1980s hair bands” to “best quarterbacks ever.”
Here’s the one guarantee: That puzzle will not be answered, no matter what happens. If Manning’s Broncos lose by three touchdowns to the Seahawks, that does not relegate Manning’s career to the secondary stage, like the lesser-known bands at a music festival, doesn’t erase all the good he has accomplished.
And if Manning hangs a Montana-esque 55-10 drubbing on Seattle, that doesn’t rescue him from the fact Tom Brady still has more, brother Eli still has as many, doesn’t recuse the past playoff failures. One game doesn’t obliterate all that came before, all the good, all the bad.
So when you ponder what Manning is, and what his place in the game may be, better think of him in these terms: Manning is the child star who also grew into an Oscar winner, the musical prodigy who also became a stadium-concert staple. He is the child of promise who fulfilled every ounce of that potential, and that is no small accomplishment.
“Here’s what I think about Peyton,” Ernie Accorsi, the man who drafted Eli for the Giants, said earlier in the week. “Whenever the time comes for him to walk away, he won’t ever have to ask himself, ‘Could I have been better? Could I have gotten more out of my talent?’ Because whatever he has, whatever he’s had, he used every bit of it. And it’s been something to watch.”
Manning is part of a select group of modern athletes whose careers we have been able to follow from cradle to casket, and every stop in between. It may well be that the bird-dogs of San Francisco knew Joe DiMaggio would be Joe DiMaggio from the moment he walked on a sandlot; it may well be that when Bob Cousy was learning his craft on the neighborhood playgrounds of Astoria and St. Albans it was clear he would become a basketball magician; if so, the world at-large was blissfully unaware.
But Manning was to the manor — and to the pocket — born, the son of an Ole Miss hero named Archie, himself a player so universally liked that even though he played for some truly wretched professional teams in New Orleans he was almost always given a pass; the football cognoscenti sadly understood how good he would have been if only fate had smiled more warmly on him.
And so, in Archie’s place, there was Peyton. From the moment he started flinging footballs at Isidore Newman School, the camera fastened itself on him. It was his name, it was his game, it was the precocious way he carried himself, even at 16 years old. That’s when we started paying attention. And the glare has never been far away from him.
That heightened his failures — no national championship at Tennessee, no Heisman Trophy, all those first-round playoff flameouts in the pros — and brightened his successes, all those gaudy numbers with the Volunteers and the Colts and the Broncos, the way he conducted offenses at the line of scrimmage like Bernstein in front of the Philharmonic, the crowning achievement of Super Bowl XLI.
Everything we thought he would be at 17 he was at 27, and he remains at 37. Do you know how hard that is to do? He has grown up and grown old in front of the sporting world, and done it not just with accomplishment but grace, too.
LeBron James is like that, even if you account for the public misstep of “The Decision.” Maybe James won’t reach the summit where only Michael Jordan, at present, resides, but Jordan was allowed to grow into Jordan, played only two varsity seasons in high school, played in the ensemble cast at Carolina. James was in our living rooms as a schoolboy.
Wayne Gretzky was like that, also, because his was a talent that demanded attention at a young age even in an age before the 24-7 news cycle. He was being touted as The Greatest before he could drink legally in Canada, where they saw him as a messiah in skates, and he certainly became that, even with millions of eyes forever fastened upon him.
Theirs is a landscape littered with can’t-miss sure things who missed badly, by a pile of Marinoviches and Lindroses and Odens. It is into this cauldron of expectation that Bryce Harper now strides, a kid who we have known about since before he could shave, who has shown us he might just be equal to that adulation … but still has to actually fulfill what is expected of him: the real, the surreal, the unrealistic all of it. Good luck to him.
And if he really is that lucky, maybe he’ll have a career like the one Peyton Manning has had, regardless of whether Manning walks off the field Sunday a winner or a loser, a prodigy who was expected to deliver a forever career.
And has exceeded expectations.