No Plan B

by Mark Kiszla

  When Elway stubbornly withheld unconditional praise as the Broncos made an unlikely run to the playoffs, The Tower of Tebow babbled that the aging legend had to be insanely jealous of his Bible-quoting quarterback, who also made miracles happen on the field when all looked lost with Kyle Orton unable to get the offense moving at the outset of the 2011 season.

  “Elway doesn’t like the fact his star has been eclipsed by this young punk Tebow,” theorized Fred Coolidge, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs and, it should be duly noted, a proud Florida Gators alum. “At some level, he is jealous of Tebow. Elway believes there should be no football gods before him. I think this whole thing is very Freudian. This is called an Oedipal conflict. Freud said all little boys naturally fight with their father. The Oedipal conflict can be exacerbated, especially if the son is bigger than the father.”

  The theory was balderdash. But it was balderdash eaten up by Tebow disciples.

  Oedipal conflict? Nothing could have been further from reality.

  It was doubt, rather than envy, that gnawed at Elway every time he watched number 15 play, even as Tebow ended six long years without a Denver playoff victory when his 80-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas in overtime beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 29–23 on January 8, 2012.

  Elway feared being surpassed by Tebow as the greatest player in Broncos history? No way. No how. To blind supporters of Tebow, the real truth was a slap in the face they never saw coming. So long as Tebow was quarterback in Denver, Elway had little faith the Broncos could ever win another NFL championship.

  With Tebow, a creative offensive coordinator, and a stout defense, maybe the Broncos could have expected 10-6 records year after year. Elway’s aspirations, however, were loftier than operating a B-plus football operation.

  As fall turned to winter in 2012, and the legend of Tebow grew. His you-gotta-be-kidding exploits ranged from the absurd, finding a way to win in Kansas City despite completing only two passes, to the sublime, with a 149.3 quarterback rating that allowed him to overcome an eight-point, fourth-quarter deficit in Minnesota, I could never shake one image of Elway. It was a grimace. Elway gave me the look on a 77-degree afternoon in South Florida on the late October day that Tebow celebrated his first start after taking over for Orton, returning to his old stomping grounds to stomp, bully, and will his way past the Miami Dolphins for an 18–15 overtime victory built on true grit.

  In the tunnel of Sun Life Stadium after the game, as Elway walked to the team bus, he stopped in his tracks to chew on a question. I asked Old No. 7 if something about Tebow’s refusal to lose reminded Elway of himself back in the day. The competitive spirit in Elway rose up and flashed a moment of irritation across his face. It was one breathtaking comeback win by Tebow, to be sure. But it was only one win. Elway said: “Let’s not get carried away.”

  That was the thing. Elway never got carried away on the giddy wave of Tebowmania. The analysis was based on his core principles. When one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game is the architect of your franchise, I will give you one guess what position the Broncos regarded as essential for success.

  “The key thing for every NFL team, and I believe this whole-heartedly, is you need a quarterback,” said Elway, who knows full well which way the rules are tilted in today’s pro game. “A great quarterback makes up for so many other voids on your football team, because you’ve got that guy who touches the ball on every snap. And, if you don’t have that guy, the weaknesses are more exposed.”

  Elway, however, did not enter this deal blindly, without regard to the wallet of Bowlen. The $96 million in the contract offered Manning made eyes bulge. But only the first season was guaranteed money. And know what? That was the way Manning wanted it.

  During the recruitment process, as he crisscrossed the country, Manning made a conscious effort to avoid conversations with his financial advisors. He wanted the decision to be based on football. The final details of the document signed with the Broncos revealed the depths of Manning’s integrity. If betting on his full return to health was a gamble, he wanted to share the risk.

  “They’ve got to be protected. That’s why with the whole medical situation I was as open book as I could be. I told them exactly how I feel, what I was working on. They have to know everything to make their decision,” said Manning, in a private moment of reflection after the television camera lights were turned off.

  When it came time to talk money with the Broncos, Manning actually negotiated against himself.

