No Plan B

by Mark Kiszla

  So I will: The Rockies first baseman is a far superior athlete to Manning.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I was the high school player of the year in football in the state of Tennessee and went to college to play two sports,” said Helton, who turned down $450,000 to sign with the San Diego Padres out of high school. “But when I got to school, Heath Shuler was the quarterback. You remember Shuler, don’t you? He went in the first round of the draft to the Washington Redskins. So I knew what an NFL quarterback looked like. And I knew it didn’t look like me.”

  In the recorded history of great American multisport athletes, the legendary names that come readily to mind are Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, Bo Jackson . . . and Helton?

  Todd knows baseball. But football? Anybody have a scouting report on Helton as an NFL prospect?

  “Todd Helton,” former Vols coach Phillip Fulmer once joked to a crew filming an ESPN documentary, “was no more ready to go and be our quarterback than the man in the moon.”

  But, in the opening game of the 1994 season, looking for a quarterback to substitute after Tennessee starter Jerry Colquitt seriously injured a knee while running the football early in the game against UCLA, Fulmer looked up and down his bench in the Rose Bowl. He picked Helton over Manning.

  At the time, the choice seemed logical. Manning was an 18-year-old freshman, just hoping to get his face on the ABC broadcast long enough for friends back home to catch a glimpse of him. Although Helton had only nine passes on his college football resume, he was a junior. Furthermore, as a star slugger and relief pitcher on the Vols baseball team, Helton was used to walking cold into trouble of somebody else’s doing.

  Much to his parents’ amazement, Manning did get a shot to play against the Bruins, albeit briefly. ABC broadcaster Keith Jackson, who always sounded more like a college football Saturday than a brat sizzling on the grill, took a look at Archie’s kid warming up on the sideline and boomed: “There’s one pair of sweaty palms right there. That’s number 16, Peyton Manning.”

  Welcome to the big time, kid.

  Trotting onto one of the most famous football fields in America, Manning recalled paternal advice. The quarterback, especially a new quarterback, must take charge of the huddle.

  What happened next is a story Manning has enjoyed telling many times, a tale he shares because the punch line wallops him squarely between the eyes. We will use the version he relayed to Dan Patrick during an interview for ESPN the Magazine.

  “I don’t think I’m nervous, but all the hair on my arms is just sticking straight up,” Manning told Patrick. “We’re getting beat 21–0, I think. The team’s kind of down. Anyway, I’m jogging in and right then I remember old Dad’s pep talk.

  “So I get in there and say: ‘All right, guys, I know I’m just a freshman, but I can take you down the field right now and lead you to a touchdown.’ I’m fired up. And, this left tackle, Jason Layman, grabs me by the shoulders and says: “Peyton Freshman, shut the fuck up and call the fucking play!’ No lie.

  “I said: ‘Yes, sir.’ And called the play . . . and I didn’t say another word the whole season.”

  Three times, Manning took the snap. Three times, he handed off the ball for a running play. The Volunteers punted. Manning took a seat. Even stories with fairy-tale endings sometimes begin with a yawn.

  No dummy, Fulmer got Helton back in the Tennessee huddle before his freshman quarterback got run out of the stadium by his own teammates. It should be duly noted: Helton rallied the Vols for 23 points in the fourth quarter, ultimately completing 14 of 28 passes for 165 yards and a touchdown, in a narrow, two-point loss to UCLA. Not bad for a first baseman.

  During the fourth game of the ’94 season, however, as Tennessee fell out of the national rankings, Helton banged up his knee against Mississippi State. This time, Manning checked in the huddle again and never departed. This time, Manning did make it his football team. There were absolutely no hard feelings. Helton had other dreams, soon to be fulfilled by the Rockies making him the eighth overall selection in the first round of major-league baseball’s 1995 draft.

  With pride as vibrant as the orange worn by the Tennessee Volunteers, the friendship of Manning and Helton runs deep. But not quite as deep as a post pattern. In fact, the very fact that Helton and Manning keep it real between them explains why the first baseman had to quit the quarterback’s football team, before he got cut.

  “I can’t catch. Catch a football? No way,” Helton said. “Now, you give me a first baseman’s glove, and I can catch a baseball. But when [Manning] throws a football? That’s not for me. It hurts your hands too much.”

  After the spinal fusion surgery that forced Manning to miss his final season in Indianapolis and ultimately led to his release from the Colts, Manning went to work at Duke University with coach David Cutcliffe, the same coach who had recruited him to Tennessee long ago. The program Cutcliffe put together was a brilliant combination of 21st-century rehabilitation techniques and old-school woodshedding. All in the name of getting Manning’s act together. A handful of friends came down to North Carolina to help Manning find his groove.

  Among the private receiving corps was Helton. How does a middle-aged first baseman run a skinny post route?

  “Very slowly,” said Helton, chuckling at the memory.

  Manning, however, had no time to do anything slowly. He was in a hurry to get back in NFL shape. And Helton quickly felt the sting of the perfectionist that burns at 500 degrees in the belly of Manning.

  “Baseball is a totally different mind-set than football, and for good reason. I mean, in his sport, they’re trying to kill each other,” Helton said. “I was lost on a few of the routes. [Manning] tells you one time how to do it, and expects you to know what you’re doing. He kept calling for a check down. And I didn’t know where to go. I kept telling him: ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”

  In the most essential way, a pro locker room is no different than the one you knew in high school. Blood, sweat, and tears adhere stronger than Crazy Glue. Humor is the male defense mechanism to mask the underlying affection.

  “I didn’t know anybody when I got drafted to Indianapolis. And that wasn’t easy,” Manning said. “When I got to Denver, it was easier. Why? Because of Todd.”

  The wrinkles and the grays in the mirror are much easier to laugh at when you have a sidekick to help stare down your athletic mortality. Helton is the Sundance Kid to Manning’s Butch Cassidy. They hear the clock ticking. It’s all borrowed time and stolen memories now. But, as long as Manning and Helton are on the way out, they figure it might as well be in a blaze of glory.

  All summer long, Manning was a regular in the seats at Coors Field. “I probably went to a dozen Rockies games,” he said.

  And when the Broncos started playing at Sports Authority Field, who was sitting alongside Ashley Manning, as she cheered her husband? Helton. “I don’t think Todd missed one game,” the quarterback said.

  After a Denver victory, it would often be Manning and Helton, sitting around the dinner table, breaking bread, cracking up, sharing the aches and pains of growing old.

  “We’ve always had a good friendship,” Manning said. “But it obviously has been strengthened this year. And I really, really appreciate the value of a good friend.”

  In June 2011, Manning tentatively threw a football to Helton in the Rockies batting cage, a pass with so little oomph it crash-landed so pathetically into his old buddy’s arms that at first the first baseman thought it was a joke.

  In February 2013, the plan was for Helton to watch Manning throw a beautiful spiral for a touchdown at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. But, as comedian Woody Allen once said: “If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.” Yes, even if they are the best-laid plans of a Hall of Fame quarterback and stellar first baseman.

  That was Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis whooping and laughing as the Ravens wrecked the Super Bowl dream of Manning and his famous sidekick with a shocking 38–35 overtime loss
in the NFL playoffs.

  So, as the city of Denver cursed and moped, Butch and Sundance hightailed it out of town. Helton bought some ammunition, packed up the truck, and dragged Manning along to do some hunting on a cross-country road trip.

  The silence of a dawn hunt helps empty a guy’s noggin of any of the regrets rattling around in there.

  “He’s trying to get over it. I don’t know when that happens, or how,” said Archie Manning, who told the Associated Press that his son killed a duck in Colorado and a deer in Mississippi during a stretch of 24 hours.

  Picture this: Helton and Manning watching the birds fly, anticipating the perfect moment to squeeze the trigger.

  In fact, there is a photo of the first baseman and the quarterback standing together and grinning alongside a pickup, with the tailgate down, and truck bed ready to be stacked with dead ducks.

  If you cannot go get a Super Bowl ring, what is a man to do?

  Clean the rifle, grab a buddy, and go shoot dinner.

  Chapter 9

  Who’s in Charge?

  John Fox stopped the insanity.

  Shortly after sunrise on a summer morning shortly before one of Fox’s first preseason workouts as the Broncos’ new coach in 2011, I stood in grass still wet from the overnight sprinkling and asked a sleepy-eyed player: “What’s the biggest difference between training camp this year and when Josh McDaniels was in charge?”

  “Well,” the player said, a sly grin prefacing his answer, “I guess you could say we have an adult coaching the team now.”

  Everybody likes Uncle Foxy.

  The 14th head coach in Broncos history will not go down in NFL history as a great innovator in the mold of Paul Brown or as a towering sideline presence as intimidating as Vince Lombardi. In fact, anybody who thinks Fox knows X’s and O’s better than his predecessor, Josh McDaniels, is nuts.

  But coaching is about way more than drawing up a game plan. Pro football can be a stressful world defined by uncertainty and anxiety, from sudden-death overtime to nonguaranteed contracts. Fox has a gift. No matter how crazy it gets, Foxy exudes a simple thought as soothing as the chorus of a Bob Marley reggae song: “Don’t worry about a thing, cuz every little thing is gonna be all right.”

  Fox’s coaching mantra: Under-sell. Over-deliver.

  Get out of the way, and let whatever talent is inside a player shine, whether it is Tim Tebow running around like a headless chicken until he bumps into a miracle or Peyton Manning directing every detail as if all movements between the white lines are controlled by the Matrix.

  John Elway hired Fox in January 2011 for a reason. He was a silver Foxy, with gray in his hair, a coach well past his fiftieth birthday. No doubt, part of the appeal was Fox had been around the block, to the Super Bowl and back, from an apprenticeship he took with Pittsburgh Steelers icon Chuck Noll in 1989, to nine years running his own shop as head coach of the Carolina Panthers.

  Elway went counter to what had been a long-standing tradition in Denver, a city that had seen, from McDaniels to Mike Shanahan to Dan Reeves, more than its share of bright young offensive minds who brought to town no shortage of ideas or ego. Fox was not only a defensive coach, but downright avuncular. No, check that. After a lengthy meeting with Fox on the day he was introduced to Colorado, I walked away thinking of another coach with a homespun wit and a gentle touch: Jack Elway, father of the greatest player in Broncos history.

  Fox immediately fulfilled the number one purpose of his hiring. He returned the sanity to Dove Valley, after McDaniels drove everybody to distraction during his tumultuous stint of chaos, which was akin to being stuck on a roller coaster for 23 months.

  At Harmon’s Pub in Canton, the pigskin-obsessed Ohio town where a young McDaniels had thrown passes in a prep stadium across the street from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the friendly barkeep’s name is Matt Cunningham. He owns the joint, which is a perfect mix of Cleveland Indians games on TV, chicken wings so spicy they burn your lips, and sing-along anthems from Bon Jovi or Journey thumping through the sound system.

  A pal of McDaniels since childhood, Cunningham needed to ask a visitor from Denver a serious question. But the inquiry could wait. There was a drink to shake and shot glasses to fill with a diabolical combination of Captain Morgan, Coke, and Red Bull. This specialty of the house is called a Ric Flair, named in honor of the flamboyant pro wrestler, better known to his legion of fans as The Nature Boy.

  Why name a drink after Flair?

  Because after you throw back the shot, it makes you shout Nature Boy’s trademark catchphrase: “Woooo!”

  As soon as my head stopped spinning, Cunningham asked: “OK, why couldn’t McDaniels ever catch a break with Broncos fans? They would’ve liked Josh, if they got to know him.”

  There, in a nutshell, was the downfall of the McDaniels regime.

  Players never knew which McDaniels was going to show up to Dove Valley. A buddy who wanted to exchange fist bumps and play rap during the team stretch. Or the raving lunatic caught by NFL Network cameras during a victory over the New York Giants in 2009, dressing down his offense by shouting: “All we’re trying to do is win a mother-fucking game!”

  He was the baby-faced Kid McD, hired by the Broncos at age 33, looking like a mere child dressed up like an NFL coach for Halloween. McDaniels arrived in Denver from the New England Patriots, wearing his hoodie. He came off as a Bill Belichick wannabe.

  The real issue with McDaniels, however, was not arrogance, as often presumed by detractors who never took the time to get under the hoodie, where a whistle-twirling bundle of nervous energy hid behind his insecurities. McDaniels knew football, but did not know how to act as an NFL coach.

  “You react as your leader reacts,” former Broncos linebacker Mario Haggan once told me. “If your leader is a guy who’s out there cursing and making life hard, it trickles down to the players. If your leader is having fun and makes work fun in a way that coincides with what his players like to do, that shapes how his guys will be.”

  Fake anger or fake authority does not work in an NFL locker room. Pro football players can smell phony baloney from 100 yards away. McDaniels never let the Broncos, much less the team’s fans, see what was genuinely inside his heart for more than a few, fleeting seconds at a time. He never gave anybody in Denver a compelling reason or real chance to root for him.

  McDaniels could F-bomb a player straight to hell.

  Fox, on the other hand, has the uncanny knack of being able to make an F-bomb sound like he just let you in on a private joke, with him as the punch line.

  “You gotta love Foxy,” said Patrick Smyth, the team’s savvy executive director of media relations. “He’s a real beauty.”

  Maybe the real beauty of Foxy is this: In a voice as raspy dry as vodka shaken on the rocks, his coaching sneaks up on you. And the message goes down as smoothly as the contents of a $12 martini. Next thing you know, it seems as if his idea was yours in the first place.

  So it was by plan, not coincidence, that Fox placed the opening telephone call to Manning, on the very day the veteran quarterback was released by the Indianapolis Colts. There was no hard sell. Fox merely wanted Manning to know the Broncos would love to have him come out to Colorado for a visit, no rush, whenever the quarterback was good and ready.

  Is the picture coming into focus? Smooth as a $12 martini, with a twist, no olives.

  St. Patrick’s Day is the wedding anniversary of Peyton and Ashley Manning. On a Saturday morning, March 17, 2012, with NFL teams anxiously awaiting word from the free-agent quarterback and the Manning family facing one of the biggest decisions of their 11 years of marriage together, Fox texted a simple message to both the groom and his lovely bride: “Happy Anniversary.” This is the oldest trick in the recruiting playbook. Win the mother’s heart and the player will follow.

  A gentle tug on the heartstrings in the direction of Denver with happy anniversary wishes makes for a cute story, but the important question was adroitly asked by Sports Ill
ustrated pro football expert Peter King: Where did Foxy get Ashley Manning’s cell number? “Top secret,” Fox told King. “I recruited for 10 years in college. I was pretty good.”

  Beginning to understand? Smooth as a $12 martini, shaken, not stirred.

  But Foxy is seldom confused for Agent 007, as Manning gleefully told his teammates on the charter flight back from a road victory against Kansas City in November of the quarterback’s first season with the Broncos.

  With a comedic touch honed by his work on Saturday Night Live, Manning made a habit of grabbing the flight attendant’s microphone and giving a quick review of team performances during the 11-game win streak to close the regular season. According to one of my spies on the plane, Manning noted the Broncos beat the Chiefs 17–9, despite some intelligence provided by Foxy on Kansas City personnel that proved to be erroneous.

  “Nice work, James Bond,” Manning announced over the loudspeaker, as everybody in the traveling party laughed. And nobody thought it was funnier than Uncle Foxy.

  In a profession where many coaches act as if they invented the game, Fox is comfortable enough in his own skin to do what serves his team rather than his vanity.

  “My biggest advice for somebody who’s going to be a head coach would be: ‘Just be you. Don’t try to be somebody else.’ Most of us aren’t smart enough to be somebody else,” Fox said.

  After the Broncos opened with only a single victory in the opening five games during his debut season, Fox handed the keys to the offense to Tim Tebow in October 2011. Cynics suggested it was to show knucklehead fans the stupidity of their demand that Tebow get a shot. Balderdash, insisted Fox, who added that setting Tebow up to fail would have been akin to “buying a Ferrari and pouring sugar in the gas tank.”

  Undeterred by the knowledge that failure would make him the target of derision, Fox ripped up his playbook in the middle of the season for Tebow, then asked his players to turn back the clock 60 years and drop the forward pass like a bad habit. “Put in this offense and some quarterbacks in the league would look at you like you had three heads. Tebow feeds off it,” said Fox. His trust in Tebow was rewarded with an unlikely playoff berth, but only two votes in the 2011 NFL Coach of the Year balloting.