JOHN ELWAY

This One’s for Dad

Jack Elway, the coach at San José State, charged off the sideline at Stanford Stadium to position himself within yelling distance of Stanford coach Paul Wiggin. Elway’s defense was beating up Wiggins’s quarterback, and Elway was not happy that the kid was still in the game. The quarterback was his kid.

John Elway was in his junior season and suffering through the worst day of his college career. His father felt his pain. It was the middle of the third quarter in September 1981, and Jack was unable to watch John absorb any more punishment. Not quite as important, but also on his mind, and a source of anxiety, was the hell he would catch from his wife, Janet, at dinner that night.

Jack Elway ventured all the way out to the numbers so Wiggin could hear him. John heard him, too.

“Get him out of there!” Elway screamed.

San José State was on its way to a 28–6 victory. Elway’s son was playing on a sprained ankle and was an easy target, but he wouldn’t come out of the game. Jack Elway was in his third year as coach of the Spartans, and his son had beaten him the first two times they met. The previous week, Elway had thrown for 418 yards in a season-opening loss to Purdue. The end result was the same against San José State, but the numbers were much different.

Elway completed just 6 of 24 passes for 72 yards. He was sacked seven times. He threw five interceptions, all in the second half. Stanford was held to fewer than 100 yards offense. John’s mother watched in agony—she hated the Stanford–San José State games of father versus son—and cringed as John was getting pummeled. What mother enjoys watching her baby boy get beat up on the football field? Even more painful was the fact that her husband was coaching the team doing the punishing.

“Sure, I had mixed feelings,” Jack Elway said after the game. “John is still the best quarterback I have ever seen. But he has a responsibility to his team, and I have a responsibility to my team.”

Jack Elway realized he was going to have a lot of explaining to do to his wife when he arrived back home in San José. He put together a quick plan. After the game, he met John at midfield to first make sure he was still in one piece. Then he invited him to dinner.

“Are you going to come home to San José tonight?” Jack asked.

The drive from the Stanford campus, known as “The Farm,” to the Elway house was an easy twenty miles south on the 101 Freeway. John made the trip all the time. It’s hard to beat one of Mom’s home-cooked meals when you’re in college.

“No, I’m going to hang at the dorm and stay up here,” John said.

“I really want you to come home,” Jack countered.

“I just really want to stay up here,” John said.

He was more than a little curious why his father was so insistent. He had played an awful game; his team was 0-2; he was upset and banged up and just wanted to hang out with his buddies. As much as he loved his parents and enjoyed their company and talking football with his father, he wasn’t in the mood.

“Okay, I’m not asking anymore. I’m telling you that you are going to come home to San José,” Jack said.

“Why?” John finally asked.

“Because if you’re not with me, your mom won’t let me in the house,” Jack said.

John went home.

It turned into an eventful evening. John had been drafted by the Yankees with the last pick in the second round of the 1981 draft in June—six spots ahead of future Hall of Fame outfielder Tony Gwynn—and had been talking to them about an arrangement to play baseball in his time off from football while he was still at Stanford. He had his mind made up to play in the NFL—he was regarded as the best quarterback prospect of all time—but baseball had always been his first love. He signed a contract for $140,000 with the Yankees the night of the San José State game that would allow him to play baseball in the summer for New York’s Class A minor-league team in Oneonta and return to play his senior year of football at Stanford. Elway was a right fielder with a rocket arm and a lot of potential. His plan all along was to play football, but where else was he going to find a summer job for $140,000? He later used the Yankees as leverage when the Baltimore Colts drafted him number 1 overall in 1983 against his wishes and he threatened to go play for George Steinbrenner instead of Robert Irsay. One week after the draft, the Colts traded Elway to the Denver Broncos.

Jack and John Elway were not only father and son, they were best friends. Jack was a major influence in John’s decision not to play in Baltimore, just as he was responsible for his son’s going out for quarterback instead of running back on his high school team. Elway had a magical arm, the strongest and most powerful in college football and later NFL history. On the first day of practice his freshman year at Stanford, he threw passes with such velocity that he broke the fingers of two of his receivers. It worked out a little better when his receivers chose to bring the ball into their bodies instead of catching it out front with their hands. Elway’s passes arrived with such force that the nose of the football left a visible imprint on his receivers’ chests. It became known as the Elway Cross, a proud if painful badge of honor.

Rod Smith, who didn’t start catching passes from Elway until Elway’s twelfth year in the NFL, said the Broncos coaches used to dial up the Jugs machine in practice to between 70 and 80 miles per hour to get them used to Elway’s fastball. He knew only two speeds. Fast and faster.

“That cross in your chest?” Smith said. “I got a few of those from John.”

Elway was a pitcher in Little League, which was the first time Jack Elway noticed something special about his only son’s right arm. He could really throw hard. But in football, he liked to play running back. Throwing a football is not at all like throwing a baseball, and Elway was a faster runner than all the other kids. He liked getting the handoff and running all out.

