In the spring of 1970, Sports Illustrated sent me to Mississippi to gather the material I needed to do a cover story on Archie Manning, the senior-to-be quarterback at Ole Miss, for the college football issue that would be published that fall.

He belonged to an exceptional crop of quarterbacks that included Jim Plunkett of Stanford, Rex Kern of Ohio State, Lynn Dickey of Kansas State, Joe Theismann of Notre Dame, and John Reaves of Florida. Each was a strong cover candidate, but none had a more devoted lobbyist at SI than Archie had in me.

I think it was Dan Jenkins, at one of our college-football staff meetings, who finally said, good-naturedly, “Oh, hell, if Billy feels that strong about it, let him do Archie.” And that was that. After all, then as now, Dan was only the greatest college-football writer ever.

Growing up in Kentucky, I had long been aware of Mississippi’s reputation as Quarterback U. Almost every year, Coach Johnny Vaught seemed to have a colorfully-named, potential cover boy running the show – Charlie Conerly, Eagle Day, Glynn Griffing, and Jake Gibbs, to name a few.

This picture is from the Golden Arm Award Banquet in Louisville in 2003. From left: Bart Starr, Ralph Crosthwait, Billy Reed, Eli Manning. 

But Archie put them all to shame. Simply put, he was just about the most exciting college player I’d ever seen. At 6-foot-3, he could run and pass equally well. Most importantly, he had a flair for the dramatic, time and again pulling out close games with some spectacular play in the closing moments.

With a season of eligibility remaining, Archie had become a folk hero throughout the South. A country group recorded a song about him that topped the charts in Mississippi. His supporters wore campaign buttons pushing him for the Heisman Trophy, and his detractors at Tennessee responded with “Archie Who?” buttons.

So off I went to do the biggest story of my young career.

If you’ve ever been to Oxford, Miss., in the springtime, you will believe me when I tell you it rivals Augusta National in April. It’s simply breathtaking. The magnolias and honeysuckle and redbud trees are in full bloom. As I strolled around campus, I also came to understand that it’s no coincidence Ole Miss has produced more Miss Americas than any college in the nation.

The trip turned out to be more than just a story for me – more, even, than my first cover story for the world’s most popular sports magazine. I formed a bond with the Manning family that lasts to this day.

At least, that’s what Frank Crosthwait, the longtime family attorney, told me when he accompanied Archie’s youngest son, Eli, to Louisville in 2003 to receive the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award, given to the nation’s best senior quarterback.

I first met Frank on that 1970 trip to Mississippi. He practiced law in Drew, the tiny Delta town where Archie grew up. Less than a year before my trip, Archie’s father, Buddy, had committed suicide. Obviously, it was a painful subject that the Mannings still hadn’t discussed publicly by the time I arrived in Drew.

Understanding that the tragedy would have to be a part of the story, but still apprehensive about it, Archie’s mother, Sis, wanted Frank to size me up. Since Buddy’s death, both Archie and Sis had come to lean heavily on Frank for advice.

When I told Frank I was from Kentucky, he almost visibly relaxed. We hit it off immediately. That, in turn, opened the way for me to become friends with Archie. At the time, I was 26, only four years older than my subject. He opened up and talked candidly about everything, including his dad’s death. He even told me his real name was Archibald Elisha Manning III.

Archie also introduced me to his fiancée, Olivia Williams, who came to Ole Miss from Philadelphia, Miss., the town where three civil-rights workers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerener – had been murdered while trying to register black voters during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.

We talked about that during breakfast one morning at the Holiday Inn in Oxford. Both Archie and Olivia seemed ashamed that such atrocities had occurred in their native state. Maybe that’s why I didn’t bring up race in the story, even though the Ole Miss team still was all-white and its fans still waved Confederate flags in the stands.

I just didn’t want to go there because the story was too good without it. Olivia was that year’s Homecoming Queen at Ole Miss. It was straight out of the 1940s or ‘50s, those innocent times before Vietnam and the Kennedy Assassination. In those days, as the song had it, “You’ve got to be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls.”

The story was the cover of SI’s Sept. 14, 1970, issue. I was so excited that I drove to a warehouse in Commack, L.I., to get an advance copy before they were shipped to the newsstands. Apparently, the story also was well-received in Mississippi, which hadn’t gotten much positive publicity from the national media in a long time.

For me, though, the best part was when Archie, Sis, and Frank told me they liked the story and appreciated that I had not betrayed their trust. That meant a lot to me. Had they disappointed, I would have been crushed because, well, they were just such good people.

I revisited Archie during the season when the Rebels played Paul “Bear” Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide in Jackson.

