ARCHIE AND OLIVIA Manning are sitting in gray rocking chairs on their front porch in Oxford. They are a few hundred yards from the Ole Miss campus, where the speed limit is the same as Archie's old jersey number: 18 mph, please. The Mississippi heat is merciful this early in the morning. He's got a hearing aid. When he walks, his knees sound like someone learning to drive a stick shift. If his house caught on fire, he jokes, the first thing he'd grab would be his cane. She is elegant and funny. They've been married for 49 years and smile at each other a lot. Everyone who walks past their condo waves and feels like they've been given an audience when the Mannings wave back.It's been a busy summer. They tell me they're currently in the process of putting their big house in New Orleans on the market. That's where they raised their three sons, and now they're downsizing to a condo a few blocks away. Archie is 71, and Olivia's 71st birthday is in a few months. Their children are grown and gone, and that home is cavernous without the noise and dirty laundry and nonstop football games and driveway basketball shootouts. They bought the house when their lives were expanding. That was a long time ago. They said their middle son, Peyton, is particularly upset about the loss of his boyhood home and all the memories they made there, he being the most sentimental of the three. His parents politely told him that yes, they were aware of his immense wealth, and that no, he couldn't buy it, because what would he do with it, and because life is a circle and they are now in the age of shedding things.This fall is the 50th anniversary of Archie's senior year at Ole Miss -- which I know because I am a sentient organism in the state of Mississippi -- and of Olivia's senior year too. This is the third time they've been to Oxford during quarantine, helping with Eli and Abby and their kids, who rode out a chunk of the virus time here. In all, Archie and Olivia have nine grandkids, who know him as Red and her as Go-Go. Everyone loves when Red and Go-Go are around. All the Manning grandchildren have had their own moment of realization when they reconcile the sweet doting man they know as Red with the cultural institution named Archie Manning. It's hilarious when they put it together. A few years ago, Eli's oldest child, Ava, was watching "The Book of Manning," and after a while, Eli explained that the young man throwing bullets and scrambling to keep plays alive was her grandfather."That's Red," he said.

She took this new information in for a minute, watching Archie in the fall of 1969 and 1970. It's been 50 years since he played college ball, and even across those decades and generations a 7-year-old could recognize something special.

"Red was good," she said.


 RED AND GO-GO are currently off the grandparent clock and enjoying a lazy Saturday morning with a whole day stretched out before them. The quiet is nice but strange. For the first time in 22 years, they don't have any children in the NFL. Eli and Abby are back in New Jersey now, and Archie laughs about an interview Peyton gave to Dan Patrick, in which he said Eli would rather be getting rammed into the ground by 300-pound tackles than homeschooling his kids and joked that Eli would rather go play for the Chargers than tutor math lessons. Cooper is in New Orleans running workouts with his son Arch, the latest Manning quarterback to set the football world abuzz, and Peyton is being Peyton while enjoying the anonymity the required face masks can give him.

I'm wearing a T-shirt from Alpine Camp for Boys, and that's the first thing they notice.

"Did you go to Alpine?" Olivia asks.I tell her I did. They know it well.

"We have a grandson ...," she begins.

" ... Heid Manning," he says, finishing her sentence, which happens a lot with them, so much, in fact, that after a while it's hard to tell where one of them ends and the other begins. They aren't Archie and Olivia so much as ArchieandOlivia, which is how folks around town pronounce their name. People see them as a team. Archie is militant about his honors being all of their honors. One of his few notes on "The Book of Manning" was to ask that the director show the 10 mph speed limit sign on the campus in honor of Eli, alongside a shot of the 18 mph signs that honor him. When he finally let Drew, the town where he was born, name the stretch of Highway 49 leading into town after him, he quietly made one demand: It must be named Manning Boulevard, not Archie Manning Boulevard, as a way to honor his father, Buddy Manning, who ran the Case dealership on that highway for years.

Seeing that sign now makes him smile, because these days of shedding are also days of remembering, the self-administered anesthesia for loss, and of reckoning too. The last act of famous men is always about closing the gap between the avatar they are in public and the human being they are with the people who love them most. The big anniversaries started three years ago, for Archie's 50th high school reunion in Drew, which Archie attended. Olivia didn't come to this one, although she went to one in Drew a few years before, when they snuck out to eat a steak at Crawdad's in nearby Merigold before returning to the party. The celebrations haven't really stopped, marking 50 years since he played Alabama on prime time or since the Sugar Bowl, and they'll go until next year, when they celebrate five decades of marriage.