Jack Elway was a teacher and football coach at Port Angeles High School in the state of Washington when John was born in 1959. Jack moved up to Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1961 and remained there until he began the nomadic life of a college assistant coach. The family settled in Missoula, Montana, in 1966 when Jack was hired as an assistant coach at the University of Montana. John began playing Pop Warner football and loved it. But when Jack was hired as an assistant at Washington State in 1972, football was not a part of John’s life. There was no Pop Warner program.

“So I really didn’t play again until ninth grade,” Elway said.

Jack was driving John to class on the first day of high school football practice. They both knew this was the year he would start playing serious football.

“Well, football starts today,” Jack said.

“Yeah, it starts today,” John said.

“What position you going out for?” Jack asked.

“Well, I’m planning on going out for running back,” John said.

The high school played the old single wing, created by Glenn “Pop” Warner. It was a running offense with four backs in the backfield.

Jack was driving a ’68 Chevy Impala, a model with the gearshift on the steering wheel. Jack Elway put the car in park. John wondered why they were stopping short of the school. Jack saw his son as a quarterback, not a running back. They sat in the car and discussed the only option Jack was giving him. Mainly, John listened. Jack knew his son had a golden arm. “I want you to play quarterback,” Jack said. “But I want to play running back,” John said. They went back and forth for what seemed like forever.

“Fifteen minutes later I got out of the car and I’m a quarterback,” John said, laughing. “I tried to talk him out of it. The single-wing offense was pretty boring. Having been a running back, I like to carry the ball. I like to be in on the action. But I knew I was starting to grow and I didn’t have the speed I had when I was in fifth grade when I was faster than everybody else. I started growing and things started slowing down a little bit, especially my speed.”

Father knows best. “In the long run, as time went on, this was going to be the position for me even though it might not have been the most fun,” John said. “He told me I would be able to run the bootleg and do other stuff, too, in the single wing. In the long run, he said, the best thing for me was to go out for quarterback.”

Elway played quarterback in the ninth grade, trying to get settled in at a new position. Jim Sweeney had hired Jack Elway for his staff at Washington State, but after a promising 7-4 record in their first season in 1972, the Cougars regressed with records of 5-6, 2-9, and 3-8 the next three years. Sweeney was fired. Elway lost his job. John lost his football team.

Jack Elway was hired as an assistant at Cal State–Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. He moved ahead of his wife and three children to buy a house and get settled. The kids finished out the school year. It was important to find a home in an area that had a good football program to allow John to reach his potential. He picked Granada Hills. The coach was Jack Neumeier, who had won city and state titles.

“They threw the ball all over,” John Elway said. “He was way ahead of his time. My sophomore year is where I really started enjoying the position because I did get to throw it all over the place.”

Elway didn’t have a lot of experience at quarterback. But he grew up fast. He had the arm and was a perfect match for the offense. “I got a chance to throw it a lot,” he said.

He quickly developed into a big-time college prospect at the same time Jack Elway’s coaching career was about to take off. Jack was an offensive coach, and John really admired the system his father ran. They were as close as a father and son could be. Best friends, really. It was such an advantage for John to be able to come home from practice or a game and sit with his father and talk business. There are plenty of young men who go into the family business, but not often does it play out in front of the cameras or in the newspapers. But the Elways were different. One was a quarterback and the other was a coach.

After the 1978 season, Jack Elway was hired as the head coach at San José State, his first really big job. John Elway was one of the hottest quarterback recruits in the country. Of course, his father wanted his son to play for him. “He said, ‘I can’t offer cars or anything,’ but he did offer to have an affair with my mother,” John said.

Even though the NCAA has strict rules, that would not have been a violation.

It could have been an uncomfortable period in their lives. John started dreaming about playing in the Pac-10 Conference when his father was coaching at Washington State. He loved the style of play, the wide-open offense. In his mind, before his father was hired by San José State, he was going to decide between the University of Southern California and Stanford University. Excellent schools academically and great football programs.

His mother wanted him to go to Stanford. “I think deep down inside, my dad wanted me to go there, too, even though he’d love to have me play for him,” Elway said.

His father did try his best to get John to join him. He had him up for a visit on campus. The coach didn’t have to make a home visit. “He impressed my mom, let’s put it that way,” John said.

It was the identical situation Jim and Jack Harbaugh faced years later when Michigan wanted Jim in 1982 and Jack had just been named the head coach at Western Michigan. Jim went to Michigan to play for Bo Schembechler.

John Elway was torn. He wanted to go to Stanford. He had his heart set on Stanford. It is a great school with a football program that emerged under Bill Walsh, who left for the 49ers in 1979, the year Elway would arrive on campus. Wide receivers coach Rod Dowhower, a well-respected offensive mind, was promoted to replace Walsh. But if John went and played for his father and helped lead San José State’s football program into national prominence, it could help elevate Jack into the spotlight, perhaps setting him up for an NFL head coaching job.