The game had been advertised as a rematch of the previous season’s shootout between Manning and Alabama quarterback Scott Hunter. It was the first college game ever televised nationally in prime time, and it turned out to be a classic –Alabama winning, 33-32, even though Archie posted a Southeastern Conference record 540 yards in total offense.

Unfortunately, however, Hunter had to miss the game due to a separated shoulder and Archie was a bit gimpy from a leg injury. Nevertheless, he played well enough to keep his Heisman Trophy bandwagon rolling.

Alas, however, Archie suffered a broken left (non-throwing) arm against Houston couple of weeks later. At the time, the Rebels were 6-1 and in the hunt for the national title. Without Archie, however, they dropped two in a row heading into their final regular-season game against LSU in Baton Rouge.

His Heisman hopes all but gone, Archie had no business playing in that game. The bone in his left forearm had been surgically repaired with a steel plate that held it together. Unfortunately, however, Ole Miss interim Coach Frank “Bruiser” Kinard, subbing for the ailing Vaught, was a Neanderthal who believed that if a player could walk, he played.
I flew in the the night before the game and met Archie in his hotel room. He let me feel the plate in his arm, just below the skin. I told him I thought he was crazy for trying to play and risking what promised to be a lucrative pro career. Well, Archie played, albeit ineffectively, and I ripped Kinard in the file I sent to SI. It was probably just as well for all concerned that the story wasn’t published.

The next season, when Archie was a rookie with the hapless New Orleans Saints, I worked out a trip so that I could stop by New Orleans on the way back to New York. I met Archie and Olivia after the game, visited with them in their modest apartment, and took them out to dinner.

And then we went our own separate ways. In 1972, I moved back to Kentucky and The Courier-Journal. I followed Archie as best I could on TV and in the papers. Every now and then I’d get a phone call from Frank Croswaith, who also sent a Christmas card with news of the Manning family.

After Archie’s retirement from the NFL, he went into business in New Orleans. But I didn’t hear much about him until the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, when I was told that he and Olivia were the parents of three football-playing sons.

The eldest, Cooper, followed his dad to Ole Miss, but was forced to quit because of a congenital defect. Peyton, the middle son, was a highly-sought schoolboy quarterback who surprised me when he decided to play his college ball at Tennessee. During his dad’s playing days, he never spoke fondly of the Big Orange.

Back at SI, I covered a few of Peyton’s games at Tennessee, but never got the chance to have a one-on-one with him. Secretly, however, I always pulled for him because he was exactly the sort of kid I would have expected Archie and Olivia to rear – modest, unselfish, considerate, disciplined.

After his senior year, the night before the Heisman presentation in New York, Peyton came to Louisville to accept the Unitas Golden Arm Award. (I was on the selection committee and I felt as strongly about Peyton as I did his dad all those years earlier). Much to my delight, Archie accompanied Peyton, and we got to spend some time talking about the old days and what my SI cover story had meant to him.

The next night, Peyton finished second to Michigan’s Charles Woodson in the Heisman balloting.

When I heard that the third son, Eli (short for Elisha), had decided to follow his dad and brother Cooper to Ole Miss, I figured Archie had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it would give his alma mater’s football program a big lift to have a Manning again running the show. On the other, however, Eli had some awful big shoes to fill.

As it turned out, Eli was more than up to the challenge. He rewrote the Ole Miss record book, far surpassing some of his dad’s numbers. Still, Eli never became a folk hero the way Archie had, at least partly because Ole Miss football didn’t occupy the exalted position in the Old South the way it did when Archie played.

When Eli picked up his Unitas Golden Arm Award, Archie couldn’t make it. I think he might have been with Peyton at an Indianapolis Colts game. Nevertheless, Crosthwait was there and he introduced me to the young man. I could see both Archie and Olivia in his fame. And, like Peyton, he was polite and deferential.

I told him that I was the guy who did the SI story about his dad back in 1970. I told him that I had met his grandmother Sis and knew his mom when she was the Ole Miss homecoming queen. He showed a bit of interest, but not much, and I couldn’t blame him. After all, it was ancient history.

And now here he is, ready to lead the New York Giants against the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, only a year after his older brother won it last year with the Colts. Is this amazing or what? All I can tell you for sure is that such good fortune couldn’t happen to a nicer family – and you can trust me on that because, well, I know a little about it.

In fact, I can almost assuredly tell you this: Archie and Olivia would have been just as proud of their sons if they had gone into fields other than football. That’s just the kind of grounded people they are and always have been.

Even when Archie was on the cover of SI, the rage of the college football world, they both seemed to keep their heads amidst all the hoopla and hype.

I got on E-Bay yesterday and found that a copy of SI’s Sept. 14, 1970, issue – the one with my cover story on Archie – could be had for $15.50. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not. I’ll have to ask Archie the next time I see him.