The history of sports is littered with stories of athletes who hung around the game too long. Tales of guys who tried to squeeze that last ounce out of their career running off sheer bravado and ignorance. Tragedies of once-great icons who sacrificed a life after to put thirty more seconds on that fifteen minutes of fame.
If Peyton Manning is the cerebral assassin that many have given him credit for being, he won't become of those stories. Instead of contemplating signing with the Jets, Dolphins or Redskins, Manning should instead consider spending his 2012 and beyond taking a job with either FOX, NBC or CBS. Peyton Manning will be 36 in two months. He's coming off a season where he played less snaps than Jake Delhomme, who was signed off the street in the last month of the season. He's had three neck surgeries in two years and he finds himself on the active roster(for now) of a Indianapolis Colts that is, to say the least, in a state of rebuilding. Manning has made enough money in his fourteen years in the NFL and from endorsements that he could swim in cash like Scrooge McDuck.
If Peyton Manning continues on with his football career, it will be more of a matter of pride and foolishness than a sign of a man with something to prove. With a Super Bowl ring, four MVPs, eleven Pro Bowl appearances and more records than a hoarder's basement, Manning has nothing left to show us to convince he's one of the greatest signal callers to ever throw on a pair of cleats. Manning spent an entire year listening and watching. He listened to talk of Andrew Luck coming to town as his heir apparent and he watched his team come within a spirited December performance away from going 0-16. What Manning should be listening to now is the advice of his doctors who, if they are smart, will tell him that the violent game of football is too dangerous for a man on the wrong side of thirty with more swelling in his neck than Tony Siragusa. What Manning should have been watching all year is the number of quarterbacks who were ushered off the field from hits from defenders whose sole purpose is to lay them out. Manning should have watched last week's NFC Championship game and saw the punishment his little brother Eli took from the San Francisco 49ers and then realized that maybe life in the NFL isn't for him anymore.
Or perhaps Manning, a infamous student of the game, should have done a little more homework and studied some guys within and outside of his sport. Perhaps Manning should have taken a long look at the final years of fellow future Hall of Fame QB Brett Favre, who overstayed his welcome by about two years and put the finishing touches on his career in the most painful and embarrassing of circumstances. Maybe Manning should take a peak at Muhammad Ali these days, who is a shell of the man once known as "The Greatest" because he fought much longer than he had to because pride and greed told him he should. How about taking a gander at the greatest athlete of our generation, Michael Jordan, and checking out those final two years in Washington when he needed ice packs the size of Horace Grant to quell the swelling in his aching knees. Is that how Peyton wants to write his final chapter, broken and downtrodden? Is the thrill of another attempt at being great worth the potential danger to his future health that comes with it? What's left for him to prove? Where can he really go and still compete?
At this point, the question Peyton must ask is why would he continue to play? If it's for a ring, where can he possibly go for one last chance at the Lombardi? Every contender these days is set at QB and the ones that aren't(Jets, Dolphins, Chiefs) are far too dysfunctional for even a healthy Manning to fix. The QB climate isn't what it was a few years ago when a team like the New York Jets took a chance on an aging-but-still-motivated Brett Favre hoping he was the missing piece to nab the Super Bowl trophy that has eluded them since the Joe Namath days. And even if it is, we saw how that worked out for Favre and Gang Green. The window of opportunity for Manning has shut. It shut quickly and tragically but the hope is that the crash of that window closing was loud enough for Manning to fight off all those voices in his head that his machismo is producing that is telling him he still has more left in the tank and walk away from the game while he's still fully able to.
The choice is up to Manning these next few months. He can ride off into the sunset as one of the greatest to ever play the game, enjoy his natural calling as a TV analyst and collect fat checks from endorsers who can't resist his charm in their commercials or he can bang around the game for a few more years and become another cautionary tale. The hardest part of any athlete's career isn't the physical punishment he takes or memorizing a playbook or dealing with the fans and the media, it's knowing the right time to hang 'em up and it's a lesson that most learn the hard way.
Hopefully, Peyton Manning isn't like most.
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