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Manning makes one final brilliant play call, goes out in a blaze of Super glory
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Peyton Manning rode into the sunset — as a world champion.
And that is a really amazing, wonderful, cool thing, because it almost didn’t happen in this Hollywood-like way.
Manning wasn’t even on the field until fate intervened in the form of a flood of Broncos turnovers in a crucial Week 17 game against the Chargers, when Denver needed a win to clinch the home-field advantage that would ultimately prove vital in the AFC playoffs.
Out came the capable Brock Osweiler. In came the old, battered legend looking for one last ride to glory. Of course, the Broncos won that day, stayed home for the playoffs, where Manning slayed Tom Brady and the Patriots one last time, before Denver outslugged Carolina in a Super Bowl befitting the team’s personality and the new, final version of Manning.
The guy with all the gaudy stats, the master gunslinger who usually was trying to outscore you, had reinvented himself for the final magic trick of his career. His ego wasn’t too big not to want to pull it off, and so he did it, and that’s why Peyton Manning was retiring as a Super Bowl champion on Monday in Denver.
For a month since the Super Bowl, it was the worst-kept secret in sports. This script begged for a retirement, especially now that a second ring was his. But one of the classiest acts we’ve ever seen in sports, a man not perfect because nobody is, stepped away from the spotlight for a month and reflected a lot, you can be sure.
Whatever decision he made would have been the right one, mind you, which flies in the face of those pushing Manning out of the game because it served that script, because it’s so easy to tell someone to retire when it’s not you.
In the end, it was nobody’s decision but his. And he chose to do what Broncos boss John Elway did 17 years ago for the same franchise, walking away on top with a lasting image of an ultimate winner, despite his broken-down physical state.
“There is just something about 18 years,” Manning said during his press conference Monday. “Eighteen is a good number and today I retire from pro football.”
Manning got to the finish line just in time, and he got to ride across that line in a parade through downtown Denver. It’s heart-warming to know that nice guys do sometimes finish first after all.
Manning changed the game, the position
As one Associated Press writer put it Sunday, Manning was both a “throwback and a transformer” during his brilliant career. Both qualities made him arguably the greatest quarterback in NFL history, because legends like Manning are made over many seasons, not snapshots in playoff games, as some incorrectly believe.
And Manning did have plenty of playoff failures. There is zero doubt in that. But anyone who makes the postseason that many times is going to build up playoff losses. That’s part of the deal. But he was almost always in the mix in the AFC whether with the Colts or Broncos, and for those who still believe he was haunted by Bill Belichick and the Patriots, Manning actually finished his career 3-2 against New England in the playoffs and 3-1 against Brady in AFC title games.
That ruins the narrative for the many Manning critics who close their eyes and still see Manning not winning a national title in Knoxville, going 0-4 against Florida and being swept away in the snow and cold of Foxboro in the 2003 and 2004 playoffs.
Two years after the playoff loss to the Patriots in ’04, Manning reached his career crossroads, facing those same Patriots in the 2006 AFC title game. And it was that classic game that was featured late this past Sunday night on ESPN2, the channel paying tribute on the night before his retirement announcement with a last-minute change in programming.
Because you can bet that as amazing as that game was, it wasn’t what was supposed to be on ESPN2 in the wee hours of March 7. While one channel played out the thrilling theatre of the Colts’ 38-34 comeback victory authored by Manning, who exorcised the Patriots demons and reached his first of four Super Bowls, ESPN’s “SportsCenter” was broadcasting live with the dark night sky of Denver in the background, as the network sent a few of its anchors there to present the scene on the night before Manning’s retirement news conference.
Goodbye to a legend
When do you ever see live coverage from the scene of an athlete’s retirement announcement on the night before, and not just the day of?
When it’s a legend who is doing the retiring, someone who changed the game but never really changed.
When it’s a man as much responsible for the NFL’s meteoric rise to supreme sports popularity in our country, who also manages to laugh at himself all the time through a bevy of commercials.
When it’s a player who has had the ability to become a Hall of Famer and stay an everyman, at the same time.
When it’s a noble man who rarely raised his voice in public but continually raised the bar for how the quarterback position should be played in the NFL.
That career-turning comeback almost a decade ago that led to his first of two Super Bowl crowns was followed Sunday night on ESPN2 by the dusted-off documentary “The Book of Manning,” a look back at the beginning of it all before Monday’s ultimate end.
Right in the middle was that stunning rally to slay New England, and a flashback to that game provides a bone-chilling reference to none other than the man he would later work and win for, to the man who in 1999 did what Manning did Monday — wave goodbye from the mountaintop.
Manning spoke about the 80-yard drive in the final, frantic minutes that sent the Colts to the Super Bowl and remembered John Elway’s famous drive 20 years earlier in the 1986 AFC title game against the Browns.
“I watched the drive with Elway; you never get tired of seeing that,” Manning said. “I’m not comparing what we just did to that, but it sounds pretty good.”
Elway was at his side Monday, the legend sending this most humble of legends into the sunset.
That sounds pretty good, too.
Cory Nightingale, a sports copy editor at the Miami Herald, lives for Saturdays. He especially enjoys the pageantry, tradition and history of SEC football.
