NEW ORLEANS — If 76-year-old Archie Manning was listed on the College Football Playoffs injury report for the Sugar Bowl it would say: Ole Miss quarterback Manning (lower back) extremely doubtful.

“My back has just been giving me fits lately. I can hardly get around,” Manning said Tuesday from the St. Charles Avenue condo where he and wife Olivia live. “I could get on the elevator to a suite in the Superdome. It’s just getting to the elevator that’s the problem. But I’ll be watching. You better believe I’ll be watching.”

Fifty-six years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1970, Manning, then 20, was most definitely ready to go. Legendary Clarion Ledger sports columnist Carl Walters described it this way in the next day’s paper: “The Ole Miss Rebels became the winningest team in Sugar Bowl history this bright but cold New Year’s Day, holding off the battling, third-ranked Arkansas Razorbacks for a 27-22 victory in a thrilling contest that will be ranked with the best ever played in post-season competition.”

Manning passed for 273 yards and a touchdown, ran for another touchdown and totaled 318 yards of total offense to win the Miller-Digby Trophy as the game’s Most Valuable Player. As was the case every time Manning took the field, the numbers don’t tell the entire story. It was the competitive flair with which he played – the zigging and zagging all over the field – that stole the Sugar Bowl show.

Says Skipper Jernigan, an outstanding Ole Miss guard back then and Manning’s long-time pal, “I just remember chasing his red-headed ass all over Tulane Stadium trying to block for him. Every time I’d go to block somebody, Archie would turn and go the other direction. He was all over the place and none of the rest of us were fast enough to keep up with him.”

And this will tell you something about Ole Miss’s rich Sugar Bowl history: Manning is one of six Rebel quarterbacks to have won the Sugar Bowl’s MVP trophy. Count them, six: Raymond Brown (1958), Bobby Ray Franklin (1960), Jake Gibbs (1961), Glynn Griffing (1963), Manning (1970) and Chad Kelly (2016).

“Seemed like when I was growing up, Coach Vaught had Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl about every other year,” Manning said. “We had a great Sugar Bowl experience. I’ll never forget it. We lost three games that season, but at the end of the year we were playing as well or better than anybody in the country.”

Jernigan put it another way: “When No. 18 was clicking, we were hard to handle.”

Tulane Stadium, packed with more than 80,000 fans, was what Manning remembers most.

“God, I loved that place,” Manning said. “It still had real grass back then, and there were hedges around the field. And, man, so many people were there. I had never seen that many people in one place before. I’ll tell you this much, I enjoyed playing in Tulane Stadium that day a whole lot more than I did my first four years with the Saints.”

Arkansas and Ole Miss chewed up the field so badly the field was still a mess 10 days later when the Kansas City Chiefs trounced the Minnesota Vikings 23-7 in Super Bowl IV. In fact, the NFL required the Saints to install artificial turf before the league would award the city another Super Bowl. The sad truth is that rock-hard Astroturf at Tulane Stadium and later in the Superdome might have something to do with Manning’s back issues today.

That Ole Miss made the Sugar Bowl that year was a story in itself. The Rebels suffered one-point losses early in the season to Kentucky and Alabama and was solidly defeated by Houston in the Astrodome at mid-season.

Then came November and upset victories over No. 8 LSU (26-23) and No. 3 Tennessee (38-0).

“Coach Vaught told us before the Tennessee game that if we somehow beat them, he guaranteed us he would get us in the Sugar Bowl,” Manning said. “And he did.”

But first, Ole Miss had to beat Mississippi State, no easy task at the time. “State had Tommy Pharr throwing and Sammy Milner and David Smith catching,” Manning said. “We had tied them in Oxford the year before and we had to play ‘em in Starkville that year and, man, they could really throw the football and put up some points.”

Ole Miss, with Manning leading the way, prevailed 48-22, and true to his word, Vaught lobbied the Rebels into the Sugar Bowl. There, they were to face the loser of the Dec. 6, Arkansas-Texas “Game of the Century,” a game so big even President Richard Nixon attended and declared the Dec. 6 game was for the national championship.

“We all thought Arkansas was the better team,” Manning said. “So did Coach Vaught. Arkansas had beaten Georgia in the Sugar Bowl the year before. We thought we would be playing Texas, not Arkansas”

Instead, Texas rallied from a 14-0 fourth quarter deficit to beat the Razorbacks 15-14.

“We really thought we were playing the best team in the country in Arkansas, but we knew we could play with them,” Manning said.

Fullback Bo Bowen got the Rebels off to a fantastic start, busting through a wide hole cleared by Jernigan and Worthy McClure for a 69-yard touchdown run. 

“Bo was just a great back,” Manning said. “He was really a tailback playing out of position at fullback but he really hit his stride the last half of that season.”

After that, Manning pretty much took control of the game, running and throwing the Rebels to a 24-6 first half lead. The Rebels got a lot more conservative offensively in the second half but hung on to win.

Fifty-six years later, Manning has vivid memories and not just of Tulane Stadium and the team headquarters, the old Fountainbleu Hotel, both long since gone. Among them:

• Of a Sugar Bowl party the week of the game, during which a magician called up Rebel wide receiver Vernon Studdard to the stage to be part of his act. The joke was on the magician, because when Studdard returned to his seat, he had the magician’s watch.
• Of how good that Arkansas team was. “They were coached by Frank Broyles, a Hall of Famer who was Coach Vaught’s good friend,” Manning said. “They had a great wide receiver Chuck Dicus, who had been the Sugar Bowl MVP the year before, and a great quarterback Bill Montgomery. Both those guys became great friends. So did Coach Broyles, who never did beat Coach Vaught. I ran into Broyles years and years later at Augusta National and he was still talking about Bo Bowen’s run.”
• Of Arkansas All American middle linebacker Cliff Powell. “Man, that guy would ever more hit you,” Manning said.

Years and years later, Archie and Olivia Manning decided to watch a replay of that 1970 Sugar Bowl with ABC legends Chris Shenkel and Bud Wilkinson doing the call.

“About midway through the second half, Olivia said it looked like my good friend Jim Poole (a fantastic Rebel tight end) had his jersey on backwards,” Manning said. “Sure enough, I looked closely and the big numbers were on the front of Jim’s jersey. The little numbers, which were supposed to be on the front, were on the back.”

Turns out, Poole had suffered a first half neck injury, and Ole Miss trainer Doc Knight had taken his jersey and shoulder pads off to massage the neck at halftime. When they put Poole’s jersey back on, it was on backwards.

Turns out, Poole played that second half with fractured vertebrae in his neck. Back then, you just took a few aspirin and went back in – until they carried you off. So what will they be saying about this New Year’s Day Sugar Bowl in 56 years? That will be 2082.