The stadium in downtown Indianapolis is affectionately remembered “as the house that Peyton Manning built.” That Colts quarterback won hundreds of games, earned four MVP awards, and made national champions out of a losing expansion team from a long overlooked city.
Building all that took 12 years. It took less than an hour for Vice President Mike Pence to upstage Manning during the Colts game against the San Francisco 49ers, a Sunday set aside to honor the beloved quarterback. That was cheap politics.
The vice president left the stadium before the end of the first quarter, interrupting the celebration to announce his protest of another protest. While the Colts stood during the Star Spangled Banner, several 49ers kneeled like they have done consistently since last season.
“I left today’s Colts game,” Pence said in a ready-made statement, “because President Trump and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”
An aide told me that Pence hadn’t planned to walk out, that the vice president had hoped players would suspend their protest out of respect for Manning. But press travelling with him reported otherwise. “The media pool was kept in the vans ahead of the game,” NBC Vaughn Hillyard tweeted, “instead of being led in with VPOTUS.”
In other words, Pence kept the motorcade together and the cars running to duck out early. A few hours later Pence was 2,000 miles away in Beverly Hills, glad-handing donors at a fundraiser for Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.
After President Trump opened up a new front in the culture war by attacking the NFL, Pence and his team knew the game wouldn’t be without incident. The decision to leave was like a play-action pass—pretend the VP would stay if there wasn’t a protest and then go long with an over the top populist statement.
But if the vice president thinks he made an easy political play, he’s mistaken. His stunt cost the fans who had to wait longer to get through security, it cost the taxpayer who had to pay for his trip to Indiana, and it cost Manning who had to watch the arena he built become a political carnival.
Happy nostalgia for Manning’s glory days was crowded out by breathless political coverage of Pence. As Sport’s Illustrated points out, the top five stories on the Indianapolis Star focused on the circus that Pence started.
Things could’ve been different had Pence not imitated the wrong quarterback.
By ruining Sunday football with partisan politics, the vice president copied Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers star who kicked off the whole self-serving anthem protest. Like Kaepernick, Pence stole the spotlight to create drama to win points. He should’ve imitated Manning.
Throughout his career Manning demanded excellence and demonstrated humility. Sunday was no different. Manning talked about his coaches, his teammates, and his beloved fans. And as Indianapolis Star columnist Stephen Holder pointed out, when Manning spoke in the first person, he talked in the plural. After a dozen years in Indianapolis, the quarterback talked about what “we” accomplished not about “me.”
Pence could’ve kept politics and football separate, what the Right has been calling for since Kaepernick first took a knee. Instead the vice president made the day about himself. That’s his loss—the vice president missed a good football game. After he walked out the Colts showed up to win for Manning, beating the 49ers 26-23 in overtime.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
