by Mark Kiszla
Cheba Hut Toasted Subs, a chain of sandwich shops in Colorado that proudly advertises itself as “Home of the Blunts,” offered Miller free subs for life. You know, like, in case he got the munchies, man. “We got some great response on that one,” shop owner Matt Clark-Johnson told the Post. “We’re getting from, ‘Why would you give a millionaire free sandwiches for life?’ to ‘Who cares?’”
Should the NFL care if players smoke marijuana? More than one retired NFL player has told me weed is more of a healthy choice than potentially addictive painkillers often prescribed to athletes dealing with chronic injury in a violent game.
Miller joined the ranks of fellow Americans from Barack Obama to swimmer Michael Phelps and singer Willie Nelson alleged to enjoy a puff of marijuana. If you ask me, it should be none of the league’s business who smokes weed, which has never been mistaken for a performance-enhancing drug. All football fans really care about is: Will the gridiron warrior make big plays on Sunday?
An annual Denver tradition on the eve of training camp is a barbecue. Reporters munch on sandwiches and coleslaw in a big tent at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters. The Broncos whet everyone’s appetite for the season ahead, as coach John Fox and star players meet the well-fed press and talk a little football before the serious blocking and tackling begin.
At the luncheon, everybody on the team is usually loose and full of optimism. Not this year. The tent was filled with tension as soon as Miller walked in. The media was there to barbecue his butt. It did not take long for the heat to be turned up on Miller.
“Is marijuana part of your life?” asked Darren McKee, co-host of “The Drive,” the popular afternoon sports talk show on 104.3 FM in Denver.
“Absolutely not,” Miller replied.
The all-star linebacker was full of bravado and seemed supremely confident that a looming four-game suspension would be reduced or thrown out on appeal. Miller proved to be dead wrong. As the league gathered more evidence, things only got worse for the Broncos. In the end, Miller’s suspension was increased to six games.
So here was the tough question: Entering the season with a hefty salary of $2.28 million, would Miller be worth a nickel to the team’s championship chase?
Absolutely not. After guaranteeing the Broncos would win the Super Bowl, Miller proved to be nearly worthless in the quest.
In late August, I asked Miller if he had damaged his relationship with Denver fans.
“True Bronco fans, they have been great, coming out to practice, still believing in the guy that I am. The media, they’ll do some crazy stuff to you and paint a different picture,” Miller replied. “But the fans know me for laying it out on the field, being a great teammate. . . .”
That was a big, stinking pile of denial. Miller is beloved by teammates, but he acted like a dope. When any player, whether he’s an All-Pro linebacker or a special-teams scrub, gets kicked out of the league for six games, it’s the opposite of being a great teammate. The absence of Miller from the Denver lineup would be a one-point detriment in every game he missed, according to Las Vegas sports analyst Todd Fuhrman.
The Broncos, however, opened the season with six straight victories without Miller. He played in nine games, recording a disappointing five sacks, before suffering the bad luck of ripping up his knee during a game against Houston in December, which forced Miller to watch the team’s playoff run from the sideline.
“Next man up!” became the unending mantra, the rallying cry and the answered prayer of the Broncos. While lauded for the twinkle-toed, high-scoring talent that allowed Denver to sweep its two-game, regular-season series against Kansas City to finish first in the AFC West, the raw courage this team displayed in gutting through tough times was overlooked.
“This whole business is coming up with a Plan B and sometimes a Plan C,” Fox said. As Fox often liked to quip, his Broncos went through a lot more “stuff” than the typical championship contender.
Pro Bowl tackle Ryan Clady never played a down in 2013. He was lost to a Lisfranc injury to his left foot, yet a patchwork orange offensive line somehow kept quarterback Peyton Manning from being sacked no more than 18 times during the regular season.
Rahim Moore rewarded the faith coaches kept in him after his playoff blunder against Baltimore, playing well at safety until he awoke in the middle of a November night, only hours after a rousing 27–17 victory against Kansas City. Moore was stricken by what alert doctors quickly diagnosed as lateral compartment syndrome, a rare blood disorder that could have cost him a limb in addition to the remainder of a promising season after emergency leg-saving surgery.