"Fifty years in January," she says.

"Who introduced you?" I ask them.

"I think I gave you and Jim Poole a ride somewhere one day," she says, looking over at Archie.

"She had a car," he says, smiling. "I didn't."

"I gave you a ride to Leslie's drug store," she says.

Archie smiles again sheepishly.

"No," he says. "We said Leslie's. We were going to the pool hall."

"We started dating the spring of our freshman year," she says, laughing. "We've been together a long time. I wish I had documented how many football games I've been to."

A few times they've had friends in town for a football weekend and decided to rest Archie's bad knees and watch the game on television. They keep beer iced down in the back, and when Olivia goes out to get one she likes to hear the metallic waves of noise coming from the stadium, the disembodied cheering like a recessional hymn, or maybe just the opposite: a long-lost friend stopping by to say hello.
MY MOTHER'S CONDO building is next door to theirs, so we catch up about the neighborhood. It's that brief early-morning window when people emerge from the cocoon of air conditioning and walk around town. Archie, Olivia and I talk as a steady stream of people pass on University Avenue. Everyone who walks from the town square to the campus passes their porch. We are close enough to the sidewalk to hear the whispers of the joggers and strollers as they pass: Holy s---! Nationally, he's best known as the father of Peyton and Eli. But inside the triangle of, say, Memphis, New Orleans and Destin, Florida, he is as beloved and culturally important as any living athlete.

"It is kind of fun even now," Olivia says, "when you walk on The Square with Archie and people see him and their reaction."

She turns to him and laughs.

"I'm surprised people even recognize you," she says, "but ... they know. I've heard people walk by, turn around and kind of come back and go, 'That's Archie Manning!'"

Olivia tells me, as she always does when we are together, how much I look like my late father. I appreciate that. They all went to college together. My dad was in ROTC and felt certain that when law school ended he'd be shipped to Vietnam -- he had his post-graduation orders to report to military intelligence school when he jumped at an offer to trade his active duty for many years in the reserves. For my dad and a lot of his classmates, Archie's college career coincided with a desperate need to live in the moment. The students who watched Archie from the stands would miss that feeling once it was gone and would never stop chasing it. My dad and his friends would pass around old cassette tapes of Ole Miss radio calls with the same intensity that I later traded Grateful Dead bootlegs.

Archie gets that. His draft number was 75. A friend-of-the-program doctor down in Jackson did Archie's Army physical and, yes, an All-America quarterback was deemed physically unfit for combat. The strangeness of that time binds him and his fans, and the long tail of his post-career stardom cannot be separated from the moment in which that stardom began. He's always been a kind of vessel. Maybe that's why he is unfailingly generous with liquored-up contemporaries who corner him on the way back from the men's room to tell him where they were when he performed some secular football miracle. It's almost hard to overstate how he exists as a symbol with only a fleeting resemblance to an actual human being. A few years ago, my godfather, Steve Vaught, from Moon Lake, Mississippi, flew up to Washington to see a new Episcopal bishop be ordained in a carnival of incense and liturgy. When he got home, he called my mom. She asked him to describe all that ritual and ceremony. "Mary," he said, pronouncing my mother's name with three drawled syllables, "I haven't seen anything that impressive since Archie Manning's junior year."

"It is kind of fun even now, when you walk on The Square with Archie and people see him and their reaction."
Olivia Manning
The Vaught story is funny to them because they know Steve and can hear it in his almost cartoonish Mississippi Delta accent: June-yah. Yeee-uhhhh. I tell them I've been over to Indianola, where incidentally Vaught once ran a John Deere dealership, and that I dug up some funny old clippings from The Enterprise-Tocsin, the local paper that covered the tiny farming community of Drew when Archie was a boy. Turns out, long before he became a football star, young Archie Manning was a champion of the Sunflower County 4-H circuit. He and his sister kept their animals out at the small family farm east of town on the Quiver River, and he regularly showed up in the paper. He received a prize for junior public speaking, for a third-place heavyweight Hampshire class fat lamb and for his specialty, the ever competitive and oddly technical subculture of poultry judging.

Olivia knows where this is going and she's already laughing.

"It's Cooper's favorite routine," she says.

"My son just thinks that's the weirdest thing he's ever heard of in his life," Archie says. "That we judged chickens."

He gets into character. Now he's standing up on the condo porch, hands behind his back and his shoulders braced at attention, reciting his speech to Sunflower County's most knowledgeable poultry men. The trick, he says, was you had to check the vents. I don't know what that is, but apparently a sensitive hand can tell a lot from the vents of a chicken.

