Sunday Drive - Page 2

Besides being a convenient means to demarcate bad haircuts and lousy pop songs, decades are the epochs of contemporary American life. We commodify them blandly, think of them fondly, or cringe at the clothes we wore. But taken as a pure expression of time, 10 years is an august measure, requiring some reflection. For some, 10 years on a job might seem like a pretty good start. For an NFL quarterback, 10 years is more than they might reasonably expect.

Still ruddy with youth, Manning looks at the last 10 years with that wide-set, somehow sinless gaze, and the temptation is to believe it’s still the first leg of a long race. He’s got time, right? But Manning understands the mathematics. He’s had one full decade. He won’t get another.

“I tell people that I’m a 32-year-old in a 28-year-old’s body,” he says. “I like to think that extends things, but I’m clearly in the second half of my career. And I always said I wanted to play 16 years. That was my goal from day one. You know, my dad played 14, Elway played 16, Marino 17. Those are the guys I shoot for.” He holds still when he says this, contemplating the statement on some internal scale, just another vector of his persona. He is fond of measuring, analyzing, calculating outcomes while the people around him labor to get him centered on their camera phone. Manning is acute in his thinking. He remembers names, faces, dates; his recall is exact. He remembers his first interception like it happened last night. “Terrell Buckley, slant route,” he says. “He jumped it. As a matter of fact, I remember all three interceptions from that game,” he says, going all hang-dog then, the way he does. “My memory is like that.”

The man’s mind does not rest. Nor does his body. He has spent the morning throwing to rookie tight ends on the practice fields, taking notes, watching a little video, running intervals, and then lifting. Same thing this year as last, same thing next year as the one after that. One hopes.

The swift lessons of 10 years gone by are evident to him now. “Ten years ago, that first season,” he says, voice rolling like a marble in an empty coffee can, “the game was so fast for me. Too fast, I thought. I remember Steve Young coming up to me, saying ‘Peyton, the game will slow down.’ I thought, ‘Hurry up and slow down, please hurry up and slow down.’”

There it is. The phrase one searches for with Peyton Manning just past mid-career. Hurry up and slow down. Once the mantra of a rookie quarterback, now it’s the cry of an entire city to its star quarterback. And while no one wants Manning to move more slowly, we’d all be happier if he could just stretch time a little. If he could hurry up and slow down the clock. He has performed bigger miracles already, on himself, on the team, and on the city.