Denver’s defensive line was blown apart by Kevin Vickerson’s dislocated hip and mysterious seizures that plagued Derek Wolfe. Heck, it seemed as if the run of bad luck never took a day off, even when the Broncos were supposed to be relaxing.
Knocked to his knees and unable to breathe on the 14th hole, Fox forgot about his par putt or the Super Bowl and began to wonder if November 2, 2013, was going to be the day he died.
Was his heart failing? How could he have been so stupid to delay a surgery needed for months? Would Fox see his wife or kids again? Was this any way for a coach’s life to end—during the NFL bye week, playing golf with buddies, crumpled on the ground barely 200 yards from his vacation home in North Carolina?
“When I was on my knees on the golf course, I remember praying to God: ‘You get me out of this and I’ll get it fixed.’ That’s how scary it was. . . . It was like being smothered. I couldn’t breathe,” said Fox, recalling those agonizingly anxious minutes when it was uncertain if he would live to see his 59th birthday, watch his young daughter grow up to be married, or take one more ski run in the Rocky Mountains.
In broad daylight, his world was fading to black. His playing partners screamed at him to stay strong. With every fiber in his body, Fox struggled to remain conscious.
“I knew I was in trouble,” said Fox, whose grotesquely purple lips signaled to friends at the scene in Charlotte, N.C., that his physical distress was severe.
As he reconstructed the frightening scene, Fox looked me in the eye and spoke the nitty-gritty truth: “Luckily, I was able to fight it off. Because, if I passed out, I wasn’t sure I was coming back.”
Fox told his story in the hallway of the Broncos’ facility at Dove Valley, with a smile plastered on his face, a coach delighted to be back at work with his first-place football team only four weeks after open-heart surgery on November 4 to repair a faulty aortic valve.
“It definitely scared my family, because they’re not ready to lose me,” Fox said. “My sons are all older. But I haven’t watched any weddings yet. I have a 13-year-old daughter. My wife is younger than me by eight years. Nobody was ready for me to not be here. So this was eye-opening for our family, just because it was a little touch-and-go there for a minute.”
But nightmares that can be induced by manipulative life-insurance commercials have not turned Fox into a worrying insomniac, and a joke told by the coach at his own expense was proof.
Waiting in the hospital for doctors to crack open his chest, Fox filled part of his final night prior to heart surgery by taking a peek at a Sunday night NFL game, when Houston Texans coach Gary Kubiak collapsed on the sideline at halftime, suffering from what would quickly be diagnosed as a TIA (transient ischemic attack), more commonly referred to as a mini-stroke.
“I’ll tell you what was bizarre,” Fox said, in a raspy voice crunchier than car wheels on a gravel road. “I was sitting there watching TV, and I watched Gary Kubiak. The combination of me, then him, I thought: ‘Aw, we’re killing this profession.’”
His heart defect was diagnosed more than a decade ago, during a routine physical while he was working as an assistant coach with the New York Giants. But the blood flow had deteriorated to the point where Fox could no longer ski more than 40 yards without stopping to rest, and he had vowed to finally fix the problem with elective surgery within days after Denver concluded the 2013 seas
on.
“I put off the surgery because I figured this was a big year for the Broncos, and I didn’t want to be coming to training camp at less than 100 percent,” Fox explained. “Yeah, it was dumb. But that’s what I chose to do.”
Fox has stuck his nose in the NFL coaching grind for 25 years. Prior to this health scare, it was my suspicion he might ride off into the sunset on the day after he finally won a Super Bowl ring.
Fox, however, now insists this heart surgery might actually lengthen his coaching career. “This is like getting a knee replaced, something that will increase my quality of life. . . . I’m going to be more active, I going to have more energy,” he said.