"You feel these chickens," he says, "then you gotta rate 'em."

Olivia and I are about to fall over. People are walking past, sneaking peeks, as he explains the competition, even down to how they rated eggs both pre- and post-cracking. The three of us spend the morning laughing like this. Archie always seems like he's in a good mood. Cooper says he rarely sees his dad get aggravated, even when he knows Archie doesn't particularly like someone.

Eventually we move inside. There's a new Ole Miss powder blue football helmet with No. 18 on the side and a painting in the kitchen by Mississippi artist Bill Dunlap, who is the Monet of the bespoke shotgun set. The couches are comfortable. I always feel that sitting with Archie and Olivia is like being inside a football snow globe -- looking back at the people looking in. That feeling is intensified inside the condo, where all of their family photographs look familiar but slightly askew. It takes a minute to figure out why. There's Eli in street clothes outside Giants Stadium, and there's Cooper and Peyton long after a game. Then it hits me. Their memories often begin just as our memories end. We remember the thunderous noise of a stadium, but they remember the quiet car ride home. They've lived this public-private duality for a half-century now.

Archie occupies a unique place in sports popular culture: Anyone can get him on the phone at any time -- a college student at Virginia recently interviewed him for a class project -- and he is unfailingly polite and accommodating but lets no one except Olivia inside. He is at once among the most accessible and inaccessible people in sports. Few living humans have given as many rubber chicken speeches or held court more at charity golf tournament grill rooms. For 50 years now he's grown expert in the art of being visible and yet invisible, famous and yet private, beloved and yet unknown. He holds his cards close, and his only real tell is silence. Sometimes Archie gets quiet and lost in his memories, and those rare moments when words fail him are when he says the most.  

• IT'S 80 MILES from their condo to Drew.

Every now and again Archie and Olivia will get into their car and drive out of the hills and into the flatland Delta that starts just outside Marks. They'll take the left to cut across the alluvial cotton fields and the dark green soybean fields nearing harvest. They follow the highway that mirrors the tracks of the old Yellow Dog railroad line. Tutwiler and Rome come and go in a blur of abandoned country stores and shotgun homes. Neither of them needs a GPS to navigate the little towns. They pass through Vance, near where John Lee Hooker was born -- and where the brutal landscape makes his droning, hypnotic blues feel created by the dirt and not by human hand, born as much as composed. The road signs warn them and all other drivers not to stop within a mile or two of the Gothic Parchman prison farm, where the heavy air of human suffering is an almost physical thing. Summer drives taste like tomatoes, and fall drives smell like thick clouds of defoliant being sprayed on the cotton by low-flying yellow crop-duster pilots, who love to dive under power lines and buzz passing cars. For the Mannings, it's a drive through a world of used to be.

"Drew would have dances," Olivia says. "After you watched Lawrence Welk with your mom and dad."

Archie starts laughing. Did I mention they laugh constantly?

"Oh my, I still watch it," he says.

You can almost hear her eyes rolling. He's getting so nostalgic in his old age -- although to be honest he's always wanted to curate his own memories and just pick the good ones. A long time ago he got paired with Welk at a celebrity golf tournament and snuck off to find a pay phone to call his mama back in Drew and tell her. Now 71, he loves that a local New Orleans station still airs reruns.

"At six o'clock," she says.

"Saturday night at six o'clock, and I watch it," he says.

"He has a cocktail and ...," she says.

"... I watch it," he finishes.

So when he goes back to Drew now, he always starts the drive by saying that they will only go to the cemetery to visit his mama and daddy and that he won't subject himself to the trauma of seeing his sepia memories stripped away when confronted with the reality of his hometown.

"That's all we've got there is a cemetery," Olivia says.

But he always caves, pulled back into the streets of his youth. He drives around and leaves feeling hollow. It's hard to explain how decayed and ruined Drew looks now, or how much that lives inside former residents like Archie. It's something they carry around, long after they've moved away. There's a store on the main drag through town where the front has just crumbled and fallen, revealing racks of clothes inside. The town can feel abandoned, though the census says 2,000 people still live there. The two most prominent features are burned shells of houses and enormous potholes, some of them as wide as a beach towel and as deep as a quart of milk.

This summer I went to have lunch with Stafford Shurden, my friend from Drew. Stafford is part owner of Archie's old home, and he drove me over. We found it boarded up. Squatters had been living inside or something. Stafford came here with Archie once and, knowing what he knows about the horrible memories Archie might associate with this place, he watched him closely. Archie focused on the good and smiled a little, pointing to the spots in the yard where he'd played. He talked a lot about his mom that day but didn't mention his dad.

