Super Bowl 50: Can Peyton Manning ride happily into sunset?

Manning looks to depart the good guy after 50th shoot-out

(Getty)

Is this the sheriff’s last shootout, on the biggest stage of them all? “The Sheriff,” of course, is Peyton Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to light up the National Football League – so named because of the no-nonsense way he directs his team, barking instructions to his line of scrimmage before the snap.

Tonight Super Bowl 50 unfolds in Santa Clara, California (forget for this year the usual Roman numeral: “L” stands for loser, which the world’s richest professional league, standard bearer of the country’s favourite sport, most certainly is not). It pits Manning’s Denver Broncos against the Carolina Panthers, led by the young and electrifying Cam Newton. If Manning has been the face of the NFL for the last decade, Newton could well own the next one.

These days the Sheriff is running on almost empty. Seven weeks away from his 40th birthday, his body is breaking down. He missed the entire 2011 season after neck surgery. This time, he’s suffered a torn ligament in his heel and had problems with his shoulder and his rib cage. At one point, for the first time in his 18 years in the NFL, he was benched. Adding insult to the litany of injuries, he was linked to performance-enhancing drugs. “Garbage,” was Manning’s response, and no more has been heard of the matter.

During 2015 he may have beaten Brett Favre’s all-time passing-yards record, but it was his worst regular season, indeed the worst by any quarterback to appear in the Super Bowl. The craft and guile of experience can compensate for the lost explosiveness of youth, but only up to a point.

By any reasonable standard, this is the end of the road for Manning, even if he won’t say so. “I haven’t made up my mind,” he told reporters the other day, “I’ve really just tried to focus [on the Super Bowl] and not think too far ahead.”

The Panthers are everybody’s pick today, but Manning has a rare opportunity: to bow out at the pinnacle of achievement in his sport.

Even Michael Jordan couldn’t resist a comeback that diminished him, and everyone knows what happened to Muhammad Ali. Some, though, have managed it. The undefeated Rocky Marciano was one. Pete Sampras, who quit after winning the 2002 US Open, was another. And, most pertinent to Manning, there’s John Elway, another legendary Broncos quarterback who retired in 1998 (the same year Manning was taken as first pick overall in the NFL draft) after his second successive Super Bowl win, a game in which he was named Most Valuable Player.

Few give Manning much chance of matching Elway’s feat, and if the Broncos do upset the odds, they will probably not have Manning to thank, but the team’s NFL-best defence that neutralised Manning’s great rival, the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady, in the AFC title game, and now must stifle the 26-year-old Newton, as dangerous a rusher as a passer.

But then again, why not? Amid the pageant of excess that is the Super Bowl – where Coldplay are doing the half-time show, with a special guest appearance from Beyonce, and a 30-second TV ad during the game costs an all-time high of $5m (£3.45m) – anything seems possible. What better than the Sheriff, the straight-arrow all-American guy, winning his final shootout?

Alas, though, the NFL has not been able to lift entirely the dark shadow that haunts the gridiron, a shadow that might now give even Manning and Newton pause for thought. Last year may have been the year of Newton, but it was also the year of concussion – not just the movie of that name, but the unprecedented expressions of concern about football and the perils of brain damage.

Last week, as participants in the extravaganza were gathering on the West Coast, news came that Ken Stabler, the hell-raising quarterback of the similarly inclined and Super Bowl-winning Oakland Raiders team of 1976, had suffered from stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Stabler died of cancer last June aged 69, but CTE can be diagnosed only after death. Almost 100 deceased former players are now known to have had CTE, while the League in 2013 reached a $1bn settlement with more than 4,000 former players over a class-action lawsuit claiming the NFL had knowingly concealed the dangers of the sport.

But the Stabler case is significant on two counts. First, he is a former league MVP, one of the highest-profile players afflicted with CTE. And second, he was a quarterback, the most protected player on the field, with a whole set of linebackers to keep would-be sackers at bay. Stabler is proof – were any needed – that no position is safe, not even the one graced by the likes of Manning, Brady, Favre and Newton.

Manning was asked about Stabler last week. “The NFL quarterback fraternity lost a great one, lost a legend,” he said. “What a prince of a guy.” As for his own possible health problems later, Manning revealed he had already been told he would someday need a hip replacement. And the rest, should it come to that? “I will try to handle them and have a good plan when they come around. I feel pretty good as we speak, and I am fortunate for that.”

And so, doubtless, everyone else feels the same at the NFL carnival in Santa Clara. Football is a game of the present, and at least everyone now knows the risks. Today is about a game that will be watched by half the US population, about the twilight of one great quarterback, and the dazzling dawn of another. As for tomorrow, who knows?