That’s a heavy burden for an eighteen-year-old. But Jack never tried to appeal to John’s heart. He tried to sell him on doing great things together: He would prepare his son to play in the NFL, and John could set him up for a coaching job at the next level if they won a lot of games. “I think he knew my mom wanted me to go to Stanford, too,” John said. “He didn’t want to push too hard.”

Elway followed his football heart and went to Stanford. His dad understood.

Stanford won the first two games of the Elway-versus-Elway matchup, and San José State won the last two. Elway continued to lean on his father for advice on and off the field during his college days. “I’d always get an honest opinion from him and he didn’t pull any punches,” John said. “He wasn’t overly negative ever, but if I had done something wrong or made a bad mistake, he would let me know that. You wanted to make your dad proud of you, especially when he was a football coach. If I could do that, then everything else was good.”

Jack was not heavy-handed, never telling John what he needed to do better. He asked questions and let him figure it out for himself. “That’s why, in my mind, he was a great football coach and he did a tremendous job when he was a coach,” John said. “He was always asking me questions to get me where he wanted me to be.”

Elway spent the summer between his junior and senior years playing baseball for the Yankees in Oneonta in upstate New York. The better Elway became in football, the more Yankees owner George Steinbrenner wanted to steal him away from the NFL to play baseball. What could be better for Steinbrenner than taking the best quarterback prospect in the history of college football and grooming him to be a right fielder for the New York Yankees? Elway had high-level baseball skills, and if he’d dedicated himself to the game, he might have made it to the Bronx.

He hit .342 in forty-two games for Oneonta and of course had a very strong arm. He could hit, hit with power, run, field, and throw: the five tools of baseball. If he became a full-time baseball player, he could fulfill his potential. “He will be a great outfielder for me, in the great tradition of Mantle, Maris, DiMaggio, and all the others,” Steinbrenner once said.

Steinbrenner, as competitive as Elway, would have loved it if that taste of professional baseball in the summer of 1982 had provided enough of a temptation for Elway to turn his back on football. The coaches and players around the Oneonta Yankees knew he had excellent baseball skills, but they had also watched him play quarterback for Stanford, where he was a once-in-a-generation player. He had one more season of college football remaining when he played in Oneonta, and even though he was on the verge of becoming the first player picked in the 1983 NFL draft, he never big-timed his teammates. He never did that in the NFL, either. He always tried to just fit in and be one of the fellas.

He told Yankees Magazine that he really cherished his time with the minor-league team. “I enjoyed traveling on the buses, and we went to a local pizza parlor for dinner and a few beers after every home game, and that was always a great time,” he said. “None of us had cars, so we walked to the park every day. We walked to the pizza parlor after the games and walked home after that. It was a great experience for me.”

Elway never had to ride the buses from one city to the next in the NFL. But he enjoyed the life of a minor-league player for one summer, and when he ended his Oneonta summer on a hot streak, he was convinced he could make it to the major leagues if he stuck with it.

“Finishing the season the way I did gave me a lot of confidence that I could play baseball at a high level,” Elway said to Yankees Magazine. “I was going right into my senior football season and I was really looking forward to that. But baseball had become a viable option for me that summer. I enjoyed playing baseball every day and I was confident because I had some success. I left there thinking, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen, but this is something I would definitely be happy doing for a long time.’”

Elway was a two-sport star before Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson, who each played in the NFL and Major League Baseball at the same time. Sanders is the only player to have played in both the World Series and the Super Bowl. In 1992, Sanders played in a Saturday night National League Championship Series game with the Atlanta Braves in Pittsburgh, flew to Miami and played for the Falcons on Sunday afternoon, and then returned to Pittsburgh for Game 5 of the Series against the Pirates, although he didn’t play.

Jackson played baseball in the same season with the Los Angeles Raiders and the Kansas City Royals from 1987 to 1990 before a hip injury ended his football career. Jackson was the first player picked in the 1986 draft by the Buccaneers but stunned the NFL when he elected to play baseball and never signed with Tampa. He was picked by the Los Angeles Raiders in the fifth round in 1987 and worked out a deal to join them after baseball season was over.

As much as John Elway loved baseball, he had learned to love football even more. He was a transcendent talent. In baseball, he had potential. In football, he was a sure thing.

After spending the summer with Oneonta, he returned for his senior season. His Stanford team once again lost to his father, Jack, and San José State, this time 35–31. Stanford was just 5-6, but Elway won the Sammy Baugh Award as the nation’s top college quarterback.