"It had to be something he was thinking about," Stafford says.

As I looked over at the abandoned high school, Stafford got a drill out of his truck and unscrewed the plywood over the front door. We stepped into the dark house. The kitchen floor had partially caved in, the stove listing at the back of the room like a doomed ship. We hung close to the walls so we wouldn't fall through. There was an empty pack of Newports on the floor. There were two bedrooms in the back. One of them is where Archie's father died. I didn't know which one. I won't ever ask him.

There was a feeling in the air, unspoken at first, that we were emotionally trespassing. It didn't feel right to me, and we turned to retrace our steps along the sturdier wall joists toward the front door. I tell Stafford what I'm thinking.

"Well, you know," he says, "he says in his book that he felt like his dad set it up for him to find him." 1 upvotes1

Posted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 104ON AUG. 16, 1969, Archie went to a Delta wedding with his mom and sister. His dad, local tractor dealer Buddy Manning, had made an excuse and stayed home. Dark clouds rolled in from the hurricane gaining speed and power in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the second day of Woodstock in upstate New York. Archie and the guys talked about the coming season, and then he went back home. He walked into the house there on the corner across from the high school, through the kitchen and into the hallway. What he saw from there were his dad's feet dangling off the bed, and something about them felt wrong. That's what made him go into the room.

He saw the shotgun and the stick used on the trigger.

He saw the blood.

One version of Archie disintegrated right there on the spot, and another was born, tougher, more private, wounded, searching. Picture him in these first moments of his new life. It's incredible to consider the reservoirs of courage and resolve he tapped. He summoned the town doctor, called a family friend to make sure not to let his mom and sister come home, and then Archie Manning cleaned up the scene. He wanted to protect Sis and Pam from the horror he would bear wholly himself, locked up deep inside, a pain he would only rarely mention in a life filled with endless opportunities and indeed command performances to talk about himself. He cleaned the floor and walls. He watched an ambulance take his father away. He turned to face the world. He told me not long ago a boy walked into that house and a man walked out.

"When it happened, it was a daze," he says. "I'm rolling along and in this little dream world, a 19-year-old. I'm a starting quarterback for an SEC school and I'm dating a pretty girl and I'm from a nice little hometown and we're gonna play a national night game on TV. Everything was so hunky-dory and then boom ... ."

A man from the tractor dealership brought Buddy's last check, and when Archie opened it, he understood for the first time how little money his dad made. Archie took responsibility for the arrangements. "I had about 10 days here to help get my daddy buried," he says, "and decide whether I'm going back to Ole Miss. Those 10 days were crucial."

He decided to quit football and get a job in Drew to support his family. But his mother, who would go on to work for a local lawyer until almost the week she died at 81, in 2000, demanded he return to Oxford. Archie would never live in Drew again, and the 4-H small-town life would grow more nostalgically perfect with each passing year. Mayberry, he'd call it. A time before pain. I've often thought that when Archie describes his hometown, he's really describing an innocence before he had to try to rebuild himself and prepare to take the field again. He's not from Drew so much as he's the one citizen of a world his dad's suicide created.

To this day, Archie dreams at night of the life that ended that August day in 1969, always good and happy dreams, of the place where country folks came to town to shop on Saturday night, the rumbling cotton gins, the one stoplight without a yellow for caution, just green for go and red for stop. His future awaited him at Ole Miss, and he reluctantly left his grieving mother and sister and struck out on his own. He rode those 80 miles back into the foothills of Panola and Lafayette counties, leaving behind Drew and his flatland youth, arriving in Oxford a highly touted but still mostly unknown player.

"When I got back," he says, pausing, searching for the words, " ... it was really tough. Two-a-days, not really in class, got some time on your hands. Olivia got back on campus. I wouldn't have made it without Olivia."

Thirty-five days after Buddy Manning died, Archie took the field in Oxford as the junior starting quarterback. The Rebels won. Two weeks after that, only 49 days since his father's suicide, he gave one of the greatest performances a quarterback had ever given, accounting for 540 total yards in a hard-fought loss to Alabama in the second-ever prime-time college football broadcast. Archie became a folk hero overnight, and the mania that continues to shadow him even at 71 began. Two moments 49 days apart. That's when both the man and the myth started. If the man Archie Manning is today was born on Aug. 16, 1969, in a small house on Third Street in Drew, and if his legend was born in Birmingham on Oct. 4, then these two closely related but clearly separate people -- the private human and the public icon -- would have 49 days between them, a separation that the past five decades have closed but never erased.

