For a player who spent nearly two decades creating one of the most uncomplicated images in sports, Peyton Manning leaves the stage with a surprisingly complicated legacy .
And only some of it is about the stains from the very end, the investigation into a performance-enhancing drug accusation and a long-ago sexual-impropriety allegation that bubbled back up years later.
No, this is his football legacy. Manning retires from an 18-year NFL career with all the major individual passing records, and a reputation as a technically-brilliant quarterback that few can match.
MORE: Unforgettable Manning images | 10 unbreakable NFL records
Yet he came down the stretch of his career needing that one more Lombardi Trophy to validate it all in the eyes of many. “Only” one Super Bowl? Accompanied by two Super-ugly losses for which he earned a hefty portion of blame?
That wouldn’t do. Win one more, even if you’re a shell of your former self when you do, and the pedestal you’ve stood on so uneasily will be set in concrete.
It’s all set now. Manning threw for 141 yards in the last game of his life that meant something, Super Bowl 50 with the Broncos. He left with a whisper instead of a roar, but he didn’t leave empty-handed, and that made all the difference for how he’ll be remembered.
Go figure.
It’s how we’ve come to judge quarterbacks, the way to measure them against each other. The rings are the tiebreakers. Manning can’t catch Tom Brady, or Joe Montana, or Terry Bradshaw in that area. But he’s ahead of Dan Marino and Brett Favre … and he now owns the lofty marks they once did, compiled in an era where it took a lot to reach those marks.
Peyton Manning’s claim to being an immortal among all immortals is strong. It’s strong enough to, again, overcome the stains on the pristine image at the end. It’s enough to overcome the way the storybook ending had him limping next to the horse into a cloudburst, instead of riding it into the sunset.
Much of his legacy will be as the face of two franchises at different stages of his career, separated by an injury crisis that sparked one of the great second acts ever.
In his 13 years with the Colts, he was the quarterback all the others chased — surgical, clinical, machine-like, carving defenses up with a style that hadn’t been seen before and is still too hard to copy. His records might fall, but the memory and knowledge of how he set his can’t ever be erased.
MORE: 10 best Manning performances | NFL Network interested in Manning
Manning chased Super Bowls for the last decade or so of that run, made it to two and won XLI over the Bears. Yet the longer it took before he claimed that one, and the harder it got to push through Brady and the Patriots to get there, the more complicated the picture of his career became.
When four neck surgeries signaled the end of his run in Indianapolis, he took that quest to Denver, produced a record-shattering season that defied probability, and went to two more Super Bowls.
Yet Manning went into the last one with that legacy in the balance. A loss would leave a gaping hole in his resume — or so the perception said, and that perception fed the legacy.
In the end, though, he won enough, and piled up numbers even more. Most career yards and touchdown passes, most single-season yards and touchdown passes, most NFL MVP awards.
And two Super Bowl wins. Maybe the legacy isn’t that complicated after all.