Elway went into the 1983 NFL draft process as the consensus overall number 1 pick and was considered the best quarterback prospect of all time. His arm strength was already legendary; he was athletic and could throw on the run; he could even unleash a bullet running to his right and throwing across his body to his left. He had a great aptitude for the game, and, despite his talent, he did not have a big head and was considered a good kid. Having a father who was a longtime football coach made him an even more attractive prospect. Football was important to him.

By the end of the 1982 college football season, it became evident that the next draft was going to be outstanding for quarterbacks. Elway; Jim Kelly (Miami); Dan Marino (Pittsburgh); Todd Blackledge (Penn State); and Tony Eason (Illinois) were all considered locks for the first round. Surprisingly, they were joined by Ken O’Brien from little-known Cal-Davis, who wound up getting drafted by the Jets over Marino, who had a poor senior season and whose value plummeted because of drug use rumors.

There was no doubt that Elway was the best quarterback in the group. The Baltimore Colts had the first pick, but just one year earlier they had selected Ohio State quarterback Art Schlichter with the fourth overall selection. Could they take a quarterback even higher after Schlichter’s rookie season? The Colts finished a league-worst 0-8-1 in the 1982 strike-shortened season. Schlichter threw only 37 passes in three games and didn’t make one start. It would be foolish to think his presence would convince Ernie Accorsi, the first-year Colts general manager, to pass on Elway. Accorsi learned the value of franchise quarterbacks in his years in Baltimore with Johnny Unitas. He had been promoted from assistant general manager to general manager by Colts owner Robert Irsay and wasn’t about to trade the pick or take another player, even though future Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson was available in the draft.

Accorsi was locked in on Elway. But there was a problem. Elway didn’t want to play for Baltimore. He didn’t have any negative feelings about the city of Baltimore, but his father, Jack, didn’t want him playing for Irsay, a heavy drinker who was not held in high regard in the NFL, or for Frank Kush, a rigid taskmaster who had been hired as the Colts coach in 1982 and proceeded to go winless. Kush had recruited Elway to play for him when he was the coach at Arizona State, but Elway didn’t even take a trip to Tempe to visit.

Elway told the Colts not to draft him. He threatened to play baseball for the Yankees. He was portrayed as an entitled kid who thought he was bigger than the draft, bigger than the NFL, as he attempted to dictate where he would play.

He had little desire to play for Kush, but it was more about the Colts organization. He didn’t know much about Accorsi, a former newspaper reporter who had worked for the Charlotte News, the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and once broke the story that the Philadelphia 76ers traded Wilt Chamberlain to the Los Angeles Lakers. Accorsi was from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and his father attended Chamberlain’s 100-point game in Hershey in 1962. Accorsi worked his way up in the NFL from public relations to general manager, and even though he went on to be one of the best general managers of his generation, and in 2016 was inducted into the Ring of Honor of the New York Giants, he had yet to establish a track record.

Irsay became an NFL owner in 1972 when he bought the Los Angeles Rams from the estate of the late Dan Reeves—no relation to the former Dallas Cowboys running back who was later the head coach of three NFL teams—and on the same day swapped franchises with Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom. Irsay wasn’t known as much of a football man. He made his money in the family’s HVAC business. When Irsay died in 1997, the obituary written by the Associated Press described him as a “meddlesome, tightfisted tyrant in Baltimore.” The Baltimore Sun remembered him for his “drunken fits of rage.”

The Elways did their homework on Irsay and the Colts. Accorsi did his homework on Elway. The Elways made it clear to the Colts that John did not want to play for them. Accorsi made it clear to them that he would not be intimidated and would not trade the choice unless he received three first-round draft picks. He would never pass on Elway and take another player just because Elway said he didn’t want to play for the Colts.

“It’s the most influential position in football and probably in sports,” Accorsi once said. “Maybe the Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar era, when the center dominated so much, was just as important.”

Accorsi is a historian. He wasn’t about to be remembered as the man who panicked and gave away Elway without getting equal return. Besides, what leverage did Elway really have? The Yankees? He didn’t want to play baseball. Sitting out the season and entering the 1984 draft? He would lose a year off his career. Neither were attractive options.

“It really came down to ‘How solid is this organization?’ It was really Irsay and it was unstable in what they were doing,” Elway said. “They drafted a quarterback the year before and there had been no direction in what they were doing. It was mainly, looking in the long run, was I going to have a chance to be successful? Is this going to give me the best chance at being successful in football by going to the Baltimore Colts or not? We looked at it and we didn’t think so. The ownership was unstable and they would make decisions on the fly.”

Elway would clash with Broncos coach Dan Reeves when they were together in Denver for the first ten years of Elway’s career. Reeves is a pussycat compared to Kush. “Frank Kush was not my dad’s style, but he was not the main reason,” Elway said. “If it had been a solid organization, if it was the Denver Broncos and Frank Kush was the coach, I’d have come here.”

