Peyton Manning Shares Private Revelation

Peyton Manning Shares Private Revelation, After taking his first snap in nearly two years, the star QB does something totally out of character. Peyton Manning emotional, thankful after first live snap in nearly two years, The pass fell incomplete, the play-clock started ticking, and Peyton Manning, football’s ultimate stickler for detail, did something completely out of character.

The future Hall of Fame quarterback had just taken his first official snap in 19 months – and his first as a member of the Denver Broncos, the team he chose last March after his high-profile divorce with the Indianapolis Colts – and instead of gathering his offensive teammates and setting up for a second-and-10 play, Manning took a moment to gaze across the wet Soldier Field grass, reflect on a year’s worth of intensive rehabilitation from a nerve injury to his neck and soak up the significance of his return.

No, Manning would not be perfect on this rainy night in the Windy City, completing 4-of-7 passes for 44 yards and ending his only series with a red-zone interception, and thus producing none of the points in the Broncos’ 31-3 victory over the Chicago Bears in their 2012 preseason opener Thursday. Yet given how far he’d come, and how hard he’d worked to save his career, simply being back under center in an NFL stadium provided a brief rush of private satisfaction.

“I’ve just come a long way in a year,” Manning told Yahoo! Sports afterward as he prepared to leave the visitors’ locker room and head to the team bus. “I got an email from [brother-in-law Will Thompson] today that said, ‘Hey, after that first snap, you ought to take a minute just to reflect about where you were at this point last year.’ Just the fact that I was able to be out there taking a snap in an NFL game anybody, if you asked it meant a lot. You’d almost have to talk to the Indy trainers, the guys that really saw me, that really know. Without getting too deep, you couldn’t make any predictions. There’s a lot of unknown to this injury.”

His postgame honesty was disarming and refreshing. As hard as Manning tried to convince himself – and the outside world – that his eventual return from four neck surgeries was never in doubt, he’d clearly confronted the possibility that he’d played his last game more vividly than all but those closest to him knew.