Maturity ’s Victories

BEAR in mind that what you’re about to read comes from someone whose
creaky knees protest any run longer than three miles, whose achy left
shoulder just got its first cortisone shot and whose haircuts are more
ceremonial than functional, given that nature is doing a barber’s work. I
have a vested interest in coming up with an argument that older is
somehow better.
But I also have the Super Bowl on my side, because what you’ll be
watching on Sunday is more than the biggest football game of the year. It’s
an affirmation of aging. It’s proof that a youthful stride matters less than a
seasoned mind, and that what happens on the far side of our physical
peaks isn’t a steady decline but a sequence of trade-offs. Our joints may
not be as sturdy as they once were. We have plenty else that’s stronger than
ever.
The Denver Broncos are favored (just slightly) over the Seattle
Seahawks, and for one principal reason: Peyton Manning. He’s finishing

up the best season of his career, maybe of any quarterback’s. For the 16
games leading up to the playoffs, he set National Football League records
for passing yards and for touchdowns thrown. And he did this after four
neck surgeries, following a period when nerve damage had wrecked his
right arm. He did this at 37, which is the cusp of senescence in his
merciless sport.
Certainly, other quarterbacks have flourished in their late 30s. In fact
a few of them, including John Elway, were also Broncos, as Time
magazine noted in a recent article titled “Peyton Manning’s Elder Power.”
But what’s extraordinary about Manning — and what gives his golden
season a resonance beyond the gridiron — is the way he’s flourished, his
careful deployment of certain advantages to compensate for other
disadvantages. It’s a tortoise-and-hare story, sort of, with a similar moral:
Flashiness doesn’t automatically win the day. Neither does fleetness. But
smarts, patience, plotting? These are paramount, and they’re less
pronounced in youth than in the rickety, wobbly expanse beyond it.
Rickety, wobbly — yes, I’m thinking of Manning’s running style. While
he was never much of a scrambler, he’s especially lead-footed these days.
In the Time article, David Von Drehle wrote that Manning’s one short
touchdown run this season “made him look like a man with a bum hip
chasing a taxi in wingtips.” Von Drehle was being generous. Manning
chased that taxi in Crocs.
All of his limbs have limitations they didn’t used to. Even as Sports
Illustrated named him its athlete of 2013, the magazine observed that the
“laser rocket arm” of his 20s was, at this point, “more like a cap gun.”
Ouch. I watched every Broncos telecast — they’re my team, and I relish any
reason to grow roots in the couch — and he threw a great many passes that
floated and fizzled and swayed clumsily, like stoned egrets, toward the
receivers they were meant for.
But they got there. And other passes, more of them, were real
beauties, with both pinpoint accuracy and plenty of zip.
Besides, he has tools now that have nothing to do with brawn, tools

forged in time served.
He has the kind of poise that maturity typically midwifes. He’s
unflappable. When something goes wrong, be it his fault or a teammate’s,
he’ll grimace only fleetingly, shrug just slightly and press on. Panic, he
understands, is a waste of precious energy, a pivot into rushed, stupid
mistakes. With a bit of age has come a better grip on the fact that a game,
like a life, is long. Stay calm. Hang in. Wait for the inevitable break. Trust
your training.
And gather information. The Manning of the moment is known less
for his power, which is diminished, than for his skills as a tactician, which
are the fruits of having survived so many different situations and studied
so many possible scenarios. He can step to the line of scrimmage, quickly
diagnose the defense’s vulnerabilities and instantly change the play that he
was about to call, using a frenzy of code words and gesticulations that
leave opponents scratching their heads, or rather helmets. Ten years ago,
even five years ago, he was nowhere near as deft at this.
It’s no accident that we elect more older than younger people to the
highest political offices, and it’s not simply because they’ve paid dues or
been able to establish the necessary donor networks (though the latter,
sadly, is indeed a factor). We understand that there’s a kind of judgment
that comes only with an accretion of years, and we hope — often vainly —
that it’s manifest in these leaders.
IT’S no accident that Robert Redford, 77, just gave the performance
of his career, in “All Is Lost,” and that Bruce Dern, also 77, did likewise, in
“Nebraska.” The Oscar for Best Actor is likely to go to Matthew
McConaughey, for “Dallas Buyers Club,” who’s doing work in his 40s —
he’s now 44 — that he couldn’t have touched in his hunky 20s.
And it’s no accident that many of us, while remembering and
sometimes yearning for the electricity of first loves and the metabolism of
our salad days, don’t really want to turn back the clock. We know that for
everything that’s been taken from us, something else has been given. We
don’t move as nimbly as we did. But we manage our emotions with greater

dexterity. Our energy may be diminished. Our use of it is more prudent.
We’re short on flat-out exuberance. We’re long on perspective.
Back in college I took a psychology course that I recall absolutely
nothing about, except for the professor’s favorite maxim. Life, he
repeatedly said, is about learning to deal with loss. For decades afterward,
as my mother died and relationships soured and I gave up on my grandest
dreams, I trusted him on the profundity of this observation, which he
could just as easily have worded another way: Aging stinks.
But he was wrong, or, at best, only half right. Life is about learning to
look past what’s lost to what’s found in the process, and that’s Manning’s
season in a nutshell. To watch him now isn’t merely to see new gifts on
display, new tricks picked up. It’s to behold, in his eyes and smile, an
amplified joy in the game he’s playing, an outsize gratitude for his part in
it.
He’ll step onto the field at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.,
not just as one of the best quarterbacks in the history of football. He’ll step
onto the field, with his thinning hair and awkward gait, as a poster boy for
the march of time.