“My approach to coaching has been: ‘I’m not going to do this for 30 more years.’ But I haven’t said: ‘I’m going to do this for one more contract.’ . . . I’m past the point of doing this for the money. It’s hard to say how long I will coach, because I’m very competitive and I love [football]. I’ve seen too many of my coaching friends say: ‘If I’m doing this at age 70, punch me in the face.’ Well, I would have punched a lot of those friends in the face.”
Maybe it’s because he was raised in a military family, but for Fox, it matters far more that the mission is accomplished than who gets the credit in victory. He didn’t want a medal for returning to work with a scar across his chest. He doesn’t like fuss. But Fox does know what it’s like to stare at death and not blink. That experience probably would not hurt, if the Broncos are down by three points in the fourth quarter of the championship game.
Football is only fun in the NFL if you win. Laughter, however, comes naturally to Fox. Not long after collapsing on the golf course, he made a little confession to one of the friends who pulled him through the frightening episode:
“Hey,” Fox told his buddy, “after I get my heart fixed, I’m good. But I think I might also need surgery on this left eardrum from you screaming at me in the golf cart: ‘Breathe!’”
Moral of the story: What’s the joy in living if a football coach can’t give good-natured grief to the guys who helped save his life?
Without a doubt, Fox entered the season with immense pressure to deliver a Super Bowl victory. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas had listed the Broncos as prohibitive favorites.
“I want to make something perfectly clear: My situation had nothing to do with the stress of coaching,” Fox said. “In today’s world, there’s a lot of pressure jobs. . . . There’s a degree of pressure in every profession.”
Want to know the truth? When Fox returned to the Denver sideline barely a month after open-heart surgery, he looked like a man playing with house money.
Guess that makes sense.
After cheating death, every new series of downs is a bonus.
But the team that greeted Fox’s return had serious issues nobody wanted to mention. The Broncos were running on fumes. This had been a better team back in October. Injuries had taken their toll. As they entered the playoffs, the Broncos were far from dead men walking. But they definitely were walking wounded. Denver needed help. Could an old pro help save them?
Cornerback Champ Bailey heard the dirt that was talked behind his back. People muttered he was washed up, broken down, and a step slow. A 12-time Pro Bowler reduced to a defensive liability.
“I’ve listened to the radio. I’ve read the newspaper. And I heard all these things: ‘He’s done. He’s lost a step. Yada, yada, yada,’” Bailey told me on a warm December afternoon. “It’s funny. Because those people don’t know me, they don’t understand me, and they don’t know what it takes to play in the NFL. So I took it all in stride. But it’s all motivation. I used everything little thing I heard as motivation. Did I ever think I was done? Hell, no.”
For 14 NFL seasons, Bailey was the league’s premier shut-down corner. He threw a blanket on the best receivers in football with the flair of a matador and made his artistry look effortless.
Then something funny happened to Bailey in 2013. The bull got him. His body betrayed him. And it hurt.
Check that. For Bailey, his 15th NFL season was a royal pain.
“I’m not going to cry about it. It was bad. But I feel good now, and I’m ready to go [play],” Bailey said. “A lot of my motivation for getting back to playing had nothing to do with anybody around me. It was just me. It’s just the way I am. You’re not going to tell me I can’t do something.”
At age 35, Bailey got torched deep by Father Time. During the team’s second game of the preseason, the turf in Seattle bit Bailey in the foot. It was a Lisfranc sprain, which can cause agony in a man’s arch with his every step. It’s an injury that has been cursed for centuries, all the way back to a time when cavalrymen in Napoleon’s army suffered the curse of Lisfranc; the prescribed remedy was amputation.
“I had a million thoughts go through my head with this injury. And I’ve never had to deal with something like this. This was definitely my toughest challenge of my career. I wanted to see if I could overcome it,” Bailey said.
In the most obvious of ways, this was the worst football season in Bailey’s brilliant NFL career. He couldn’t get on the field. During 16 regular-season games, Bailey made only 14 tackles. Reduced to a footnote on Denver’s 13-3 record, he lost his starting job at outside cornerback, a position built on equal parts swagger and skill.
