Peyton Manning, Football Historian

For all of his competitiveness when it comes to opposing defenses Peyton Manning seems to regard his fellow quarterbacks...
For all of his competitiveness when it comes to opposing defenses, Peyton Manning seems to regard his fellow quarterbacks as a kind of brotherhood.PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL FRAKES/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY

As many of college football’s top quarterbacks huddled around him and a few of high-school football’s élite passers peered from nearby seats, Peyton Manning proceeded through a motion he has completed more than nine thousand times in seventeen N.F.L. seasons, something monotonous to witness if not for privileged proximity: he dropped back to pass. He shuffled his six-foot-five-inch frame through a seven-step drop and then staked his right foot into the turf, whipped his right arm forward along his ear, and sent a spiral into the Louisiana air. His wide receiver, who ran a comeback route to the sideline, caught the pass in stride. “That’s pretty, boys,” Cooper Manning, Peyton’s older brother and the emcee for this Saturday night showcase at the family’s annual passing academy, in Thibodaux, said. Cooper’s voice boomed through the public-address microphone, above whoops and hollers from the bleachers, where locals joined campers and their parents around Manning Field in early July. “That’s how it’s supposed to look.” Then the circle of quarterbacks around Peyton reshaped into a line, and each passer stepped up to throw the comeback, but could only mimic what couldn’t be outdone.

It may have been one of Peyton’s final passes at the academy, which the family formed in 1996, and which connects quarterbacks at several ranks of football for tutelage. Once he retires from the N.F.L., Manning will remain active with the academy, but will stop throwing for the showcase, he says. The timeline for that transition remains unclear, and, during the camp’s media session a day earlier, Manning fended off invitations to predict his future, laughing as he recalled being a young player overhearing veterans obsess about their retirement. “I used to look at them like, ‘You know, you’re not doing your current job all that well,’ ” he said. “ ‘I’d like for you to block a little better. Or maybe you dropped five balls last week, so maybe we could home in on this current job a little more and leave that business or that real-estate deal you’ve got to a later time.’ ”

Even if he’s focussed on the present, much of the current conversation about Manning, now thirty-nine, concerns his place in football history. He’s the N.F.L.’s all-time leader for touchdowns in both a season and a career. The single-season yards record belongs to him; in a few months, the career yards mark should, too. He has been named to fourteen Pro Bowls, the most among quarterbacks, and won five M.V.P. awards, the most among all players. He stacks up great, in other words, if you’re inclined to do any stacking. But Manning, for all of his competitiveness when it comes to opposing defenses, genuinely seems to regard his fellow quarterbacks more as a circle than a stack—to see them, in other words, as a kind of brotherhood. “I think only quarterbacks know what other quarterbacks might be going through, when you’re having one of those tough games, when you have an injury,” he told me at the camp. “I’m not sure anybody can relate besides another quarterback who has been through that situation before. So it is a unique fraternity.”

Manning has been an amateur football historian for longer than he’s been a quarterback. As a child, he was exposed to N.F.L. personalities through his father, Archie, who played QB for the New Orleans Saints, Houston Oilers, and Minnesota Vikings. But Peyton’s best lessons in football history took place in the back seat of the family car. When Archie and his wife, Olivia, drove their boys between New Orleans and Mississippi on visits to the boys’ grandparents, Archie, to pass the time, challenged his sons with football trivia. He allotted them ten or twenty yes-or-no questions to deduce which player he had in mind. Did he play in the sixties? Was he in the Coastal Division? As the Manning boys got better at the exercise, they earned the chance to present the group with their own mystery men. Victory meant finding players too obscure even for Archie—but they needed to know enough about them to handle all the yes-or-no questions.

As Peyton came to learn about the quarterbacks of yesteryear, he liked to ask about old battles, and what it felt like to play in particular games or with certain teammates. He knew all the pertinent names. By the time he was playing college ball in Knoxville, Tennessee, he wanted to share that camaraderie with his contemporaries. During at least one off-season, he tracked down phone numbers for prominent college quarterbacks—of course he knew the key players—and placed some calls. “Hi, this is Peyton Manning, the quarterback at Tennessee,” he would say, as if they didn’t already know who he was. “I’m just trying to get to know some of the other people in college football, to see if you ever want to talk ball sometime, to shoot the breeze.”

Even as he became one of the N.F.L.’s most celebrated names, Manning kept up this interest in history and, especially, his fellow QBs. After a game against Baltimore in 2013, during which Manning threw for seven touchdowns, a sideline reporter caught up with him and asked what it meant to be the first player since Joe Kapp, in 1969, to reach that mark. “Joe Kapp, No. 11,” Manning said. Then he squinted and grinned, as if searching his mind for more details to solve one of Archie’s old trivia questions. “From Cal, I want to say; Canadian.”

Manning continues to invite new quarterbacks into his circle; he seems to relish his time with the high-school and college passers at the academy. When asked to follow Manning’s perfect throw on the comeback route, many of the N.C.A.A. guys, despite their jocular disposition between passes, looked tense; they sailed their passes far and wide. Cooper tried to lighten the mood with jock-inflected trash talk. (“You know, guys, if this doesn’t work out, there’s a chess camp next week”; “I like that headband; I think my daughter lent it to you.”) Peyton grimaced at the most egregious overthrows, then clapped in encouragement. When the passes came in perfectly, he hooted and fist-pumped. A few years from now, young passers at the showcase won’t have to mimic Manning’s spiral, though they may still hope to chase the history he’s made. Manning, for his part, may continue to stand nearby, even after he’s stopped throwing, if only to cheer them on and shoot the breeze.