Archie’s Family

The luckiest football father in America couldn’t stop fidgeting as he sat on the bed of his Santa Monica hotel room. He rocked from side to side, bounced on his legs, jiggled his feet. Finally, Archie Manning clenched his fists tight enough to crack walnuts and whispered, “Yesss!”

He never took his eyes off the TV, where Indianapolis was playing at Denver in an exhibition game last Monday night. Colt quarterback Peyton Manning had just thrown a touchdown pass, and his proud father -- voted No. 18 among the top 100 college football players of all time -- could barely contain his excitement.

Consider this embarrassment of riches: Archie has one son who’s an NFL star; another, Eli, who’s an Ole Miss quarterback and Heisman Trophy hopeful; and the eldest, Cooper, who eight months ago made him a first-time grandfather.

“I’ve been blessed,” said Archie, 54, in Los Angeles this week promoting DirecTV. “I get on my knees all the time.”

Knees, feet, stomach, back ... Manning can’t sit still when he’s watching his sons play -- unless he’s attending the game. Then, he shows all the emotion of a granite statue.

“I’m real observant of football daddies, sports daddies, quarterback daddies,” said Archie, who played 14 NFL seasons with New Orleans, Houston and Minnesota. “At our camp this year, we had 700 kids and 450 quarterbacks. Little over half of them had their daddies come with them to the camp. They come to practice every day with their kids.

“Everybody always used to praise me [about] how I’d sit in the stands and be calm. I understand daddies that holler and scream at the referees sometimes. You get excited, you want your son to do good, and you act like a fool and say stupid stuff. Fortunately, sometime at an early age in my embryonic times as a Little League daddy, I saw how stupid that looked. I thought, ‘This is bad. I don’t ever want to look like this.’ So I just shut up.”

Folksy and easygoing, Manning is sheepish now about all the fuss surrounding his Heisman comments earlier this year. He said that he didn’t want Ole Miss, his alma mater, to design a grand-scale promotional campaign touting Eli for college football’s most prestigious award.

At first it sounded like sour grapes. Archie was a two-time Heisman finalist, and Peyton appeared to be a lock for the award in his final season at Tennessee before he was nipped at the wire by Michigan’s Charles Woodson. It was as if the father were trying to protect his youngest son from the same heartache. But Archie later explained that he simply didn’t want Eli swimming in Heisman hype. No billboards. No bobble-head dolls. After all, players who win the Heisman usually come from winning teams, and Ole Miss hasn’t won the Southeastern Conference title in 40 years. Why put extra pressure on the kid? It all made sense to Eli.

“There’s no point in even worrying about it now,” said Eli, a fifth-year senior who has passed for 6,519 yards and has 24 school records. “I’m worried about winning games this season. In two weeks, you can be out of the Heisman race and never be asked about it again.”

Eli goes by “Easy E” and is as relaxed as Peyton is coiled tight. The two look alike and have similar 6-foot-5 builds, but the younger brother has a way to go before he’s ready for NFL stardom.

“I don’t like being called out, people running up to me in a crowd,” Eli said. “If I’m in class reading the newspaper and there’s a picture of me in there, I’ll turn the page right away. I might go back to my room and read it. I don’t want anyone to see me reading it, reading about myself.”

Peyton is among the most recognizable players in the NFL. He, Rich Gannon and David Carr were the only three quarterbacks to take every snap last season, and Manning is the first quarterback in league history to have thrown for 4,000 yards in four consecutive seasons. If there’s a statistic that gnaws at him, it’s that he’s 0-3 in playoff games, including a 41-0 drubbing by the New York Jets in January.

After that game, he took a break from the real world with a weeklong hunting trip, with no TV, no cell phone, no razor and no worries.

“My dad’s best friend has 12,000 acres in central Mississippi,” he said. “We’d go duck hunting in the morning, deer hunting in the afternoon. It’s kind of like detox from the season.”

Peyton is such a perfectionist when it comes to football, he has suggested players should be cut if they laugh on the team plane after a loss.

He’s considered one of the smartest quarterbacks in football, a guy whose understanding of the offense is so complete he might check out of two or three plays before the snap. Bobby Fischer in cleats.

“I could tell you every quarterback in the SEC for the last 20 years,” Peyton said. “We had to teach Eli the 12 teams in the SEC before he went to Ole Miss.”