  “Even today, at the last minute, I said: ‘John, put it the way you want it in the contract.’ He and I talked about that from the get-go, on that first visit. You don’t start off on a bad foot,” Manning said. “I kind of argued with them a little bit . . . on their side. Nobody believes you when you say that. But it’s got to be what they’re comfortable with.”

  Sealed with mutual trust, here was the deal:

  In 2012, Manning would be paid $18 million, no matter how many snaps he took.

  Before $20 million salaries for both the 2013 and 2014 seasons kicked in, however, Manning would need to show his neck was physically sound.

  The final $38 million of the contract, to be paid evenly in 2015 and 2016, came with no guarantees. In other words: Manning had a burning desire to show he was worth every last penny through his very last play for the Broncos.

  “I don’t consider it much of a risk, knowing Peyton Manning and his willingness to tell us everything,” Elway said.

  The negotiation really came down to a single question.

  Elway: “Can you be the Peyton Manning of old?”

  Manning: “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  Draw up the paperwork. Break out a pen. Where do we sign?

  Manning could look Elway in the eye as a peer. Elway was never going to see Tebow as anything more than a project. Football, like the rest of life, is built on relationships.

  “This is sort of a historic meeting,” said Bowlen, understanding full well that most NFL owners feel blessed by one Elway or one Manning in a football lifetime. “We’re glad to have two Hall of Fame quarterbacks. Our goal here has always been to win Super Bowls. Peyton gives us another chance to win a world championship.”

  And, at age 67, what more can any owner, in any business, want other than to feel he is still a major player in the game?

  On the day the Broncos signed a four-time league MVP to be their quarterback, Elway stood in a hallway of the team’s Dove Valley headquarters and dug deep, searching for words to express his genuine gratitude for Tebow. But, in the process, Elway also gave the coldest, most direct scouting report ever filed on Tebow as an NFL quarterback:

  “Tim Tebow is a great kid,” Elway said. “If I want someone to marry my daughter, it would be him.”

  Elway was not in the market for a son-in-law. That is why Tebow had to go. He was an inspiration, a winner, and a role model beyond reproach. But Tebow was no NFL quarterback.

  When looking for a new team, Manning did not join the Broncos over the 49ers or the Titans to finish second. A slow fade to retirement is not his style. Before putting his signature on a five-year contract with few financial guarantees, he set his jaw with rock-hard determination and flat-out told me that his intention was not only to win a Super Bowl in Denver, but to make a habit of collecting championship rings with the Broncos.

  “Three or four would be great. I’d like to win as many as we can. That’s the goal: to win. There’s always that debate every year. If you don’t win the Super Bowl, is it a complete failure?” Manning said.

  “Knowing I don’t have 15 years to play football, there is a sense of urgency to win championships.”

  There was no time to waste. There would be no excuses for failure. There could be no looking back.

  No Plan B.

  Chapter 3

  Riddle Me This

  Jabber, jabber, jabber.

  This young’un would not shut
up. As the car rolled down the highway, across the state of Mississippi, an eight-year-old Peyton Manning clicked off questions as quickly and endlessly as the mile posts whizzing by outside the window.

  “From a young age, Peyton was very driven. It was so intense, I don’t even know where it came from,” said legendary Archie Manning, wrapping his 63-year-old bones in the warm fuzzies of a happy Denver locker room during the Broncos’ eleven-game winning streak of 2012.

  “I’m telling you, Peyton was never fast. He could not have won a foot race on the grade-school playground. I don’t want to say he wasn’t athletic, because that sounds bad. But his feet weren’t very good. Well, I can say this: He did have size. He was always tall. And had a natural throwing motion. But here is what Peyton understood from the start: It was going to take hard work for him to be any kind of quarterback. And he used to ask a lot of questions. A whole lot of questions.”

  Archie Manning worked in New Orleans, as quarterback for the Saints. But he grew up in the old plantation country of Sunflower County, Mississippi. Olivia, who gave him three handsome sons, was raised in Philadelphia, another tiny Deep South town that was famous for being a battleground in the civil rights movement long before giving birth to the legend of Marcus Dupree, who scored 87 touchdowns for the local high school. Mr. and Mrs. Manning both attended Ole Miss, in Oxford.

