Peyton Manning isn’t old in life years, but in football years he might as well be 100. I am not big on telling athletes when they should retire, that is a personal decision.
I wouldn’t want anyone telling me when I should stop doing something that I love. For athletes they have participated in sports since they were kids. For someone like Peyton Manning the majority of his life has been spent with a football in his hands.
Sometimes I think fans and even media are blinded a bit by what athletes have to go through for our entertainment. Because they make so much money, we are dismissive of the problems they have. Imagine being 38 years old and having to go through this every time you got off work.
It takes Peyton Manning 15 minutes to shed his suit of armor after a game.
He begins with his cleats, which he can barely untie without assistance. A Broncos equipment staffer helps peel them off his feet while he does a radio interview, because after nearly 25 years of football dating back to high school, it’s a relief to not have to bend over that far. Next come his shoulder pads, which, when yanked over his head, generate a groan that is a mixture of suffering and sweet relief. Manning’s pale arms and torso are covered in fresh scrapes and old bruises, some the color of strawberries, others a shade of eggplant.
His socks come off after several violent tugs, revealing toes that are twisted and bent into obtuse angles. When he removes a thick blue DonJoy knee brace from his stiff left leg, he twice pauses to grimace and gather himself before stripping it off and handing it to a staffer for safekeeping. As he slices away at the thick layers of athletic tape supporting his ankles, he looks like a surgeon operating on his own leg without anesthesia.
When he finishes, he stands, joints creaking, loose strips of tape and blades of grass still stuck to his skin. He has just completed a comeback win over the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Week 2, and a flood of text messages keeps pinging his phone, which has a picture of his 4-year-old twins, Marshall and Mosley, as his background. He can’t resist reading a few and smirking with satisfaction. He drapes a towel over his shoulders, but the crooked pink scar on the back of his neck is still visible, evidence of the four neck surgeries he’s had to repair a pinched nerve and herniated disks and to fuse his vertebrae. Because of the victory — the 181st of his career — Manning smiles as he limps gingerly in the direction of the showers. If this is what it feels like on a good night, only two games into his 18th year, try to imagine the bad ones.
Peyton has received a lot of praise over his career and some criticism (no one is immune to that), but we should appreciate we are watching the last days of an all-time great.