REFLECTION
I had the privilege during my playing career to participate in two amazing rivalries.
First was Michigan-Ohio State, which goes back over 125 years and has produced so many legendary games. At Michigan, we could lose every game but beat Ohio State and people would consider it a successful year. Conversely, we could win every game and go to the Rose Bowl, but if we lost to Ohio State those same people might consider the season unsuccessful. That’s how much the rivalry meant to the folks in Ann Arbor.
Then there was my rivalry with Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts, which developed over about fifteen years. From 2001 to 2015, we played each other every season but three. (In two of those three missed seasons our teams actually played but one of us was injured.) All told, my Pats teams won the regular season match-up and the overall head-to-head match-up, whiled around his teams won the AFC championship head-to-head match-up. Peyton won more regular season MVPs, but we won more Super Bowls. And over that whole time, we won a very similar number of games. Ours was a pretty even rivalry for a decade and a half—a rare thing.
LESSON
But rivalry is obviously more than just how many times you play someone. In its purest form, rivalry is a uniquely intense kind of competition that challenges you physically, mentally, and emotionally. It pushes you to confront your own limitations, and then it compels you to transcend them—to run faster, hit harder, throw farther, dig deeper—because in the end you know that the outcome of a rivalry matchup is going to mean more to you than if it were just another game.
And what I have found is that when you realize the magnitude of a rivalry’s importance—to you, to your teammates, to fans—it can either shut you down or it can unlock a new level of focus that you might otherwise struggle to reach, much less hold onto.
I knew, for example that when I played Peyton Manning, I had to be locked in all week and laser focused all game. I couldn't have a single bad play against him. I knew that one interception could cost me a game. I knew that game could cost me home field advantage. I knew that home field advantage could cost us a chance to go to the Super Bowl. That sounds like a hypothetical, but it’s the story of our week 8 match-up during the 2006 season, which they won. We both ended the season as division winners with identical 12-4 records, but the Colts got the higher seed, hosted the AFC championship game against us, and went on to win the Super Bowl.
This mindset isn’t unique to football. I’m confident that rivals in every other sport have similar stories. There’s just a level of focus, motivation and performance that only a certain group of people can get out of you.
APPLICATION
We should all have a deep appreciation for the rivals in our lives who push us past the point of comfort and force us to question the confidence we have in what we’re capable of. Because the challenge these fierce competitors present is the thing that will spur us to find within ourselves effective strategies to overcome our limitations and achieve new levels of success. In this way, I think you have to look at great competitors and great rivalries as a gift.
But I also believe—and this is kind of an old school point of view considering where we are with social media these days—that you have to allow your rivals to become your enemies. True enemies, in your mind and on the field. You can, and should, respect them, but you can’t look at them like “friendly competition.” You have to recognize that they are trying to take what you are trying to earn. They are standing in the way of your highest goals, of everything you have worked so hard for, and of all the people you will compete against, they are the best-equipped of all to thwart you.
It takes everything you have to beat a true rival. When the stakes are really high, when you have to destroy them and bury them under the goalposts to guarantee victory, it’s that much harder to summon that extra level of strength, focus and will, if you think of the guys on the other team as your friends, if you’re doing each other’s podcasts and acting like everyone’s your brother. But when you see them as your enemy, it puts you in a frame of mind to fully defend, by any means necessary, what you are trying to achieve.
That’s why the greats like Michael Jordan didn’t have friends during the season. Kobe Bryant wasn’t collabing with anyone who wasn’t in purple and gold. Tiger Woods didn’t have friends on tour. Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens would throw at their moms if they were in another team’s jersey. For my part, I didn’t have any real friends on any other teams when I played. I had the guys on my team and that was it.
When I look back on my relationship with Peyton Manning, my respect, admiration, and appreciation for him as a competitor has grown with each passing year. It was always there, don’t misunderstand, but while we were competing against each other I couldn’t let that get in the way of the fact that he was my enemy, that he didn’t respect me, that he thought he was better than me because he was a #1 pick from an SEC school—or at least that’s what I made myself believe. Convincing myself that those things were true created a sense of urgency within me to prove him wrong, and it provided the extra bit of energy and motivation necessary to lock in and focus and execute just that much more so that I could beat him more often than he beat me.
The downside of this approach might be some hurt feelings for a while, but the upside is greatness and reaching your competitive potential.
Peyton Manning was a gift to my NFL career. I maybe didn’t fully know it at the time, but I needed someone to look up to, who inspired me to be better, and who gave me a target to aim for. Now when I see him, the only thing I can say is thank you. Thank you for challenging me to be the best I could be, to dig deep in March and April and May when nobody was watching, and to have expectations for myself that were above and beyond what others thought was possible.
That’s the value and power of rivalry. That is the gift of competition. When you embrace it, it makes you better than even you thought was possible.