  So there was always a Sunday dinner or a speaking engagement or some such waiting for the longtime Saints star in Mississippi. From the time he was knee high to a grasshopper, young Peyton, the middle child of three, loved to tag along on the road trips. He would ride shotgun with his father as they drove three or four hours out of New Orleans. Dad never got a chance to sit back and listen to the radio. Every second of dead air was filled with questions from Peyton. Football questions. As the kid grew older, the car became a mobile course in advanced quarterbacking theory.

  “Oh, there were so many questions. So many. Peyton used to ask me, ‘OK, now let’s go over the two-minute drill. What do I need to remember in the two-minute drill?’ And then it was ‘How do you check down against the blitz?” And then it was something else. Always something else. It never stopped,” recalled Archie Manning with a sigh of bemusement, as if he was still weary from a 30-year-old memory of his eardrums being worn thin by Peyton’s curiosity.

  “He used to ask so many questions, I started calling him The Riddler.”

  Batman debuted on the ABC-TV Network in 1966, when Archie Manning was a junior at Drew High School. The first episode was entitled “Hi Diddle Riddle.” The television show’s first guest villain was Frank Gorshin as The Riddler.

  It obviously made an impression on Archie. How could it not? The theme song, the Bam! graphics and the catchphrases from Batman became etched in the brain of every child of the ’60s.

  “Riddle me this!” demanded the Riddler, whose favorite suit was green and adorned with question marks.

  The riddles, inspired by a mix of felonious mayhem and criminally bad puns, required the Caped Crusader to retreat to the Batcave for computer analysis.

  “When’s the time of a clock like a whistle of a train?” Batman would ask pensively, as if the answer might hold the key to the universe.

  And with the unbridled enthusiasm of a teacher’s pet, Robin would reply: “When it’s two to two. Tootootoo!”

  Hey, they didn’t call him the Boy Wonder for nothing.

  Is a boy born to greatness? But being born with a predisposition for throwing a spiral does not ensure you will die with Super Bowl rings and a Hall of Fame plaque to your name.

  Peyton and Eli Manning are brothers, the sons of the ultimate Ole Miss Rebel and a homecoming queen. “People always said our boys were born to be NFL quarterbacks,” Archie Manning told me. “But, to be honest, that idea always scared me a little. I never wanted to be that Little League Dad who irritated everybody. Raise an NFL quarterback? All my Olivia and I were trying to do as parents were raise good young men.”

  Being blessed in the deep, rich end of the gene pool did not guarantee the number one spot on an NFL depth chart.

  We all fear the unknown. From a young age, Peyton Manning learned to take charge of an uncertain situation by exhausting his anxiety under the weight of relentless questions. If he had not grown up to be a quarterback, Manning would have been a district attorney worthy of a John Grisham novel. The answers provided Manning with the tools to solve any riddle.

  “When I first got to know Peyton, he was a tall, thin, pimple-faced college freshman. Little did you think that one day he would be a Super Bowl MVP,” Dan Carlson told me after one of Manning’s early spring practices with the Broncos.

  During the 1990s, Carlson began a long career at the University of Tennessee working as a graduate assistant in the football office. One of his first tasks on the job was organizing a recruiting visit by a promising class of prospects for coach Phil Fulmer. Who stood out in the group of teenage athletes? A string-bean teen from New Orleans with a famous football name.

  But it did not take long for Manning to convince Carlson that this quarterback was much more than Archie’s kid. If he was born with a silver spoon, Manning was using it to dig in and get ready to win.

  “He came in with questions for the football staff. He really grilled them,” Carlson recalled, the memory of a young Manning’s audacity causing laughter. “He wasn’t coming in to Knoxville just to take in the sights. He had a list of things he wanted to know. Imagine that for a high school senior.”

