Don’t worry about Peyton Manning’s legacy

Last Sunday’s game between the Denver Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs was one of the lowest points in Peyton Manning’s career. Not only did the Broncos lose to their division rivals, 29-13, but Manning completed a mere five of his 20 pass attempts, ending the game with 35 passing yards and four interceptions. He was even benched late in the third quarter, and the frustrated Denver fans let him know just how displeased they were. It was ugly.

Manning hasn’t played well this year, to put it lightly. For the most part he’s looked like a shell of his former self. This has unsurprisingly resulted in plenty of hand-wringing, both sincere and not, about his legacy.

Despite the poor year he is enduring, and despite having not looked quite right the past few seasons, Manning is fine as far as his legacy goes. Contrary to what many people are suggesting, his current on-field play isn’t tarnishing his legacy as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. Any sense of damage or tarnishing comes from us as fans, and is the result of what we choose to think and feel. In an odd way, Manning’s legacy is beyond his control.

Legacy is a strange concept. It is often discussed as if it is an entity independent of fandom — something just floating out in the ether, waiting to be analyzed. It parallels a lot of the ways in which narratives are discussed in the sports community: What will the narrative be after this game? What can so-and-so do to change his or her narrative? Like with the concept of narratives, legacy is something that us fans talk about as if we lack the power to shape it.

What these conversations tend to ignore — at times for the sake of word-saving convenience, and at other times out of the desire to push some sort of agenda — is that something like legacy, although based on observable, quantifiable on-field performance, is an idea that we define. We think and talk and shout legacies into existence. We take what is quantifiable — statistics, records, etc. — and then we attach a little bit of emotional investment and basic storytelling plot points. Once a narrative becomes ingrained enough in sports discourse, we tend to forget that it was us — fans, bloggers, radio talk-show hosts, TV pundits, you name it — who created the narrative in the first place, who took some points of data and used them as the foundation for a story. We lose sight of our control, of our power over the conversation.

This is not to say that narratives don’t exist, or that they are worthless or somehow invalid. Not at all. But it’s important to remember that fans have far more power than we give ourselves credit for. When it comes to Peyton Manning’s legacy, we get to determine how he is remembered. If we choose to define his career by this lackluster season, if we choose to allow our memories of his skill to be tainted by what we’ve all witnessed in the senescence of his career, then of course Manning’s legacy won’t wind up as sterling as it would have had he retired a few years ago. The important point to remember, though, is that there’s a choice involved.

In the year 2015, when anyone with internet access can watch hours of footage from an athlete’s career, it seems a bit short-sighted to try to definitely say that Manning’s legacy is in some irrecoverable place, that the narrative die has been cast. Perhaps legacies mattered more in the past, back before we all had access to years and years of footage, back before we could flip on, say, the NFL Network and watch a rebroadcast of a classic game. Back in those days, an athlete ending his or her career with a whimper, a stumble off into the sunset, perhaps had more weight to it, because outside of box scores and passed-down tales there were fewer ways for people to truly remind themselves  — as in visually and emotionally re-experience — what an athlete was like at his or her best. But we now live in an era in which we can watch all of Manning’s greatest fourth-quarter comebacks on YouTube. We can essentially re-experience his career from its beginning, all his amazing moments preserved forever in the museum of the internet. In such a world it seems weird to think that Manning’s preternatural quarterbacking ability will be tarnished or forgotten, that he will only and forever be defined by games like last Sunday’s. If his legacy diminishes, it will be because we allow it.

Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that there is no shame in wanting our athletic heroes to conclude their illustrious careers with one final moment of excellence. It’s a perfectly reasonable and understandable set of feelings. But just because an athlete doesn’t play along with our wishes doesn’t mean we then have to dilute what said athlete accomplished in his or her career. Just because our expectations and dreams aren’t met, just because a career doesn’t end with the sort of storybook denouement that movie executives drool over, doesn’t mean we are required to turn to cynicism. We have the power to choose differently. Should we simply ignore an athlete’s bad twilight years? No, of course not. But we can avoid falling into the trap of letting those years, those final impressions, overwhelm the whole narrative. A sour final note doesn’t detract from what came previously, and it shouldn’t.

The hand-wringing and concern trolling over Manning’s potentially tarnished legacy seems more like a psychological defense mechanism than anything else. (Yes, the simpler interpretation is that such conversations are great for traffic and ratings, but bear with me here.) Much like how children with low self-esteem can be the worst bullies, inflicting pain onto others as a way to offset the pain life inflicts on them, worrying about an athlete’s legacy goes hand in hand with our worries about how we will be remembered — not just in death, although that specter is certainly there, but in our jobs, our relationships, our friendships. We spend a lot of time fixating on the importance of first impressions — we prepare and rehearse and do other such things to get ourselves up to par — but really it is our final impressions that cause us the most stress, because they are the ones we seemingly lack control over. A bad first impression can be rectified; a bad final impression seems more permanent, more damning.

We should extend to athletes the courtesy we wish people would extend to us: the chance to be remembered at our best, not our worst. Instead of focusing on all the ways in which Manning is no longer the player he used to be, we should focus our attention on how transcendent he was at his peak. It is important to remind ourselves that we have all the power when it comes to determining how someone will be remembered, that we can choose to be either forgiving or not, sympathetic or not.

Manning’s legacy is in our hands. Let’s not allow a few unimpressive seasons to cloud our judgement.