Peyton Manning must be a lucky man.
I feel rather confident in just straight up saying that fortunate seems to find the former NFL quarterback. Nicknamed "The Sheriff," Peyton is considered to be one of the best QBs to ever play the game. And while we're on that note, let's just look at his career in the NFL real quick.
Manning spent 14 seasons with the Indianapolis Colts, and then 4 seasons with the Denver Broncos. Peyton won two Super Bowls: one in 2006 with the Colts and 2016 with the Broncos. In that latter game, he posted a passer rating of 56.5 (not good), throwing for 141 yards, no touchdowns and one interception. The Broncos basically won in spite of him.
Peyton then transitioned from a playing career in the NFL to a media career seamlessly, and has cracked the code of being paid to have fun. Manning turned his travel show Peyton's Places into a hit for ESPN, and then parlayed that into a ManningCast deal, where he and his brother Eli basically get paid to watch Monday Night Football games together (sporadically) and they don't even have to leave their own homes.
That's luck if I've ever seen it.
Obviously I'm leaving out a lot of the great stuff from Peyton's career that cemented himself as one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history... but I'm trying to prove a point here. The best way to actually convince you that Peyton Manning has incredible luck would be to point you in the direction of this legendary anecdote that Pat McAfee loves to tell.
As the story goes, when Pat and Peyton were teammates on the Indianapolis Colts, Manning once asked McAfee to go on a golf trip with him and some others in French Lick, Indiana. McAfee accepted the offer, then had to borrow Adam Vinatieri's clubs... because he didn't actually play golf. But who would say no to that kind of offer from Peyton Manning?
The group ended up staying at one of the many casinos in the area, and at one point during the trip, Pat decided to hit the roulette table, as he explained in his stand up bit:
"I'm up at the roulette table. I go, 'How's it going man? Yeah, I'd like $500 in chips. I don't know why I have $500, I don't even think it's mine, but I want them all in chips.' Peyton Manning walked into that casino and a f**king buzz started.Then Peyton Manning just slaps me right on my butt. Boom. I go, 'How's it going man?' Everybody at the table just looks at me like, 'Ugh, who the f**k are you?' Peyton kind of stood behind me for a couple of minutes, just watching how everything was going."
Remember... this is before Pat McAfee started his own media career and became one of the many faces of ESPN and College GameDay. Since he was just known as a punter at the time, he was still relatively unknown, which is why everyone was shocked that Manning was being buddy-buddy with him.
Before Peyton moved on from the table, McAfee says that he gave him an all-time tip that was solely based on Manning's jersey number:
"Peyton went to leave, and he goes, 'How bout that red 18?' with a wink and a finger gun and walks off. I put all of my chips on 18. The guy spins it, all of the sudden the number stops... f**king red 18. Bang.I wake up the next morning. It's the first time I've seen Peyton since the finger gun and the wink. I go, 'Hey man, did you know 18 hit when you said that?' And he goes, 'Yeah.'"
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFeVzjWxBsJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Simply iconic.
It's one of those stories that's almost hard to believe... but remember that I had a lot to say about Peyton Manning's luck earlier in this piece. There's even more detail to story that McAfee provided in his full set, and you can view that below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HyDtgZkjik
