Peyton Manning was glad to be of service on USO tour

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — On his USO tour in March, Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning went farther than he ever imagined he’d go.

Halfway around the globe.

And six miles through the streets of Naples, Italy.

That was a 5 a.m. run with Navy Adm. James Winnefeld and Brandon Anderson, the admiral’s aide de camp. Manning asked the night before if he could join them. He hadn’t run that far in 25 years, a pro in a game measured by yards, not miles.

“The last time I ran six miles was when I was 12 years old in the New Orleans Crescent City Classic,” Manning said. “When you’re 12 years old, you don’t even train for it. You don’t even know you’re getting tired, you just run. And so, had it not probably been in Naples, Italy, which was absolutely beautiful, at 5 o’clock in the morning on a picture-perfect morning . . . it would have been pretty healthy for a quarterback.”

Manning said he was pleased with his pace, and is surprised now that he was able to chat with Winnefeld the whole way, exchanging thoughts on leadership, and the parallels between the military and football.

Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in an email to The Times: “I kept thinking, ‘This guy is what, 6-6 and 240 pounds, all torn up from those years in the NFL, and he’s just trotting along with us at a pretty good pace?’ It was surreal. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out later he had not run that far since he was a kid.”

Throughout the tour, which included stops in Afghanistan and aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, Manning was constantly reminded of the NFL’s popularity.

“So many of these soldiers, they all love football some way or another,” said Manning, whom the Broncos list at 6-5, 230. “Whether it’s a college team — I saw ton of Tennessee orange, lot of Colts blue, lot of Broncos orange. But even if they’re not any of those, the team that they love either beat you last year, or you beat them, and so you have an immediate bond or connection. You have something to talk about, whether it was, ‘Hey, I went to Alabama back in 1995,’ or, ‘I’m a Chiefs fan and thought you were going to come to Kansas City.’ That’s why I’m so glad I went as a current player.

“The little USO tour part of it, we’d get up there and the commander would give us eight names and we’d throw a pass out to wherever they were. That was cool. They said, ‘Thanks for bringing some of America over here.’ So you felt like you were doing a service to them, and at the same time, all the guys I was with, they were definitely inspiring to us.”

Manning took every opportunity he could to spend time with the troops, said Lt. Col. Patrick Seiber, public affairs officer to Winnefeld.

“What he wanted to do was just spend more time with the troops out there,” Seiber said. “Unfortunately, there’s just not the time to get the one-on-one with everybody. He’s a big celebrity, so they would flock to him. But when he’d get an opportunity, he would take it to spend time with them.”

Wrote Winnefeld: “It was impressive to watch how Peyton lit up when he got around our servicemen and women and their families.”

One of the highlights, Winnefeld wrote, came in Germany “when a young airman introduced him to his twin infants, named Peyton and Eli.

“[Manning] didn’t miss a beat, noting that Peyton was the bigger and better looking of the two kids.”

sam.farmer@latimes.com

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