That conflicted with the information Accorsi received years later when he was the Giants assistant general manager and Jim Fassel was hired by George Young as the head coach. Fassel was Elway’s offensive coordinator at Stanford and they were very good friends. So good, in fact, that Fassel was in John Elway’s wedding party when he married his first wife, Janet, after his rookie season.

Fassel told Accorsi that Kush was the reason Elway didn’t want to play for the Colts. The information came from Elway. It was probably a combination of two things: John Elway was scared of Irsay, and Jack Elway was scared of Kush. Elway said he always regretted blaming geography.

“We kind of came up with the lame excuse that we wanted to stay on the West Coast and that ended up backfiring,” he said.

To people on the East Coast, Denver is the West Coast.

Elway laughed. “They don’t realize it snows here.”

Marvin Demoff was one of the most powerful agents in football. He represented Elway and Marino in the 1983 draft. At the NFL owners meetings in Palm Springs, California, one month before the draft, Demoff arranged a dinner with Jack Elway, Accorsi, and Kush. They dined in the hotel restaurant.

“The purpose of the meeting was not to talk about the possibility of us drafting him,” Accorsi said. “They wanted to express in person that John didn’t want to get drafted by the Colts.”

Accorsi knew Demoff well. They had done many contracts over the years. Even before dinner, Accorsi heard the rumors that Elway didn’t want the Colts to pick him.

“Dinner was very low-key. It was done very professionally,” Accorsi said.

Jack Elway was quiet. He let Demoff do the talking.

Accorsi wanted Elway, but he had a backup plan. Even though Marino’s stock was slipping, if Accorsi could come up with a record-setting haul for Elway, he would make the trade if he could still get Marino. He wanted three first-round picks, with two in one year, and two second-round picks.

Elway and his father came up with a list of ten teams that he would accept a trade to. The Cowboys were interested, and Accorsi asked for Randy White and Danny White and two first-round picks. Tom Landry, Tex Schramm, and Gil Brandt refused. San Diego had three first-round picks in the 1983 draft—the fifth, twentieth, and twenty-second—but were not willing to part with the best of the three. No deal. The Raiders were trying to acquire the Bears’ pick at number 6 to go along with their own pick at number 26 and would have traded both to Baltimore. But Chicago wanted Howie Long from the Raiders and the talks died. If the deal had gone through, Accorsi was going to take Marino in the Bears’ slot.

The Patriots called Irsay and offered All-Pro guard John Hannah and the fifteenth pick in the first round in exchange for the first spot. Irsay wanted to do the deal. Accorsi threatened to quit.

The draft started at 7 a.m. Each team had fifteen minutes to make its first-round choice. No acceptable offer had been made to Accorsi. He told Irsay he was going to select Elway at one second after seven. Irsay was overheard telling team counsel Michael Chernoff that he would allow Accorsi to have his moment of glory by taking Elway, but then he would take over and trade Elway.

Three days after the draft, Elway called Accorsi to apologize. He wasn’t backtracking on his decision not to play in Baltimore. He apologized for embarrassing Accorsi, knowing his refusal to play for the Colts was a bad reflection on him, but the decision had nothing to do with Accorsi. Accorsi appreciated the phone call, but he was not budging. You want to go play baseball, go play baseball.

He had checked with sources he had in baseball and acquired Elway’s scouting report. “He wasn’t really a major-league prospect,” Accorsi said. “I figured on July 15 when he’s hitting .260 and riding the bus in Greensboro that he would want to play football.”

This was business. It was also Accorsi’s first draft. He did not hire Kush. He did not pick Schlichter one year earlier. In fact, he didn’t want him. “I was against that pick,” he said. “That was Irsay.”

Accorsi had gotten word that Elway was looking for a five-year $5 million contract. He made the mistake of telling Irsay. If Accorsi had any chance to keep Elway and call his baseball bluff… that ended it. There was no chance Irsay was going to pay that kind of money.

Irsay was an impossible owner, and Accorsi knew staying in that job could ruin his NFL career. But for now, the best way to protect himself was to protect the franchise. Ten days after the draft, Accorsi was sitting at home watching the NBA play-offs when ESPN interrupted the game with breaking news. The network teased it by saying there had been a big quarterback trade. Accorsi sat up. “Wonder what happened,” he was thinking. He then found out that Irsay had run an end around on him and traded Elway to Denver for tackle Chris Hinton, who had been picked three spots after Elway; the Broncos’ first-round pick in 1984 (subsequently used to pick guard Ron Solt); and backup quarterback Mark Herrmann. In addition, Broncos owner Edgar Kaiser agreed to host the Colts in preseason games at Mile High Stadium in 1984 and 1985. The gate receipts were split fifty-fifty between the home and visiting teams. The Broncos always drew a full house in the preseason, and receipts from the two games would put $800,000 in Irsay’s bank account.

Elway had to deal with the criticism that he was spoiled and a crybaby. He wanted to play where he wanted to play, and his talent gave him the leverage. But it came with a price. Elway’s image was being damaged.