Archie started getting thousands of letters. Tribute songs hit the radio. This is the season my godfather compared to a religious ceremony: Archie Manning's Junior Year. For Ole Miss fans like Steve Vaught and my late father, that was the greatest fall of their lives. For Archie and his family, it was ... complicated. "All of a sudden I start having my best year in football," Archie says. "Fifty years later, it's still my best year ever. That was a lot -- losing my dad and all of a sudden all this success and acclaim."

After a big game, in the quiet moments of a bus or locker room, he raged internally about the unfairness of his dad missing all this by a month and a half. One day not long ago, Archie and I talked about this season on the phone, and I think his voice might have cracked when he talked about the things his father didn't get to see. "He wasn't one of those daddies who always had his nose in it, but he was proud," Archie says, talking slowly. "He would have loved all those games and those wins. He would have loved it."

Archie burrowed himself deep into the team, where a worried head coach John Vaught kept close emotional tabs on his young star. When award season rolled around later, Archie found himself the only one of his peers who traveled with an assistant coach, Vaught wanting to make sure he always had someone nearby. Archie's response to the twin storms of grief and celebrity was to pull the people in his life even closer, especially his girlfriend, Olivia. They'd been dating since freshman year, when her popularity and beauty made her more of a big deal on the campus than just another recruit trying to make the team. I ask if he remembers the first time he saw her after his dad died. He gets quiet. Olivia and her parents came to the funeral, he says. Their support meant so much to Archie that he would later give her dad his Sugar Bowl watch.

I ask if he remembers that first moment of eye contact and the lifetime of promises that lived in it -- an understanding that she would share the spotlight with the outward legend but make a real life with the man inside. There is a silence.

"Yeah," he says finally.

Then Archie is gone for a minute, alone for a walk in his memory, his smooth facade down and his tenderest place exposed.

"Yeah," he says.

He is clearly standing again in that cemetery.

"Yeah ... " he says.

It's the summer of 1969. Drew is still vibrant, and his stardom is still a month away, and everything remains in front of him, all of it, the Sugar Bowl, the Saints, Cooper, Peyton and Eli, the future unknowable and far, far away. But Olivia is there, and things will somehow work out for the best.

"... yeah ... yeah ... yeah," he says, six times in all, and then he's quiet again. 1 upvotes1

• tayloblPosted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 104


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ARCHIE'S PHONE IS never silent. That familiar Apple alert noise eventually just fades into background noise. It's pretty funny. Cooper, who has quietly become a successful New Orleans businessman while remaining the family comedian, likes to do his impersonation of his dad's pocket.

"Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding," he cracks.

There is a case to be made that Archie Manning has more ongoing text threads than anyone else alive. Olivia's laugh has more than a little side-eye in it.

"He does," she deadpans.

The tentpole thread is named the Dirty 30. That's his freshman teammates at Ole Miss, the recruiting class of 1967. There were 30 of them who survived the brutal winnowing orchestrated by their main coach, a former ****-kicking, island-storming Marine named Wobble Davidson, who regaled his terrified charges with stories of going into caves and killing the enemy. Wobble's wife, Sarah, acted as a kind of den mom to help the boys lick their psychic wounds.

They talk about their grandchildren and what uniforms the Rebels might wear in the upcoming game. They still call football helmets "hats" and make a lot of jokes about being grumpy old men.

"On the thread I'm 18," Archie says. "That's all they call me. They call me 18."

They've lost seven friends in the past 50 years, and Archie was there to eulogize and bury them all except for his right tackle, because a looming back operation kept him from walking -- an absence that "killed me," he says. Three years ago, as his season of remembering began, the Dirty 30 had a reunion at Ole Miss.

"Even Sarah Davidson came," Olivia says.

Archie sends out texts every morning to his children and grandchildren and a few of his grandchildren's high school teammates. Sometimes scripture. Sometimes a thought for the day. Sometimes he sends a quote. When Drew Brees decided what the world really needed was his opinion about a protest of social injustice in America, Archie's daily motivational text message the next morning quoted Will Rogers: "Never miss a good chance to shut up."

He checks in on former teammates at all three levels. The fruits of those conversations pepper his daily life: He'll talk about a guy who was on the Saints for two years who has a son who plays college ball out west now, or maybe about a guy from Mississippi who owns a duck-hunting farm or something.