Still, Peyton has known for years that his younger brother has a truckload of talent. When Eli was in seventh grade, Peyton was a senior at Isidore Newman High School in New Orleans. The seniors wrote messages that were printed under their yearbook pictures. Peyton thanked his friends and parents, and finished with this reference to Eli: “Watch out world, he’s the best one.”

“I thought I was being clever and I needed something catchy to say,” Peyton said. “Turns out, I was probably right.”

There is a lot of love between the brothers. Eli turns to Peyton for advice. And both of the younger brothers turn to Cooper for comic relief. He’s an institutional broker in New Orleans with an off-beat sense of humor, a former Ole Miss player who had to give up football after his freshman season when -- after he felt numbness in his fingers -- doctors discovered a narrowing of his spinal canal. The risk of paralysis was too great.

“Cooper and I have this deal,” Peyton said. “I have to help him be more serious, he has to keep me loose.”

Not that Peyton doesn’t unwind. He and country-music singer Kenny Chesney have been close friends for years, and Chesney has taken Manning on tour with him, letting him play backup guitar in about 20 concerts. Manning’s not much of a guitar player, so his is unplugged when he’s on stage. Peyton wears his cowboy hat low and stays in the background, so he goes all but unrecognized until Chesney introduces the band late in the show.

“When we sing together, I’m pretty good about staying just far enough away from the microphone so my voice doesn’t come through,” Peyton said. “Every now and then, he’ll hang me out. He’ll bend down and leave me alone at the mike.”

Peyton has done some studio work and says his voice isn’t half bad, “thanks to the power of editing.”

Not so fast, says Eli, adding that his brother can carry a team a lot better than he can carry a tune.

“[Peyton’s] voice is brutal,” he said. “I think mine sounds better. I’ve heard his recorded voice before and I think he could use some singing lessons.”

Cooper’s assessment?

“I don’t think any of the Mannings have much to brag about in the way of voice,” he said. “The effort is phenomenal, but the sound is nothing to write home about.”

When it comes to teasing, the Manning boys spare no one. Chesney is 5-6, so he’s almost a foot shorter than Peyton. Eli said the crooner should bring a milk crate on stage. They remind Cooper of a well known duo.

“It’s like Tattoo and Mr. Rourke,” he said. “A lot of times I thought they could go as that at Halloween.”

Peyton, who had Chesney sing at his wedding, met him on the sideline at Tennessee after throwing a touchdown pass against Alabama in 1996. Chesney, who is from Knoxville, Tenn., had a local following at the time and was issued a field credential.

“This little guy came up to me in an orange poncho and congratulated me,” Peyton recalled. “I was like, ‘Can we get him back in the stands, please? How did he sneak down here?’ ”

The two became friends and later struck a deal: Chesney would get Peyton on stage if Peyton would let Chesney participate in a Colt practice. So far, Chesney has come through, but Peyton hasn’t.

“He’s a frustrated high school receiver,” Peyton said. “We had a charity bowling tournament in Indianapolis and Kenny came. I saw him cornering [Coach] Tony Dungy and trying to work that angle. I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ If we get him onto the field, it better be in the spring with no pads.”

As serious as he is about football, Manning can be a ham. He has been interested in acting ever since his school play in eighth grade, “The Boyfriend.” He didn’t get the lead role and instead played a Spanish dancer named Miguel. (“I had to learn the tango.”) When he acts in commercials -- he’s got a Gatorade spot running now -- he asks for the script to be faxed to him days ahead of the shoot. He wants to have his lines memorized, and, if possible, nail it in one take.

“Time is money,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who take that seriously -- union crews, production crews. I realize that the window of opportunity isn’t always going to be open.”

It’s not as if Manning needs to moonlight. He’s in the final season of his original six-year, $48-million contract and this year counts about $15 million against the salary cap. The Colts have yet to negotiate another long-term deal with him and might have to designate him their franchise player next season, which means a base salary in excess of $10 million.

Manning has shown he will do what it takes to win, even if the game doesn’t count. In the exhibition game at Denver, the Colts ran a double reverse to Marvin Harrison with Manning leading the blockers.

Back in his Santa Monica hotel room, Archie Manning held his breath as he watched that play unfold. He exhaled as Peyton jogged back to the huddle. Exhausting job, watching your kid.