Irsay had gone over Accorsi’s head and behind his back and was dealing directly with the owners of the other franchises. Reeves had inquired about trading for the Colts’ pick before the draft, but the price was too high. Denver knew that the Colts liked Hinton, so they had a valuable asset. If Irsay had forced the trade on Accorsi before the draft, he would have taken Marino. Instead, he had an offensive tackle, a backup quarterback, and a future first-round pick.

After the 1983 season, Accorsi quit and was hired by Art Modell in Cleveland as the Browns general manager. Following the 1986, 1987, and 1989 seasons, Elway’s Broncos beat Accorsi’s Browns in the AFC Championship Game. When Accorsi joined the Giants in 1994, it was Dan Reeves’s second year as coach of Big Blue after he had been fired in Denver, primarily because of a fractured relationship with Elway.

John Elway was hired by the Broncos to run their football operations late in the 2011 season. Once the season ended, he began a search for a new head coach. He retained Accorsi as a consultant.

Perhaps he felt he owed him one. Accorsi recommended former Panthers coach John Fox, who had been the Giants’ defensive coordinator when he was the Giants’ general manager. Elway hired Fox, who helped Denver make it to one Super Bowl.

John Elway retired as a player with Super Bowl rings earned in the final two years of his sixteen-year career. He had the greatest exit in NFL history. Even though he had incredible talent, great success did not come easily in Denver. Elway lost three Super Bowls in his first seven seasons to the Giants, Redskins, and 49ers by a combined score of 136–40. Each loss was worse than the one that preceded it. It started with a 39–20 loss to the Giants, then 42–10 the next year to the Redskins, and 55–10 two years later to the 49ers. His 98-yard drive in the final minutes of the 1986 AFC Championship Game in Cleveland, which became known as “The Drive,” sent the game into overtime, which the Broncos won. It might have been the greatest under-pressure drive in NFL history, but there would be no doubt about it if the Broncos had gone on to win the Super Bowl.

Reeves’s philosophy with those Broncos teams was to keep the score close until the fourth quarter and then ask Elway to win it. It worked in the AFC, the much weaker conference at the time. Reeves never gave Elway the defense that Elway gave Peyton Manning when Manning played the last four years of his career with the Broncos, and Reeves never gave him a running game. Elway resented Reeves as a person and his approach as a coach. Even though he was all but a one-man team in his first three Super Bowls, he was the face of the franchise and received a majority of the criticism.

It reached the point in Denver where Broncos fans were actually afraid of their team getting back to the Super Bowl. They almost preferred losing in an earlier round, or not making the play-offs at all, to being subjected to further humiliation.

Elway turned to his family for comfort. He wasn’t getting any from Reeves. After their first year or two, the Elway-Reeves relationship deteriorated. Elway resented that Reeves played conservatively for three quarters and then put the pressure on Elway to win the game, rather than turning him loose earlier. It would gradually get worse between Elway and Reeves, who in their final couple of years together came to believe that his quarterback and offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan were conspiring behind his back.

John was always close to his twin sister, Jana, who died of cancer in 2002 at the age of forty-two. He had his first wife, Janet, to lean on, although they later divorced in December 2003. But the one person who really understood what he was going through on the football field was his father, Jack.

“He was a support system for me, not so much on the field, but mentally and off the field,” John said. “He encouraged me to stay in there and keep working hard and try to put things behind you and keep the focus forward.”

Jack’s success at San José State led him to Stanford, John’s school, when he was hired as head coach in 1984, two seasons after his son left. Jack coached Stanford for five seasons before he was fired and finished up his coaching career with the Frankfurt Galaxy of the World League of American Football.

The Super Bowl losses were hard on John. “I always leaned on my father,” Elway said. “He was always that sounding board and especially because Dan and I didn’t get along very well a lot of the time.”

The three losses in the Super Bowl were hard on Jack as well. His son was getting blamed. Terry Bradshaw, a four-time Super Bowl champion, was critical of Elway. Of course, Bradshaw was surrounded by a team of future Hall of Famers when he won his championships. Elway never had that kind of talent around him in Denver. Through it all, John knew Jack would always be there to say the right thing.

“He was just as disappointed, if not more disappointed, than I was after the Super Bowl losses,” John said. “Having kids now, I know how disappointed I was when my kids have lost games.”

Jack Elway tried to help John work on his relationship with Reeves. It had turned into a nightmare, and at one point Reeves considered trading Elway to his friend Joe Gibbs in Washington. Elway was miserable playing for Reeves. Even though Marino was not having the same team success as Elway, he was putting up huge numbers playing for Don Shula. Elway looked at the records Marino was setting and could only dream about what he could do playing for a coach who let him be himself the entire four quarters rather than being ultraconservative for three quarters before putting it all on him.