"I'm going, 'Dad, what the hell are you talking about?'" Cooper says.

Sometimes Olivia or the boys will ask him about his day.

"I got a lot of work done," he'll say, and what he means is that he called or wrote about 40 people. It's how Archie chooses to spend his time. Some of this is Archie understanding that a note from him means a lot to people. But he also doesn't want to disappoint. He rarely tries one of the endless and fabulous new restaurants in New Orleans because he feels so guilty.

"The old places have always been so good to me," he explains, "and I feel like if I hadn't been in in six weeks, it's kind of like, 'Where you've been?' So I try to be loyal and faithful."

"I go to the new places with the girls," Olivia says.

"I'm going to Manale's, and I'm going to Clancy's," he says.

"His never losing touch with everybody that has been a part of his life has been remarkable. He is really, really, really good at keeping in contact with people."
Cooper Manning
He feels a responsibility, to himself, to his mother who endured, to his father who couldn't endure. Sometimes I think about the energy he must spend trying not to let people down. Nearly every person in Oxford has a story, such as the waiters at City Grocery who complained about his table leaving only a 10% tip only to find Archie back in the next day to make it right. My cousin Michael was one of the top people in the athletic department before he took a job at Texas A&M. He told me once about the time he got a phone call from one of Archie's friends. Archie was on crutches from a recent surgery and was trying to figure out how to park close enough to the stadium to get inside. But he would never ask the program for a favor, so his friend was taking matters into his own hands. When Michael called, Archie tried to tell him no until he finally just took the parking pass -- which allowed him to park near a building and a street bearing his last name. He puts tremendous pressure on himself, it seems, to be the man people expect him to be, which of course is the man he expects himself to be too.

If some kid who attended the Manning Passing Academy eight years ago had a great Arena League game, he could expect a text from Archie. He'll check in with Fran Tarkenton and with former Ole Miss legend Charlie Conerly's widow and still find the time to send NFL general managers gushing texts about his grandson Arch's latest triumph. He checks in with me, for god's sake, giving me an opening to send a picture of my young daughter. "It's constant contact," Cooper says. "His never losing touch with everybody that has been a part of his life has been remarkable. He is really, really, really good at keeping in contact with people."

A lot of people don't know that the summer Buddy Manning took his own life, Archie was up in Oxford working out and taking classes. It was the first summer he hadn't worked on a brick-laying crew in Drew. So in the small window after summer school ended but before two-a-days began, Buddy drove up to Oxford to pick up his son. They rode those 80 miles back out of the hill country into the Delta and went back home. Buddy waited until Archie was home to kill himself, and Archie has spent a lot of time trying to understand why. His best guess is his father knew that Archie could handle it and that he'd shield his mom and sister. In that light, Buddy is a deeply imperfect hero, living in constant inner pain, just hanging on until his special boy was home and would be able to clean up the mess and take up the burden. Archie lives with the fact that he missed the signs, if there were any. He let his father slip through his fingers, and in the five decades since, he hasn't let that happen to anyone else. Once you are in Archie Manning's life, he is fierce in his desire to keep you there.

He never lets anyone go.

ARCHIE KEEPS A lockbox in a bank in New Orleans. Inside are things he inherited from his father. There are more than a dozen pocketknives, including a beautiful green one monogrammed "EAM." His dad always told him a man should carry a pocketknife. His uncle Peyton told him to always carry a handkerchief, and Archie still does. But the real treasures stored in the bank are Buddy Manning's pocket watches. There's one on a silver chain. One is engraved. Another is well worn and scratched. There's one made by the Illinois Watch Company, which was started in 1867 and made it until 1928, the time frozen at 1:54. The Elgin brand is stopped at 12:50, the Bulova at 9:55, the Waltham at 10:32. He doesn't think any of the watches work anymore, which doesn't matter much because their value to him was never about their ability to mark the passage of time. Or rather, because their mere presence in his life tracks the rushing away of days in a more sophisticated and cosmic way than the marriage of springs and gears. The wristwatch my father left me doesn't tell time any longer either, and for reasons I don't fully understand I haven't taken it to get fixed. I think I like it broken. This morning I read a poem by Philip Levine called "Inheritance." It's about an old Bulova watch that "finally threw up its twin baroque arms to surrender to the infinite and quit without a word." That poem unlocked something about the innate human desire to stop time, and about the way that few things are more freighted with meaning and symbolism than a hand-me-down watch that no longer runs. Levine speaks for those timepieces when he writes that heirlooms are merely "amulets against nothing." Archie texted me a dozen photos just now of him holding these watches, turning them over in his hands, the gold and silver and brass cold against his palm. 2 upvotes2

• tayloblPosted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 104


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I, ELISHA ARCHIE Manning III, being of sound mind and body ...

