THE MAN MANNINGS

In rare interview, Tom Condon, super agent for Peyton & Eli, gives exclusive look into his world

TOM CONDON was about to go to the biggest meeting of his life, and he couldn’t find his pants.

He was sure he picked them up from the dry cleaner before he left for New Orleans on that weekend in 1997. But as Condon was getting ready to meet with Archie Manning, who had just begun screening agents for his superstar son Peyton, all he saw under his dress shirt and jacket was an empty hanger. Condon was on Archie’s short list, along with some of the biggest names in the business — agents such as Leigh Steinberg and Marvin Demoff, who at the time seemed to have a monopoly on the NFL’s top quarterbacks and stars.

Condon had a plan to win the Mannings over. But first, he needed to find pants.

“I was supposed to meet him at 9 or 10 o’clock,” Condon recalls in a recent rare and exclusive interview with the Daily News. “So I end up running around that morning, trying to find some dress pants somewhere. Of course, nothing was open.”

“We had gotten a suite at a hotel for a couple of days and Tom was going to be the first one we met with,” Archie Manning adds. “And he knocked on

the door and he was standing there and he had on a pinstripe suit coat, shirt, tie . . . and blue jeans.”

Condon had already represented a couple of first-round quarterbacks, but he knew a “generational player” such as Peyton Manning would do things for his career that the likes of Todd Marinovich and Heath Shuler never could.

“He changed the landscape for me,” Condon says. “I knew after that everything would be different.” If only he could get beyond the cuTHErious

and amused look on Archie’s face when he opened the door that morning and saw the man he was considering entrusting his son’s future wearing jeans.

Nearly a quarter century earlier, long before Peyton or Eli Manning was born, Condon was a relatively anonymous offensive lineman, a 10th-round pick out of Boston College, drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1974. In a business where no one but the owners got rich at the time, he never imagined that someday he would become one of the most powerful agents in sports.

The Chiefs offered Condon a $14,000 non-guaranteed salary and a $2,000 signing bonus as a rookie — a deal they assumed he would take without a fuss. So imagine their surprise when Condon told Hall of Fame-bound coach, Hank Stram, “Thanks, but no.”

“(Stram) told me ‘We’ve never had a 10th-round draft choice make this football team,’” Condon recalled. “He said ‘I just offered you $2,000 for a summer job.’”

Even Condon’s father — a lawyer from Ansonia, Conn., whom Condon