If the ultimate goal is winning championships, then Shula failed Marino just as Reeves failed Elway. Marino made it to the Super Bowl in his second season in 1984, the year he set records with 48 touchdown passes and 5,084 yards passing. The Dolphins lost 38–16 to Joe Montana and the 49ers, and Marino never made it back to the Super Bowl in the final fifteen years of his career. Marino had the numbers. Elway had the Super Bowl appearances. They were both unfulfilled until Elway won two titles with Shanahan as his coach.

Jack Elway attempted to help John understand Reeves. Not from an Xs and Os standpoint but in how he was handling him. The Elways had been afraid of Kush, but now John was having issues with Reeves, a stubborn and old-fashioned coach who was a disciple of Tom Landry.

“He did give me the head coach’s viewpoint from the other side to try to help me understand,” John said.

What could Jack say after the three Super Bowls to make John feel better? The message was not to give up. “He would never let us quit anything,” Elway said. “If you start it, you’re going to finish it no matter what it was. He’d always say, ‘Be wise before you start something because if you start it, you’re going to finish it. Make sure you have good information before you start it and it’s something you want to do.’”

Elway never thought of quitting, even if there is nothing worse in football than losing the Super Bowl. One game, all or nothing; every mistake is magnified. The further a team advances in the NFL play-offs, the harder it is to accept defeat. Elway had to deal with three blowout losses.

Elway quit on one of his teams only once. He was wrestling in high school.

He went to his father and told him that he “couldn’t stand kids sweating on me,” he said.

Jack broke his own rule. He let his son off the hook.

“Just understand, this is the only time I’m ever going to let you quit anything,” he said.

That was Jack’s mentality. Start it. Finish it.

“Once we got through those three Super Bowl losses, they got more discouraging as they went on,” Elway said. “I was like, ‘Okay, we dug ourselves a hole.’ Now we’ve just got to figure out how to get to the next level and that’s to win one. His mentality was instead of looking backward about what went wrong, try to find a solution to make it right.”

Elway and the Broncos were 11-point underdogs to Brett Favre and the defending champion Packers when they met in Super Bowl XXXII in San Diego. By then, Elway was in his sixteenth season and was the sentimental favorite. The Broncos had last been in the Super Bowl eight years earlier. Elway had a crazy run for a first down in the third quarter—later named “the Helicopter” because he went flying after giving up his body—that set up a key Broncos touchdown.

Elway was helped in the final two minutes when Packers coach Mike Holmgren made a crucial miscalculation. He lost track of downs. The score was tied at 24 when Denver moved to a first-and-goal situation at the Green Bay 8-yard line with two minutes remaining. The Packers had two of their time-outs remaining.

On first down, Super Bowl MVP Terrell Davis ran 7 yards, but tight end Shannon Sharpe was called for holding. It sent Denver back to the 18. Davis then ran 17 yards to the 1, setting up second down. Holmgren thought Davis had picked up a first down, forgetting the penalty had made it first and goal from the 17 rather than first and 10 from the 17. He thought the Broncos, at the very least, would run down the clock and kick the game-winning field goal without allowing Brett Favre much time to send the game into overtime. He instructed the Green Bay defense to part like the Red Sea and allow Davis to score. In fact, if he was aware it was second down and not first down, he could have used his final time-outs after the second and the third downs and left Favre enough time to try to get the Packers into position for the tying field goal. Of course, that was all contingent on the Green Bay defense being able to keep the Broncos out of the end zone, which was unlikely but not impossible.

Holmgren’s strategy put the ball back into Favre’s hands at his own 30 with 1:39 remaining and two time-outs. He was able to advance the Packers to the Broncos’ 31 with 42 seconds left on the clock, but his fourth-down pass to Mark Chmura fell incomplete.

The Broncos offense came onto the field and Elway executed the sweetest kneel down of his career. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue handed the Lombardi Trophy to Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, who held the trophy in his hand and shouted, “This one’s for John!”

Elway was overcome with joy. He had finally won the big game. The critics, led by Terry Bradshaw, could keep quiet now. He had just beaten Favre, who by then was the best and most dangerous quarterback in the league. He had received a lot of help from Davis, who rushed for 157 yards and three touchdowns despite a debilitating migraine headache. The pain reached such unbearable levels that Davis was unable to see clearly and was at times put in as a decoy in the first half to occupy the Green Bay defense. He went into the locker room to take his migraine medication, and the extra minutes tacked onto halftime for the entertainment allowed the medication to work so he was able to come out and play the second half. Davis was the biggest difference between Elway’s losing his first three Super Bowls and finally winning in his fourth attempt. That game is a major reason Davis was elected in 2017 to join Elway in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

John Elway sought out his father, Jack, in the cramped Broncos locker room underneath the stands at the dilapidated Qualcomm Stadium. Equipment bags and shoulder pads and sweaty uniforms and an overflow crowd of media—the usual locker-room scene—made navigating hard, but John found his father and they shared a long embrace.