His father died at 59, his grandfather at 79, his great-grandfather at 85. Archie is 71. He's got years and years left, but he is in that glowing final act. What will his children and grandchildren inherit from him?

They will inherit football.

The Manning grandchildren don't really get how rare it is for one family to produce so many professional quarterbacks. Once Eli's daughter, Ava, was trying to sort out the whole situation. She was 8 or so and had questions.

"So you play for the Giants?"

Eli said yes.

"And Uncle Peyton played for the Broncos?"

Eli said yes.

"And Red played for the Saints?"

Eli said yes. Ava considered all this. Her other grandfather, Abby's dad, is called Tom-Tom. You see where this is going.

"Who did Tom-Tom play for?"

Eli tried to explain that Tom-Tom didn't actually play football.

"Why?" she asked.

His family will inherit a lot of stuff. In preparing for their big move, they've been going through a storage unit. Sitting with me one day, Olivia recounts all the stuff that has somehow followed them for all these decades.

"We found Archie's pins from 13 straight years of attending Sunday school," she says, laughing. "Perfect attendance. And his tap shoes."

"Olivia says I'm a hoarder," he says.

They will inherit his deeply ingrained instinct for self-deprecation. Here's a story he loves to tell on himself. The summer before Arch Manning started playing junior high football, he and his dad, Cooper, and Archie traveled to a baseball tournament together. Arch used the time to ask his granddad for advice about the coming season. 1 upvotes1

Posted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 104



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"Red," he said, "I'm gonna be playing real football this fall. Do you have any advice?"

This caught Archie off guard.

He thought about all the lessons he'd learned about being a quarterback, and all the lessons he'd taught. With his grandson eagerly awaiting the matrix to be revealed, Archie told him about how important it was for quarterbacks to have total control in the huddle, even if that means standing outside the team for a second to get composure and control.

"You are in charge of your huddle," Archie said.

There was a pause.

"Well, Red," Arch said finally. "We don't ever huddle."

They both laughed.

"I'm old," Archie says.

They will inherit a lot of valuable parenting lessons, as Archie leaned on the men in his life like Coach Vaught and Olivia's dad and his uncle Peyton. Think about his son's names: The oldest is named after Olivia's dad, the middle after his uncle, and not until the baby did he name a child after his own dad. Cooper sometimes wonders how his dad learned how to be a man in the years after Buddy died. It remains something of a beautiful mystery, but he's grateful. At no point in the mania of Eli and Peyton did Archie ever make Cooper feel slighted or somehow inferior, a lesson Cooper leans on now that he has his own superstar in the making. He remembers a moment during one of his brothers' Super Bowl runs when he heard Archie bragging about the youth baseball team Coop had been coaching. "He could talk about that and make it seem just as important as it was when Eli beat Brett Favre at Lambeau Field," he says. "There was never even an ounce of jealousy for me because I felt like Dad and I were in it together."

Archie loves being part of the action. Arch and his Newman teammates have spent the summer doing cruel running workouts texted from Eli to Cooper, while Archie stands to the side and runs the stopwatch and yells encouragement. Long ago he stopped thinking of himself as a quarterback and started thinking of himself as the father of quarterbacks. For years, the last four digits of his cellphone number were a reference to his own pro football career: 0808. A few years ago friends noticed a change. He had four new final digits: 1810.

Now he's the grandparent of a quarterback, and there's some magic at work in the timing. Just as their life of Sundays ended, they found a way back to Friday night. Their children's football careers have ended exactly as their first grandson's career is taking off, just in case they weren't catching enough of the circular vibes being thrown at them by the universe. They are back where all this began, in metal bleachers beneath halogen lights.

"That's a lot more fun," she says.

"High school is so pure," he says.

His grandchildren will inherit a fighting spirit that is sometimes obscured by how friendly Archie is with strangers. Yes, he is a 71-year-old man with an earnest, goofy grin who finds time for everyone. But don't misunderstand. He is also still the young man who found his father's dead body and cleaned it up. He is still the man who won those big football games in college, who won a Sugar Bowl, who endured season after season of beatings in the NFL.

As we talk about all this passage of time, Olivia interrupts us and hands over a photograph that just arrived via text. She seems joyful and proud.

