ANOTHER BIG SHOWDOWN
Manning and Brady ready to duel
Some of the gloss has come off, and you can begin to see underneath Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. In any other job except NFL quarterback, these guys would be the office drudges. They are punctilious, tedious, procedurally dogged. Manning, at 39, is more dun coloured than blond and requires a full mindbody effort to throw the ball. Brady, 38, is a drab, obsessive, attenuated figure. This is what real expertise looks like, and it’s not gorgeous.
They understand each other better than we ever could, and they certainly aren’t letting us in on their psychology this week. The two eventual Hall of Famers will meet in the AFC Championship with perhaps a last crack at a Super Bowl on the line, yet they’re treating it outwardly like it’s no different than working behind a counter. They obstruct all needless distraction and any attempt to get them to say something revealing with blandness.
“All I can say about Tom Brady is he plays the position the way it’s supposed to be played,” Manning says. “He just plays the position the right way and when you do that there’s a reason you play the position well and play it for a long time.”
Everyone else is an outsider to their little club of two, peerless equals who are 5-5 in their last 10 meetings, and 2-2 against each other in the playoffs. They can talk all they want about how this isn’t about them; it’s about the Denver Broncos against the New England Patriots. But the fact is theirs is the most important position on the field, and each will have no margin for error on Sunday, given how exacting the other is. The rest of us can only sift through the evidence, searching for clues to their internal drivers.
According to the Manning family, their home movies show Peyton was rigorous even as a three-yearold. It was an organic trait: He was barely out of toddlerhood when he could drop back and set up to pass in imitation of his father Archie, the New Orleans Saints quarterback. He was a miniature perfectionist, and footage shows him throwing tantrums if the smallest thing wasn’t done right.
He might have tipped over into an overwrought striver, had Archie Manning not been so firm a parent. One year the Mannings bought hand-tooled leather cowboy belts as souvenirs of a Colorado ski vacation. Archie’s had his jersey number on it, No. 8. “I hung it in the closet prominently,” he says. The Manning boys would clear the furniture and play football on their knees, and when fights broke out Archie would threaten, “Don’t make me get the No. 8.”
The mere threat made a lot of problems go away. “It never came off the hook too many times, but it was there,” Archie says.
Peyton didn’t need the No. 8 much. He set out to ace every test, and usually did. But that intensity could flare obnoxiously. At age 10 when he lost a youth basketball game, a furious Peyton jabbed a finger at his coach and shot, “We lost because you don’t know what you’re doing.” Archie watched from a distance, and demanded to know what had been going on. It was hours before Peyton confessed, and Archie drove him to the coach’s house to apologize.
The Bradys tell the same kind of stories about Tom. He was always insisting on what was “fair” as he strained to keep up with three athletic older sisters, who invariably let him know “He was low man on the totem pole,” his father Tom Sr. says. To give him some relief from the big-sistering, Tom Sr. took him on father-son golf outings, and by the time Tom was eight, he was making bets on the course. The stakes were free car washes of the family car. When Tom trailed, he’d just double the bet.
“By the ninth hole he would be into me for 160 car washes, and he’d throw his golf club and be sent to the car,” Tom Sr. says.
They had season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers, and Tom was so detail-obsessed they would set a timer and tape the games, so he could watch the replays when they got home from the stadium. Tom would analyze all the mistakes. “Even that young, we would talk about bonehead plays or how a coach or a player misused the clock or did something stupid,” Tom Sr. says. “It’s very much in his DNA.”
As adults Manning and Brady are all about self-command, their tantrums and insecurities channelled. They come into Sunday’s game from opposite directions, Manning failing physically in his 18th season with that stooping curvature in his surgically repaired neck, Brady healthier than ever in his 16th.
Manning missed seven starts with torn plantar fascia in his left heel and has thrown nine touchdowns to 17 interceptions. Brady is having one of his finest personal seasons, 38 touchdowns to just seven interceptions, yet his Patriots have been injury riddled. They will meet right in the middle, each nearing the cusp of 40, with more know-how when it comes to winning than anyone on the field.