  To this day, Manning does command the room with a sly know-it-all smirk. But here is the refreshing part. There is a childlike sense of wonder about Manning, a quest for knowledge that never grows old. Facts are like ice cream. He still greedily devours every last spoonful of information.

  After nearly 36 years of asking and jabbering and inquiring some more, Archie’s kid rolled down the highway from Indianapolis to Denver to become the Broncos’ new quarterback. Manning was all grown up, but his infinite curiosity showed zero signs of abating.

  Manning immersed himself in the team’s offensive terminology. He asked receivers to improve their speed reads of defensive coverages. He challenged coaches to stuff as much information as possible in the game plan.

  Does Manning ever run out of questions?

  “That,” Broncos assistant Adam Gase replied, “would be a firm ‘No.’”

  As the team’s quarterbacks coach in 2012, Gase walked into every meeting with Manning as if there were going to be a pop quiz. And the answers often required the perception to read between the lines of X’s and O’s in the Broncos playbook.

  “His questions are always productive and great questions. When he asks questions, you’re sitting there going, ‘Gosh, that’s a great question.’ You’re sitting there thinking, and you almost want to say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? That’s a great question to ask.’”

  “You’ve got to find answers. And, if you don’t know the answers that second, you better go investigate and find out.”

  OK, riddle me this:

  Where on earth did the Broncos find the inspiration to think a broken-down quarterback, unwanted by the Indianapolis Colts, was the answer to their Super Bowl problem?

  For centuries, the purple mountain majesty of the Rocky Mountains has inspired moments of 1,000-mile clarity for artists, from western frontier painter Albert Bierstadt to pop musician John Denver, who sat around the campfire, with everybody high, singing about it raining fire in the sky.

  In a state with 53 peaks that tower more than 14,000 feet above sea level, it is not hard to get a natural high. The fourteener straight west of Denver that serves as the city’s backdrop is Mount Evans. Mount Evans is the centerpiece of a stunning view out the windows of the executive offices on the second floor at the Broncos’ Dove Valley Headquarters.

  Mount Evans was not always Mount Evans. Way back in 1863, Bierstadt hopped a crude wagon alongside journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow and took a rocky ride to Idaho Springs, in sea
rch of an alpine vista fit for framing. The painter found his inspiration while traveling up Chicago Creek, where Bierstadt was awestruck by the natural beauty of a yet unnamed peak standing tall among gray, threatening storm clouds.

  Ludlow, his companion on the trip, was notable for two reasons: (1) the publication of an autobiographical book extremely provocative in the 1800s, because it was titled “The Hashish Eater” and detailed experimentation with cannabis extract, and (2) his hot young wife, a society woman named Rosalie Osborne, who had definitely caught the wandering, artful eye of Bierstadt.

  With every masterstroke of his brush, Bierstadt revealed the turbulent, covetous, adulterous emotions roiling inside his heart. Bierstadt called the resulting painting: “A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie,” thus christening a 14,000-foot peak in the name of a married woman he secretly desired.

  By 1866, that cad Bierstadt had wooed Rosalie away from Ludlow. “In 1895,” according to Denver art historian Tam O’Neill, “the Colorado legislature decided that the majestic peak should not be named for a scandalous divorced woman, and so changed the name to Mount Evans, honoring John Evans, the second territorial governor of the state.”

  In 2012, the inspirational powers of the peak formerly known as Mount Rosalie were again messing with affairs of the heart. In fact, you could blame the same mountain for causing the Broncos to cheat on Tim Tebow and dump him for a more attractive quarterback.

  The man in the Broncos organization to first propose the bold masterstroke of bringing Manning to Denver never scored a touchdown in the NFL and was not classically trained in football. But a brilliant idea can come from anywhere. The wild-and-crazy notion that Manning could lead the Broncos back to the Super Bowl was originally uttered by Joe Ellis.

  Ellis, a 1980 graduate of Colorado College, is the franchise president. His areas of expertise are wide-ranging, from fiscal planning to marketing to stadium development. But watching football videotape? Not so much.