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A common theme in virtually every profile of Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl quarterback’s legendary devotion to football. At age 12, he exhorted his pee-wee linemen to block harder. He started deconstructing NFL game video in high school. He arrived at college six weeks early to work out with upperclassmen. A few days after the Indianapolis Colts made him the first pick of the 1998 draft, he had the team playbook memorized. He orders rookies to meet him on the field at 8 a.m. the Monday after they are drafted. He falls asleep watching tape in the basement of his Indianapolis home; his wife slips the remote from his hand. Isn’t that sweet?
Then there’s Manning’s line-of-scrimmage foot-stomping, finger-pointing, signal-shouting choreography. It looks like an act, a bluff, deliberate misdirection—and it often is. It also looks like a twitch that jibes with the nonfootball personality quirks Manning is said to possess. Manning doesn’t know how to work a can opener. Manning needs to look at Polaroids of shirt-slacks-and-tie combos in order to get dressed. And there’s this, from a 2001 interview with Dan Patrick, who asked Manning for a “trivia question” about himself:
Manning: Why does Peyton Manning lick his fingers after every play or throw?Patrick: Yeah, I’ve noticed. What’s that, a signal or a good luck thing?Manning: Nope. The finger lick is just a really bad habit—I do it all the time. My wife, Ashley, is going to kill me if I do it at dinner one more time. I look like an animal about to dig in.Patrick: Wait, you do it at dinner?
Paging Dr. Sacks! If Manning weren’t a star athlete, you might tally his social foibles and physical tics, lay them beside his 3.0 GHz mind, and conclude that the dude has obsessive-compulsive disorder. A more plausible lay diagnosis is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The difference? People with OCD want to stop a particular behavior; people with OCPD don’t. “With Peyton Manning, he clearly doesn’t want to stop doing what he wants to do,” says Lennard Davis, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Obsession: A History.
And neither do football fans. After a tenth 4,000-yard passing season, a career-best 68.8 completion percentage, and a chance to win his second Super Bowl ring this Sunday in Miami, it’s time to state the obvious: Yes, Peyton Manning is obsessive. But he’s also a genius.
The two go throwing-hand in football-glove. It’s understood that extraordinary athletes like Manning and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are freaks. But they’re respected freaks because they do something valued by society. As opposed to, say, David Gibson, a South Carolina math teacher who studied word lists four hours a day every day for 12 years to become a champion Scrabble player. If Manning did that—or stomped his feet and licked his fingers while watching Jersey Shore all day—we might not be so interested.
Like those other elite jocks, Manning has the attributes of what Malcolm Gladwell has called the popular definition of genius: obsession (notebooks filled with observations on offenses and defenses), isolation (a darkened video room), and insight (a second-half evisceration of the New York Jets’ defense in the AFC Championship Game). The 18th-century writer and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, quoted in Nobel-winning neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s 1916 book Advice for a Young Investigator, put it even more neatly: “Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme.”
As the privileged son of an NFL quarterback, Manning the genius is no “outlier.” But his genius isn’t innate, either; with his Opie face and boyishly parted, short, brown hair, Manning looks more like a dentist than an NFL superstar at first glance. In his forthcoming book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, David Shenk tells the story of how Ted Williams would use his lunch money to pay friends to shag baseballs so he could keep hitting. The point: Like other brilliant obsessives from Mozart to Newton to Darwin to Bird to Manning, Williams worked harder than everyone else. He hated when people described him as a natural. “Why wouldn’t he?” Shenk says.
Of course, Williams, like most geniuses, was a pain in the ass, forever yammering about the science of hitting and interrogating great hitters about technique. Teammates grew weary of him, and fans resented his obvious disdain for them. Manning isn’t a public grump like Williams, cultivating as he has—to the tune of $13 million a year in endorsement income—an image as a self-deprecating dork. But that doesn’t mean he’s any easier to work with (or for) than the curmudgeonly Teddy Ballgame.
“He lives, eats, breathes, smokes, snorts, chews football,” says Adam Meadows, a starter on the Colts’ offensive line during Manning’s first five pro seasons. “He’s just a machine. That’s all he wants to do. I think he expects other people to approach it the way he does. It’s not always a good thing.”
Stories abound about how Manning’s demanding personality can rub teammates the wrong way. There’s a video of Manning screaming at his longtime center, Jeff Saturday, during a 2005 game after Saturday had the temerity to suggest a different offensive tactic than the one Manning had chosen. Before the Super Bowl three years ago, Manning pissed off teammates when he had the Colts ban hotel-room visits from relatives and friends the week before the game. “I don’t want any crying kids next to me while I’m trying to study,” he said during a team meeting, according to Sports Illustrated’s Michael Silver.
Manning is also known for lighting into his line when things go awry. “For a guy who doesn’t get sacked a lot, you don’t want to hear it when he does,” says Meadows, who left the Colts after the 2003 season and retired in 2007. Meadows says that during the 2000 season he was diagnosed with pneumonia on a Monday and had lost 14 pounds by the time he was able to practice again that Friday. Still ailing, Meadows managed to play that weekend. But after the team lost at New England, Manning ripped his performance: “We’re paying you to be better than that.”
Anecdotes like those are usually marshaled to demonstrate Manning’s competitiveness and will to win. He makes up with teammates afterward, buying presents for his linemen and hugging and thanking them after the Colts’ next success, as he does with Saturday in the 2005 video. What has rankled teammates in the past, though, is an insensitivity to life beyond football. Meadows says that he and Manning were close during the quarterback’s first two years in the NFL. Then the lineman had his first daughter; he didn’t want to talk protection schemes or stay late to watch film. When Meadows left practice early to attend the birth of his second daughter, he says Manning asked why he couldn’t have babies in the offseason.
But as Manning has aged—he’s 33, though still childless—some teammates say he’s mellowed a bit. The rep as an insufferable workaholic? “I think that’s a misconception about him,” says Denver Broncos wide receiver Brandon Stokley, who played with Manning from 2003-06. Stokley said he’s “never been around” any player as hardworking, intense, and committed as Manning—or one who can remember and process information as quickly or thoroughly. Stokley says that’s not all there is to the quarterback, though—he’s also a locker-room prankster and fun to be around. “It wasn’t like he was just all football, all the time,” Stokley says.
Whether or how much Manning lets loose is almost beside the point. As with most obsessive geniuses, the players around Manning are willing to be driven a little bit crazy because they admire his talent, goals, and results; none of the Colts complained about their empty hotel rooms after the team won the Super Bowl. “I loved the fact that he stayed until 10 on Mondays watching film and talking to coaches,” says Steve McKinney, who played on Manning’s offensive line from 1998-2001. “I had to be a dad and a husband. I couldn’t go home and start watching the plays at home for two hours. Not only that, I didn’t want to. Ten hours a day is enough.”
So while Manning could be “just like a robot” and “a little overbearing,” McKinney says he wouldn’t have wanted to line up in front of anyone else. “You’re the quarterback, brother; I’ll support you 100 percent. I love that you care so much. Because I’ve been on the other side. I’ve played with quarterbacks who were last one in in the morning, first one out at night,” says McKinney, who spent six years with the expansion Houston Texans. “Guess what? We sucked. We didn’t win.” Meadows puts it this way: “Down by six, a minute thirty on the clock, on our own 10-yard line, I want to play with No. 18.” When Manning retires, he says, “you can make a case that he was the greatest player who ever played.” The greatest ever? Sounds like a genius to me.
Slate V: If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl
