by Mark Kiszla
There is no hiding his conservative nature. Rival NFL coaches know it. As you might expect from the son of a U.S. Navy Seal, Fox carries out the mission. He rarely colors outside the lines of the game plan.
Here is a prime example: Leading New England 13–7 in the second quarter of a regular-season game in December 2011, Tebow scrambled inside the 10-yard line of the Patriots, setting up a fourth-down-and-one situation. The Broncos were flagged for holding on Tebow’s run. Rather than push back Denver with the penalty yardage, New England’s Belichick let the play stand, daring Fox to be bold and go for it on fourth down.
But, sure enough, Fox sent in the field goal unit, eschewing the opportunity to score an early knockout blow. A 26-yard chip shot by Matt Prater put the Broncos ahead 16–7. The Patriots would score 27 unanswered points. And Denver lost the game. It would be unfair to pin the defeat solely on Fox, especially on a day the Broncos’ defense was torched by quarterback Tom Brady. Fox’s conservative nature, however, allowed an ample window of opportunity for New England to climb back in the contest.
Yes, there is some fuddy-duddy in the Broncos coach. What else would anyone expect from Fox, whose coaching principles were nurtured at the hand of no-frills, no-fuss Noll? “You are what you eat,” Fox has often told me.
In an interview with Gary Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Fox revealed why he is a reasonable facsimile of Noll, detailing the attributes he admired in the Steelers coach: “I think he’s the greatest guy I’ve ever been around. [Noll] is very calm, very technique-oriented, very fundamental-oriented. He is not a screamer. He wasn’t up or down. I think the biggest thing is that he was the same guy every day. He was not an ego guy like, ‘Look what I’m doing.’ I thought he was a great mentor.”
When Manning decided to join forces with Fox in Denver, the move was blasted as a dumb business decision by MarketWatch, which screamed this headline: “Peyton Manning blew it by picking Broncos.” Columnist Jon Friedman insisted: “He should’ve signed instead with the San Francisco 49ers.” The reasons given were: (1) too many blizzards in Denver, (2) Broncos not contenders, (3) Tim Tebow backlash, and (4) Frank Gore carries the rock in San Francisco.
Which only goes to prove: Wall Street pundits are even worse at analyzing football than keeping your 401(k) out of harm’s way.
San Francisco’s Jim Harbaugh is a brilliant coach, maybe the best in the NFL. But he also is an arrogant, loudmouthed lout (not that there’s anything wrong with that). His type A personality and Manning’s obsessive perfection would have never peacefully coexisted.
Sometimes, it is hard to tell who is in charge of the Broncos. During games, nobody does more coaching on the Denver sideline than Manning. That is precisely why Fox was a much better choice for this particular quarterback than Harbaugh, whose demeanor from the opening kickoff to the final gun is half-man, half-Doberman.
“My impression of what’s most important for a football coach is: Can you get guys to play hard for you? There are different ways to do that,” Manning told Mike Klis of the Denver Post. “There are scare tactics, fear tactics where you’re scared if you don’t make this tackle they may cut you next week. That’s worked. I’ve had coaches where you just like them so much you don’t want to let them down. I’d say Fox is in that category. I think players really like him. He’s very fair to players. There’s no reason guys shouldn’t be going out there laying it on the line.”
Players break rocks for Harbaugh. Manning works in concert with Fox.
Foxy is far more concerned with winning than reminding everybody who is the boss.
“It’s all about winning. Football is only fun if you win.” said Fox, who wouldn’t dare think of coloring a single gray hair on his 57-year-old head to make himself look like somebody he is not.
Everybody at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters can read and understand the organizational chart. But, just as Elway learned the painful way with Dan Reeves, it gives a team a better shot at the fun that accompanies winning if a veteran quarterback and an experienced coach can both shelve the egos and work as peers, rather than wrestle over power.
“Peyton is a great player, there’s no argument to that. But he’s also a guy who wants to be coached and wants to do it the right way,” Fox said. “He has one Super Bowl ring, so he has an understanding of how it gets done. That allows a great understanding between us, as coach and quarterback. Because, you know, this isn’t my first rodeo, either.”
Maybe it was Elway’s charisma, or the common bond between Hall of Fame quarterbacks, that initially attracted Manning to Denver. But contrary to the analysts who cavalierly treated this decision like a fantasy football transaction rather than drilling down to inspect the core issues of an effective business relationship, Manning did not blow it by choosing the Broncos over San Francisco or Tennessee. Why? Give credit to Foxy. The way he does business works for Manning.
“Everybody has got his own way of coaching. And there are a lot of ways to have success coaching,” Fox said. “Me? I’m comfortable with empowering players to lead the team.”
Beneath his aw-shucks veneer, however, Foxy is fiercely competitive. Suggest he might rank more at the middle of the pack among the NFL’s 32 head coaches rather than at the top alongside Harbaugh or Belichick and Fox will retort: “When you’re one of 32, or whatever, in this profession, I think everybody’s pretty much gold standard.”
During training camp, when some knucklehead suggested in the pages of the Denver Post that the Broncos’ defensive personnel were more suited to a three-down lineman and four-linebacker alignment than the defense Fox was employing, he shot down the criticism with a joke.
“Did Vince Lombardi come back and write that?” Fox asked, knowing full well the column was penned by me. Fox playfully stuck the needle in my funny bone, when other NFL coaches might have angrily gone for the jugular.
With a laugh, Fox added: “I think everybody’s entitled to their opinions, but I think we have some fairly proven minds on our staff. We appreciate the suggestions. But I think we might know a little bit more.”
Uncle Foxy gives the impression that when he turns out the lights at Dove Valley, he goes home, puts a chew between his cheek and gum and commences to whittle. The reality? He is a reader. Books. Serious books. Lone Survivor, the tale of one U.S. military hero who escaped alive from a bloody battle on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is definitely not a page-turner for the fainthearted, but it fully engaged the mind of Fox.
Although raised in a military family, Fox seldom shakes an iron fist. He does, however, firmly believe that once men pull on uniforms, they are all equals.
It was that guiding principle that led Fox to a rather unorthodox way of holding his players accountable. When the Broncos watched video of their games during 2012, coaches were not present. Placing trust in veteran leaders such as Manning and cornerback Champ Bailey, players switched off the lights in the meeting room, turned on the tape, and corrected their own mistakes.
“We watch the game film together, just the players. Coaches aren’t in there,” Manning said. “It’s each player’s job to speak up on what he did wrong.”
Players in charge? Really? Can you imagine McDaniels allowing that to happen?
In the NFL, which has the reputation of being as flexible as a straitjacket, the idea sounds almost as wacky as putting Jack Nicholson in charge of the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it is simpler than you think, Chief. This crazy notion was thoroughly thought out before Fox implemented it.
“A very common thing in the military is debriefing. They spend a lot of time in the preparation of their mission, then they debrief. It’s a process that’s rankless. What your name is doesn’t matter,” Fox said.
“One of the dysfunctional aspects of any football team can be unhealthy conflict, or even the fear of conflict. Now, I know conflict can be a rough word that scares some people. But, if you’re going to win in this business, guys have to own up to their errors.”
Bailey blows
a coverage? He hears about it. Tackle Ryan Clady misses an assignment? His Pro Bowl pedigree gets zero credit from his peers.
“Everybody is held accountable, from the top to the bottom. We take our stripes off in the defensive meeting room, and we go after each other,” Broncos linebacker Wesley Woodyard said.
There is one adage respected by all who wear an NFL uniform: The eye in the sky does not lie. The All-22 videotape of a football game sees all, knows all, and reveals all. Oh, Fox and his staff dissect the film. They hand grade sheets to the players.
Then, however, old Uncle Foxy departs the meeting room and leaves his conservatism at the door.
“We, as coaches, trust our players to take ownership of getting better. In the end, this is their team,” Fox said.
“It sounds simple, like a lot of things in football do. But it’s not easy. Nothing in the NFL is easy.”
Chapter 10
Signed with Respect
Let’s go for a ride on the way-back time machine, rewinding the years at warp speed to 1997. We take this trip as a reminder of how quickly lives can be turned upside down. The world spins so fast, it can be hard to hang on, let alone keep pace with all the changes.
With a crazy notion that people would buy a hybrid automobile, Toyota gave birth to the Prius in 1997. Princess Diana died in a car accident, and a worldwide television audience of two billion grieved during her funeral. Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO of a quirky but struggling company, in the hope he could save Apple Computer from financial doom. In a college football preview issue published August 18, 1997, the Sporting News adorned its cover with a photograph of the quarterback for their preseason number one team, a superb athlete named . . .
John Hessler, quarterback of the Colorado Buffaloes.
“Yeah,” said Hessler, as he slid a copy of the old Sporting News from ’97 across a table. “But I want you to open up this magazine and see the story of another college quarterback who wasn’t on the cover. Tell me his name.”
Peyton Manning.
“Just one of the guys” was the headline on the Manning feature, written by David Climer, whose portrait of the University of Tennessee senior holds up remarkably well 16 years later. As I read a handful of paragraphs aloud, Hessler suppressed a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin in his seat across from me in a suburban Denver restaurant.
“For three years, Manning didn’t have time to find the roses, much less stop and smell them. He ran from classroom to football field to speaking engagement to the library,” I said, reciting the words on page S-8 of the 16-year-old magazine, its pages beginning to turn yellow with age. “[Manning] now has learned the fine art of the post-lunch nap, which, come to think of it, is something normally mastered by the greenest of freshman instead of the orangest of seniors.”
Hessler laughed out loud. “I know one thing: I was way better at naps than Manning. Way better,” said Hessler, now 38 years old and a Northglenn resident, living in a cozy house a stone’s throw away from Interstate 25. “Remember what they called me? Mad Magazine. Friends started calling me that long before I got to CU, because I looked like Alfred E. Neuman. What! Me worry?”
But, in 1997, Mr. Mad Magazine made the cover of one of America’s most-respected sports publications. Ranking every major football program in the land, the Sporting News predicted the Buffaloes to be number one. Dead last in the preseason rankings was a football school that seemed doomed to be famous for little else besides potatoes and a home field covered with blue Smurf turf: Boise State.
The story celebrating the nation’s top-ranked team was written by Terry Frei, who focused on Rick Neuheisel, building a name for himself with his rock ’n’ roll spirit, his great offensive mind, and his lack of patience with slackers who cruised through life like Alfred E. Neuman.
“While working with quarterbacks, Neuheisel is like a perfectionist music professor who wants to make his pupils into prodigies and blows his stack when pupils don’t share his obsession,” wrote Frei, nailing the personality of one of the rising stars in the coaching game during the 1990s. “Last fall, Neuheisel was irate when Hessler—who was solid as a ’95 fill-in for [Koy] Detmer—couldn’t seem to get his brain out of low gear. When Hessler was oblivious to the slight adjustments, Neuheisel exploded in practice.”
The big bang theory was built on matter and antimatter. Well, here are two theories about building a football team. Get yourself a quarterback as obsessive as Manning, where every detail matters. Or find a QB who forgets about the dangers and thinks of the fun. Hessler was the anti-Manning.
Hessler, a coach on the field? Not exactly. But Hessler could have taught Manning a thing or two about not sweating the small stuff. Maybe he could never read a defensive alignment with the instant recognition that Manning did, but Hessler had the 20/20 vision to see life is good, even when a coach is spewing venom in your face. “Nobody could make Coach Neuheisel yell like I did. Nobody,” said Hessler, with a mischievously twisted sense of pride. “Know what? Most of the time, I deserved it. But every word that Coach Neu shouted at me? It was love. Pure love.”
You don’t have to be a weatherman to know: Tomorrow pays no heed to predictions.
Manning led Tennessee to 11 victories in 1997, including a scrapbook-worthy comeback from 13 points down to beat Auburn 30–29 in the Southeastern Conference championship game that earned the Vols a berth in the Orange Bowl. The trophy case haul for Manning included the Maxwell Award, the Davey O’Brien Award and a second-place finish behind Michigan cornerback Charles Woodson in the Heisman Trophy balloting.
On his way to the Heisman ceremony in New York, Manning stopped by the set of Late Night with David Letterman. He threw a perfect spiral across 53rd Street into an open second-story window on a dare by Letterman, and joked about having a bursa sac injury checked out in Manhattan. “It was the same doctor you went to eight years ago,” Manning told Letterman, “for your knee, I think.” Amazed and amused at the depth to which a college senior had studied the comedian’s biography in preparation for the show, Letterman cackled and quipped: “The kid’s got writers.”
In fact, Manning might have taken home the Heisman as a souvenir from that trip to New York, if not for Hessler. During Michigan’s season-opener, Woodson started the last successful campaign by a defensive player to win college football’s biggest prize. What was Woodson’s first Heisman moment? Leaping high to intercept a pass underthrown by Colorado’s senior quarterback. The Wolverines won the game 27–3. CU’s national championship designs were shattered. And the Buffaloes never figured out how to put the pieces back together again. Colorado finished with a disappointing 5-6 record, when a gritty fourth-quarter rally against Nebraska led by Hessler fell three points short of redemption.
“Wanna know the truth? My head was never right all season long,” Hessler told me. Hidden from the headlines was the real nitty-gritty of why Hessler was so distracted. On November 4, three days after the Buffaloes lost to Missouri in Boulder, Hessler became the father to a son, a child born out of wedlock. “Being a dad is a blessing,” Hessler confessed, “but at the time, I was a mess.”
Manning had no such drama. He was the first player taken in the 1998 draft, by Indianapolis.
Hessler began the same odyssey experienced by many young men fresh out of college, with no map for the rest of life. Hessler chased dreams on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, briefly playing quarterback for vino and pizza in Europe. He also spectacularly failed in an attempt to get back together with his true sports love, as a minor-leaguer with the Colorado Rockies baseball organization. “Lost my fastball while playing quarterback in college. And I never did find it,” Hessler said.
His glory days had passed Hessler by. Early in his college career, after Hessler had come off the bench to rally the Buffaloes to victory against third-ranked Texas, Neuheisel proclaimed: “John Hessler is going to go down in Colorado football history as the Comeback Kid.”
Little did Neuheisel know how prophetic those words w
ould ultimately be.
Settled in a thoroughly adult routine as a seventh-grade social studies teacher and an assistant football coach at Regis Jesuit High School, Hessler was driving down Highway 76 near Denver in October 2003 when he got blindsided by a hit that nearly killed him. A Chevy Blazer clipped Hessler’s Honda Accord, sending him careening across the median and into the path of a pickup truck. The driver of the SUV stepped on the gas, ran like a coward, and has never been caught.
Hessler was lucky to get to the hospital alive. He slipped into a coma that lasted 33 days. “There was a time when the doctors gave me 24 hours to live. Do you believe it? That’s one thing that blows my mind,” Hessler said.
His weight dropped to 143 pounds. A titanium plate was used to patch his skull. Hessler felt trapped inside his broken body. A quarterback who once threw two touchdown passes in the Cotton Bowl was told extremely depressing news: Relearning to walk would take years.
Why get out of bed and out of the house, if there was no place to go, no job waiting, no real hope? Hessler stopped dreaming. He forgot how. At one point, there was a do-not-resuscitate order taped to his refrigerator door. He cursed God and cried. “We’re not talking little tears,” Hessler said. “I was flat-out bawling, crying so hard to the point where I couldn’t breathe.”
Nearly a decade after being left for dead at the side of the road, a guy who never sweated the small details still has difficulty getting the trivial details of life to stick in his brain, a lingering effect of the accident. For example: Regardless of how many times Hessler visits his favorite neighborhood lunch spot, he never recalls whether or not flavored ice tea is on the menu, and checks each visit with the waitress, as if asking for the first time.