“Look, Dad. Finally. We finally got it done!” John said.

Jack Elway’s coaching career was over. He had been hired by the Broncos as a scout in 1993 and the next year became the director of pro scouting, having input into signing veteran free agents. They were able to share the moment and earn a Super Bowl ring. Knowing his father played a part in his first championship meant so much to Elway.

“It was worth the wait to be able to do it together,” John Elway said.

The Broncos won the Super Bowl again the following year, starting the season 14-0, threatening to be the first team to put together a 16-0 regular season. But John’s old friend Jim Fassel and the Giants beat the Broncos in a last-second thriller to give Denver its first loss. It was an injury-plagued season for Elway. All the bumps and bruises, the surgeries, the big hits, took their toll. He missed three games during the regular season. But he ended his career in style, throwing for 336 yards in the Broncos’ 34–19 victory over the Falcons. He was named Super Bowl MVP. Three months later, he announced his retirement.

Jack Elway died from a heart attack on April 15, 2001. He was no longer working full-time for the Broncos, but he sat in on draft meetings. John asked Shanahan if it would be okay if he was present for those meetings as well. He was out of football at the time, but observing the draft preparation would be helpful as he prepared for a career in the front office. He didn’t know at the time that it would be the last quality time he would ever spend with his father, who was only sixty-nine years old when he died. John cherished being with his father in those meetings until he passed away two weeks before the draft at his home in Palm Springs.

“I got to sit next to my dad every single day. I enjoyed that time,” John said. “We really got a chance to sit down and talk about personnel and evaluation. He was a very good personnel man. So I got a chance to hear some of his anecdotes about what he liked and what he didn’t like. When I was playing, it was so much about my career that we never ever had a chance to talk about football as a whole. I really started to pick his brain and get deeper into it, but then he passed away.”

John Elway became the CEO and part owner of the Colorado Crush of the Arena Football League in 2003. He was out of football again when the league folded after the 2008 season, but in 2011 Bowlen asked him to come back and run the Broncos as general manager and executive vice president of football operations. His first big move in 2012 was taking a chance on Peyton Manning, who had been released by the Colts after his fourth neck operation in two years. Manning picked the Broncos over the 49ers and Titans. Elway was one of the major reasons. Why? He did a great sales job from one quarterback to another. Elway convinced Manning that he would be able to surround him with a solid defense and quality skill-position players who would give him the best chance to succeed.

The Broncos made the play-offs all four years they had Manning. In his second season, Denver lost to Seattle 43–8 in Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a loss as humiliating as any of the three Elway suffered as a player. In the final game of Manning’s career, the Broncos beat the Panthers 24–10, in Super Bowl 50 (the only Super Bowl with an arabic number rather than a roman numeral). He was not nearly the player Elway was at the end of his career, but Elway’s shrewd personnel moves allowed Manning to go out a winner, just as Elway had done following Manning’s rookie year in 1998.

When the Broncos won the Super Bowl with Elway as the architect of the team, John held up the trophy and shouted, “This one’s for Pat!” as a tribute to Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s and unable to attend the game. Elway could have easily said, “And this one’s also for Dad.”

Elway thought of his father and how he would have felt about John’s winning a title as an executive. “I think he would have been as proud, if not even more proud, than when I was a player, just because the influence he had on me in this area was really more than he did as a football player,” Elway said. “Football was talent and the systems I was in, but this was more up his alley of what he did as a career coach and then being on the personnel side. I’m glad he held on for those Super Bowl wins. I just feel like I was so lucky to have him for as long as I had him.”

John thinks about Jack all the time. He misses him a lot. “What would Jack do?” John said. “I always think about what I could have learned from him. Also, I feel bad. I know he would have been my right-hand man, if he was still around, in the position I am in.”

Elway waited the minimum five years before he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2004. He was selected five years to the day after his final game. It hurt him deeply that Jana and Jack were both gone. “It puts life in perspective. We do the best we can,” he said. “The thing my sister always said, one of the last things she said to me, she just wanted to live.”

He spoke lovingly about his twin sister and about his dad at the induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio, on August 8, 2004.

“My dad wasn’t just my best friend, he was my hero, my mentor, and my inspiration. He was the keeper of my reality checklist, and the compass that guided my life and my career. And he taught me the number 1 lesson of my life: Always make your family proud. Now that he’s gone, I thank God every day for letting him see the Broncos win those two Super Bowls.

“My dad didn’t so much teach me how to play football, but why to play it. He taught me to compete, to never give up, to play every down like it’s your last. He taught me to appreciate the game, to respect it, to play it like it was meant to be played. He taught me to enjoy my successes and learn from my failures. And above all, he told me, ‘Make sure when you go out with your offensive linemen, you pick up the tab.’”

And propose a toast to his old man.