Peyton Manning And The Trouble With Immortality

It seemed like everybody already knew the outcome before the game ever started. Peyton Manning's Broncos—as opposed to Darius Kilgo's Broncos, or Ty Sambrailo's—were getting 3 points in a primetime divisional showdown against big goofy Andy Reid's Chiefs; the usual suspects might as well have had their self-congratulatory tweets scheduled days ahead. Judging by how quickly they popped up during Denver's 31-24 win at Kansas City on Thursday night, CBS' producers had been working on the "Peyton Is Cooked" graphics all day long, just in case.

Early in the game, it looked like a savvy move. Manning's gnarly early pick-6 and numerous near-interceptions were bad enough, but even his completions arrived with a dawdling anti-urgency. Broncos receivers could only watch them lilt through the air like errant wiffleballs, tapping their toes and staring at their watches. The Chiefs defensive line can make even the most athletic QBs look like they're riding a PhunkeeDuck, and Peyton Manning is not that quarterback. Behind Denver's spit-and-glue O-line, Manning might as well have been dangling from 20lb test.

For rival fans, seeing the 39-year-old Manning get crushed in his own backfield is no longer a cathartic experience; it has displaced Emily Deschanel's turn as the unrealistically awkward "Bones" as television's single most terrifying weekly ritual. At this point, and at his age, every blow Manning takes seems like one he might not get up from. At times this year, Manning has seemed aware of his sudden fragility, which is an uncommon thing to see in a quarterback, let alone one bound for the Hall of Fame.

There's a logical disconnect that seems to pop up whenever we talk about Best-Evers like Manning. We—his audience and acolytes and detractors—experience and understand his deterioration very differently than he does. Our context for the conversation seems, unsurprisingly, hilariously wrong.

We rarely think to use the terms "lingering effects" or "rest of his life" like we would for lesser players, whose "sudden" retirements we've applauded; players of Manning's caliber—especially quarterbacks, whose physical ailments are stubbornly read as referenda on toughness—are seen a somehow more than human, which is to say are dehumanized in a slightly different way than the NFL usual. Even when we're discussing the grisly weekly rituals Manning performs to coax his failing body into the showers and in front of a microphone, as Kevin Van Valkenburg does in a thoughtful profile at ESPN—He begins with his cleats, which he can barely untie without assistance. His socks come off after several violent tugs, revealing toes that are twisted and bent into obtuse angles—there's something abstracted about it. Public concern for the post-football health of NFL players seems, paradoxically, to be a luxury afforded only to the men we can ignore while they're on the field. Fans appear to have confused utterly the distinction between immortalizing players in the Hall of Fame and actually immortality, and it makes it only more difficult to understand a player like Peyton Manning in a meaningful way.

It has been more than a year since there was any real distinction between Regular Season Manning and Playoff Manning, maybe longer—the downward pressure of the salary cap, championship expectations, and time itself having crystallized arguably the best quarterback ever into something much wobblier. For most of the first two games of this season, Manning has been priming the engine desperately and yanking on the cord of his career like a rusty Snapper. "It's not even December!" his every exasperated grimace says, "This fuckin' thing." All of which is to say that, no, Manning did not seem up to erasing a 14-point deficit—one that owed largely to his own incompetence—on the road.

Football has a way of making reflexive, snap judgements like that look starkly dumb in hindsight, though, and Peyton Manning is very good at football. With some help from their hosts, Denver snuck out of Kansas City with a win. Of course they did, because they always do; all the doom was suddenly a strange but half-remembered Ambien dream. The conversation was, improbably, once again about legacy.

The win planted Denver on the top of the contentious AFC West, and in as strong a position as any team could be heading into Week 3. This past January's AFC title game seems like it was a million years ago, but that decisive and definitive-seeming loss to Andrew Luck's Colts—and the changing of the guard it seemed to signal—is fresh and raw. In leading that comeback in Kansas City, Manning certainly played like a man who wanted to leave something behind. That or we're just reaching for a story again, some certain thing to hold on to, when we've really only watched a football player win a football game.

But that's never stopped us before. The fun of the NFL, to the extent that it's fun and not merely whistling past the graveyard, is imbuing these stupid games with deeper meaning, and tying them into a bigger story. The NFL tries to do this with its typical ham-handedness every time it bangs away at the "NFL = America" message. The rest of us are just writing our own stories, using the characters we like most; we really can't help ourselves that way.

For instance, Peyton Manning probably has more in common with your average turtledove than he does with Brett Favre. But as we pull all this together and prepare to tell ourselves a football story, the two of them being the only QBs ever to eclipse an arbitrary 70,000 yard milestone becomes not just important but significant, somehow. If you squint at it just the right way, it has meaning. For now, that's good enough. In eight weeks, though, if the very mortal-looking Broncos of 2015's first six quarters are looking up at the Chiefs, and the Chargers too? There aren't enough milestones in the world. The storytelling machine will have moved on.

Let's live in the moment, then. Last Thursday night was an unforgettable roller coaster, and one overseen by an impressively inept operator, even by the prevailing traveling carnival standards. In spite of that, or because of it, Broncos 31 - Chiefs 24 may well have been the most entertaining Thursday Night Football game on record. Afterwards, Phil Simms described the Broncos' performance as a "gut check," which for a professional goober is remarkably sensible. His broadcast partner, Jim Nantz, was a bit more grounded. In his wrap-up, Nantz observed that "as the game went on, [Manning] looked stronger." And he really did. Maybe it's just as simple as that.