"I just got this from Abby," she says. "Eli and Ava are off to play in a father-daughter golf tournament."

They both look so happy. I wax about how cute they look and what a special bonding experience this will be. Her grandparents know better.

"Ava's competitive," Olivia says with a knowing smile.

THERE IS ONE thing his family will not inherit. They will never experience the darkness Archie battled when his father chose to exit his son's life. Nobody will. He keeps that private. Buddy Manning loved his son. Archie is sure of it. But he never said the words. Not once. Archie says the words to his sons every day. Those three boys, grown men now, live in a world where circles are always whole. The pain that killed Buddy Manning died in that room with him, and not because of luck, and not by random, but because Archie made the decision that he would keep that hurt himself and not pass it on. The public story of the Manning family is famously that his boys followed in his footsteps, a narrative so powerful it leaves little room for a hidden, essential and foundational truth. Archie has chosen the parts of himself and his past that will live on and he has chosen the parts that will not. And the one thing that will die with him, that will not take up hidden residence in his children, or their children, is what that room on Third Street in Drew really felt like. That burden is his alone. Carrying it has been the most important job of his 71 years. 1 upvotes1


• Posted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 10LAST YEAR ARCHIE got yet another lifetime achievement award, which is as close as a human can get to attending his own funeral. He knows exactly what folks will say when he's gone, which is a weird piece of information to have. This particular ceremony was for being a distinguished American, given out in the Yale gymnasium on the campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Everyone wore tuxedos. The retired Ole Miss sports information director and close family friend Langston Rogers, who used to watch after Cooper, Peyton and Eli at ceremonies just like this one, accompanied Archie to Yale out of love and habit.

A chain of surgeries had left Archie struggling. The walk to the microphone took a far greater toll than he let on. So as Archie started his speech, Rogers looked around for an elevator. He didn't think Archie could make the long trek back up the stairs to the waiting car. Onstage Archie talked about sitting with Buddy Manning on Saturday afternoons and listening to college football on the radio. The memories he shared of that time were light and full of joy. That's a choice he made a long time ago. He indulged his nostalgia for Oxford, talking about the big games and the lifelong friends and how he met Olivia there. He told the crowded room about how Coach Vaught had been like a father to him long after the last play had been called and the last football snapped. Archie talked about visiting his old coach three and four times a week in the last month of Vaught's life.

When the speech ended, to great applause, Langston whispered in Archie's ear that he'd found an elevator and they didn't need to walk. Archie waved him off. With Rogers watching in fear and then admiration and then awe, Archie slowly climbed the stairs by himself, without help or pity, just a man who long ago learned what it took to look at himself in the mirror and be proud.

In the coming years you will be able to find Archie Manning on Friday nights sitting up at the top of the high school bleachers, wearing the green of Newman on his baseball cap, the rare man who has lived a public life of incredible highs and harrowing lows and finds himself content in the glow of the world he created. He presides over a close-knit family whose members haven't let fame or money take the most essential part of themselves. His race is run and he is enjoying the victory parade. That's the energy Archie puts out when people spend time with him -- at a high school game in New Orleans, on his porch in Oxford. You can feel the contentment.

His phone dings and he looks down. More texts from the Dirty 30.

One of them is a link to an interview that young Arch Manning gave to a recruiting website, his first big media moment. The young man talks about the pressure of his last name and how he just wants to be a good teammate and leader. Archie looks at a photograph someone has texted the group. It's of a huge red moon hanging over Deer Island on the gulf coast near Biloxi: a 4-mile sliver of fragile sand that gets smaller by 2 acres a year -- literally a piece of Mississippi that is disappearing, a little more with each cycle of that big moon. One day the only thing left of Deer Island will be the memories and stories of those who once enjoyed its shores. Memories and stories, which can withstand even the tide, as long as they are told and retold. Someone else texts a link to an old Elvis Presley video about picking turnip greens. The Dirty 30 are themselves prolific traffickers in the same nostalgia that often ensnares their most famous member. When Archie pulls it up to listen, there's a driving bass line and Elvis is singing on a Las Vegas stage in the summer of 1970, almost 50 years ago to the day. The horns shift into gear, rockabilly trill guitars, then fast bluegrass picking and a funky wah-pedal tone. Archie is transported to that magical time in Oxford, between his junior and senior years, when he and his girlfriend, Olivia, walked hand in hand through a campus that one day would be a shrine to their family name. 3 upvotes3

Posted on 3 hrs, V I P, User Since 85 months ago, User Post Count: 104



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- The End - 3 upvotes3