The Book of Manning

Peyton, who's you're favorite football player, man?

My dad.

You're dad's your favorite football player too?

The pride of Ole Miss,

quarterback Archie Manning.

Written in the pages of football folklore

is the Manning legend, a father and his sons.

Archie Manning, former NFL quarterback, patriarch.

Peyton and Eli, also NFL quarterbacks,

both boys number one draft picks,

back to back Super Bowl champions and MVPs.

The Manning story seems so surreal

that it reads like a fairy tale.

For them to be number one picks in the draft,

win Super Bowls and MVP, yeah we pinch ourselves.

We just tried to raise kids,

we tried to raise good kids and have a good family.

I don't like the perception that it was a plan,

that I was an NFL quarterback for awhile.

And now, I've got these boys and I'ma mold them

into being NFL quarterbacks, not so.

Even if I can do that and they might be an NFL quarterback,

I'm not sure you're gonna have a great father, son relationship.

That's what I wanted.

Fatherhood took precedence over football.

A strong sense of family was ingrained in his upbringing.

Elisha Archibald Manning,

Archie was born May 19th, 1949 in Drew, Mississippi,

the only son to parents Cis and Buddy.

As a boy,

Archie yearned for closeness to his father.

Common ground was found in football.

And my dad was a football fan.

We'd watch some football.

Anybody from Mississippi who played professionally,

he liked that team.

And he loved Mississippi, loved Mississippians.

And remember watching games every Sunday.

My dad was a New York Giants fan,

and we didn't get them on TV a lot.

So, that was a big thrill if we ever get

to see the New York Giants.

And the reason he was a Giants fan,

there was a quarterback, back in the '50s,

number 42 from Ole Miss named Charlie Conerly,

and my dad loved Charlie Conerly.

Therefore, we followed the Giants.

I think Archie wanted to be closer to his dad than he was.

But his dad was a little bit distant in that regard,

and he did have trouble telling his kids he loved them.

You didn't hug in those days like we do now.

I don't think a lotta dads told their kids they loved them.

I'm sure his father loved him as much as any father does.

It's just men at that time

did not show demonstrative affection.

He was a tough guy.

And I think he was a good influence on my work ethic,

In 13 years, I had never missed a day of Sunday school.

I tried to make good grades so I could be Valedictorian.

In the 1950s, Drew, Mississippi

was a farming community of only a few thousand.

A slow paced, one stop light town in the delta.

Yet at the time,

Drew had more cotton gins than anywhere in America.

My dad was in the farm machinery business,

farming community, cotton was big back in those days.

First job I remember we could go, what we call chop cotton.

We made $3 a day, that's what you made for chopping cotton,

was $3 a day.

In the summer, he worked for a friend of ours father,

and they laid bricks.

Oh, labor, labor for a brick layer,

which meant we hauled bricks.

It was really hot, long hours,

five hours in the morning, go to lunch,

couple of hours in the afternoon, then go to baseball.

He was starting short stop for Drew High School

in the eighth grade and he wasn't out there

because they needed somebody to put in the spot.

He was the best on in the area to play the position.

Archie excelled at baseball,

but his first love was football.

A love shared by his father.

My dad loved Ole Miss, he loved Mississippi.

That really became my dream to be an Ole Miss quarterback.

But I was real thin.

Archie was skinny, he was skin and bones and freckles.

When we say skinny, we mean skinny.

When you're six three and 160 pounds, you're skinny.

Not much of a football body,

but it will surprise you to see

what a great athlete he was.

He could not only throw the ball,

but he could run that football too.

I wasn't that fast

but I was the fastest one there in Drew for a while.

I didn't have but three offers but one of 'em was Ole Miss.

We didn't let him know we wanted him that badly.

In fact, we sent a student assistant down to sign him

after his last ball game.

So, he wasn't hard to sign.

Some people probably said,

maybe you shouldn't do that

because Coach Vaught signed a lot of quarterbacks,

and he would change them to other positions.

So there were eight my year, eight quarterbacks signed

to go play freshman football at Ole Miss.

Baseball came calling.

Archie was drafted out of high school by the Atlanta Braves.

Doubting the Ole Miss decision, he looked for guidance.

Thinking I might change my mind,

my dad really helped me there.

He kinda just said, "You know, you gotta do

"what your heart tells you to do."

And I wanted to go to Ole Miss.

In those days, the things were so different,

you played freshman football.

And so, you could also sign 40 people,

but you didn't play but four games.

So, that's like three weeks of practice in between games,

you were really doing fundamentals of

a lot of tackling.

Kinda the job of the freshman coaches,

get those numbers down a little bit.

And we had a great freshman coach,

legendary guy named Warburg Davidson.

He kinda had a way of communicating with 18 year olds.

Guy is holding his knee,

big, sharp piece of his leg bone sticking through the skin,

blood going everywhere.

"Son, what's the matter with you?"

"Oh, coach my leg's broke, my leg's broke."

"How you know it's broken, are you a doctor?"

"Matcher, come and get this man out of the way.

"All right, let's go, line 'em up, keep running.

"Don't worry, you're not gonna die,

"you pass out before you die."

If you could make it through Warburg Davidson,

you could run barefooted and naked through hell

and you wouldn't even be sunburned

when you came out on the other side.

It was tough, every day was a gut-check.

First time we got to go home, a lotta guys didn't come back.

And I can't say I didn't think about it.

Manning persevered.

At quarterback, he was the last man standing.

Archie engineered an 80

to eight victory over Vanderbilt.

Head Coach Johnny Vaught took notice.

And in an historic move,

Archie was named the starting quarterback

his sophomore season in 1968.

In all the quarterbacks he'd had,

he'd never started a sophomore, never started a sophomore,

and I was gonna be the first sophomore quarterback.

I was thrilled, probably a little scared.

This is big boy football.

Behind center, Archie showed off a skill set

seldom seen in quarterbacks at the time.

One thing that caught the imagination

of everybody back then was that he could run

and he could pass so well.

Not many quarterbacks in that era

could do both as well as Archie could.

Pass protection would break down,

and Archie would reverse field on a rollout,

head the other direction.

He might even give ground, then wind up completing a pass.

It was amazing the way that he could escape pressure.

Archie just, he put on a show, man, he just did.

He ran everywhere and through everywhere.

When a fellow starts out to the right,

and gets boxed and turns back to the left,

and then throws it back to the right,

that gets you attention.

He worked, and worked and worked all the time

to build up his body, learn flip balls, study tapes.

He would leave the dorm after lunch

and study film for hours before practice.

We knew that as long as he was in our huddle,

we had a chance to win every ball game.

Archie Super Manning is what they called him.

Archie's heroics won games and won over fans.

Playing with reckless abandon,

he led the Rebels to seven wins his sophomore season.

And Archie Manning, about the coolest article

we've seen this year at quarterback.

Archie was a multi sport athlete,

playing baseball for Ole Miss

in the College World Series that year.

On campus, he attracted attention easily.

I knew who he was,

and I knew he was quarterback at Ole Miss.

It was a fraternity, sorority mixer.

We called them swaps back then but it was a mixer.

And so, I met him there, danced,

talked and I could talk football.

We just had a lot in common,

both of us from small Mississippi towns.

Well, I thought she was beautiful,