In a more subtle way, however, the season revealed why Canton, Ohio, anxiously awaits the pleasure of swinging wide the front door for Bailey’s entrance into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
From fighting the betrayal of an aching body to suffering the indignity of standing on the sideline in his uniform at Kansas City as the Denver defense hung on for a 35–28 victory against the Chiefs, there were ample reasons for Bailey to cry tears of self-pity. The best defensive player in franchise history, however, refused to let any of us see him sweat.
The grace with which Bailey has stared down his athletic mortality was the very definition of mental toughness and a testament to his professionalism.
“It hasn’t been easy,” Bailey said. “I was ticked. I was frustrated. But I live with it. So I’m going to make the best of it.”
To the credit of the coaches and the veteran cornerback, the Broncos figured out a way to do right by Bailey and improve the team’s maligned defense at the same time. He moved inside to nickel back, reducing the number of snaps he played in a game, while leaving the task of running stride-for-stride with receivers to younger cornerbacks on the Denver roster.
“I’ve always been a mainstay out there on the field, but it’s not like that now. I accept it,” Bailey said. “I’m not going to sit here and predict what’s going to happen. But I expect to start every year.”
Early in 2011, shortly after John Elway returned to the Broncos as vice president of football operations, Bailey could have left the Broncos as a free agent. He decided to stay. Loyalty in pro sport? It’s rare. But it still exists.
“I could have run out of here. I was a free agent,” Bailey said. “But I wanted to be here in Denver. And Elway wanted me to be here. I wanted to be a part of what Elway started with this team. I didn’t see this guy touching anything and being a loser. He hasn’t lost in football.”
When it would have been easy to give up hope and surrender to the pain, Bailey refused. All he wanted his entire career was one good crack at winning the Super Bowl.
Unfinished business.
After the Broncos trounced Oakland 34–14 on the final Sunday of the regular season to clinch the AFC’s No. 1 seed for the playoff tournament, Fox wanted to send a message to his players before they hit the showers.
“Great regular season, men. But that ain’t what we came for,” said Fox, summoning the Broncos to huddle up. The real hard work had not yet begun. Men caked in dirt and sweat, the survivors of a team beat up by the season’s heavy physical toll, formed a tight circle and raised their hands as one.
“We have a season to finish, men,” shouted Fox, his words so anxious they bumped into each other whil
e racing out of his mouth. Three victories in the playoffs, and the Broncos would win the franchise’s first championship in 15 years.
“That’s three games, one at a time,” Fox exclaimed. “Let’s finish this thing on three. One, two, three: Finish!”
Together, Broncos repeated their vow and shouted it out loud, with one voice and a single purpose: “Finish!”
Chapter 20
Shove It Where the Sun Don’t Shine
When a quarterback old enough to know better sat down for a television interview and was ambushed by Ron Burgundy, the biggest buffoon in the history of broadcasting, Peyton Manning rolled with the punches. Comedian Will Ferrell had a new movie to promote. With Manning as his foil on a split-screen shot videotaped by ESPN cameras, Ferrell effortlessly slipped into his role as America’s favorite bungling anchorman. Madcap hilarity ensued. Manning can play that game.
Burgundy gave Manning unsolicited advice: Grow a moustache. Football heroes are supposed to look tough. And, as the face of the franchise, Manning had a big problem. The clean-shaven mug of Manning, declared Burgundy, appears as soft as a “succulent baby lamb.”
What makes any joke funny is the hard kernel of truth wrapped in the laughter.
There was unfinished business for Manning during his second season with the Broncos. Among the issues to tackle: Stop the snickering behind his back. He does look like the quarterback from next door. But in the 16th year of his brilliant NFL career, the veteran QB wanted to put a halt to any suggestion he is as soft as a succulent baby lamb. He was a Manning on a mission, out to prove he does not fold in the cold; he does not wilt under pressure; he does not suck in the playoffs.
Exactly 12 months to the day after the sky fell on the Broncos during the most upsetting playoff defeat in franchise history, Denver beat San Diego 24–17 on January 12, 2014, to open a playoff run destined for an appearance in Super Bowl XLVIII.