Peyton Manning

by Mark Kiszla

  While quarterbacks are paid to throw touchdown passes, the image that defines Manning shows a man reveling in all the little details of his job: With a scar on his neck peeking out the backside of a Denver helmet, Manning stands in the shotgun, giving a rapid-fire lecture on football theory to teammates. He surveys the defense for weakness and calls an audible, then shouts: “Hurry! Hurry!”

  But, truth be known, Manning is in no hurry. No hurry to leave this job. No hurry at all. As the play clock winds down, he loves and cherishes every second of being a quarterback.

  “That’s what I’ll keep doing until . . .” Manning said, “. . . until I stop playing.”

  The beautiful mind is what makes him Peyton Manning.

  A heart hungry for one more snap, one more perfect spiral, and one more shot at the Super Bowl is what makes him America’s most beloved quarterback.

  Chapter 22

  Kicking and Screaming

  John Elway was ticked. Do we really have to explain why he was so mad?

  After all the sweat Denver put in the 2014 NFL regular season to win 12 games and earn a No. 2 seed in the Super Bowl tournament, the last thing anybody in Broncos Country expected to see was the home team get rudely bounced by Indianapolis in the playoffs and, even worse, go down without a whimper during an embarrassing 24–13 loss. Are you kidding me? This was not part of Elway’s master plan to return championship football to Colorado.

  There is an unwritten, but well-documented rule at the team’s Dove Valley headquarters: Piss off the boss at your own peril. When there’s trouble, Elway does not dance. He swings the hammer of Thor. Problems do not linger. Elway pounds them to smithereens.

  When Denver exited meekly from the playoffs, somebody was going to pay. So it was no surprise when Elway promptly said goodbye to coach John Fox after Denver was eliminated from championship contention. But the defeat would also cost Manning dearly.

  How Elway operates as general manager is informed by pain he endured while playing quarterback for the Broncos from 1983–98. There are football scars on his soul, etched by a rusty blade with the numbers 39–20, 42–10 and 55–10. Three times early in his playing career, Elway was embarrassed on the NFL’s biggest stage, and he remains tender about those Super Bowl losses after all these years.

  When working for Elway, it’s a bad idea to take a knee of surrender. And, let’s be honest. It appeared the Broncos quit against the Colts. “To go out this way, I feel like we let a lot of people down, including ourselves,” defensive lineman Malik Jackson said. “We let down our families. Our friends. Denver, Colorado. We expected more.” Yes, John Fox fashioned a sterling 46-18 regular-season record and won the AFC West all four seasons he coached in Denver. In the end, maybe the real surprise is that Elway didn’t tell Fox to leave town sooner.

  “At least in the last game you want to feel like you go out kicking and screaming. When you’re right there . . .” said Elway, disappointed the Broncos exhibited so little fight during that 43–8 loss to Seattle at Super Bowl XLVIII, then disgusted when his team showed so little fire as Indianapolis dominated a playoff game in Colorado fewer than 12 months later. “Two years in a row, it didn’t feel like we went out kicking and screaming.”

  In the aftermath of getting trounced by Andrew Luck, the quarterback who took his job in Indianapolis, Manning dropped a bombshell: Plagued by poor health and poor play down the stretch of this disappointing season, he was having second thoughts about returning to the Broncos in 2015. “I guess I can’t just give that simple answer. I’m processing it. So I can’t say that,” said Manning, whose strained quadriceps robbed him of the strength to connect on deep sideline routes against the Colts.

  A few minutes later, Manning left the auditorium where he had stunned reporters with the admission that his retirement could be on the horizon. After gathering his belongings in the locker room, Manning walked down a hallway in the stadium, only to be confronted with two more unsettling shocks to his system. It broke the quarterback’s heart when Marshall and Mosley, his 3-year-old twin children, approached him with tears in their young eyes, distraught because their Daddy suffered such a tough day at the office against the Colts.

  What’s more, Manning expressed genuine dismay when informed by two reporters from the Denver Post that prior to kickoff against Indianapolis, there was a televised report by NFL insider Jay Glazer, a close friend of Denver’s head coach, that suggested if the Broncos lost in opening round, Fox could lose his job and immediately become a top candidate for league rivals with coaching vacancies.

  “Is that true?” said Manning, a creature of habit who hates change. Was Fox looking for a new job when he should have been concentrating on beating the Colts? If Denver dumped Fox, might the quarterback be less likely to return for another season with the team?

  Fewer than 24 hours later, the worst fears of Manning were proven to be 100 percent correct. Elway and Fox mutually agreed to part ways on January 12, 2015. “In any relationship, you’re always going to have bumpy patches. I think the main thing between (Fox) and I was we disagreed how to get to that next step,” Elway said.

  But it was my strong feeling that Fox abandoned ship before he was forced to walk the plank, and my opinion was strongly reinforced when Fox was hired by the Chicago Bears within four days of his sudden departure from Denver. Why did Fox want out? Although he received a two-year contract extension after losing to Seattle in the Super Bowl, it seemed the Broncos almost immediately had buyer’s remorse after giving him a raise to $5.5 million. In addition, it was an open secret Fox sought more input in player personnel decisions, while Elway was irritated when Fox’s coaching staff was slow to develop draft picks Michael Schofield and Cody Latimer into contributors on the field.

  The signs of trouble for the Broncos were hidden in plain sight long before the loss to Indianapolis caused Elway to blow a gasket. The team did not have its head in the game. The musty stench of distraction had infiltrated the Denver locker room. Too many key members of the organization had their sights set on the exit door when the situation demanded they keep their eyes on the prize.

  Prior the playoffs, defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio was being wooed by Oakland to take over on the Raiders sideline, while offensive coordinator Adam Gase engaged in what proved to be a futile pursuit of the head coaching vacancy with San Francisco. Tight end Julius Thomas, who had been Manning’s favorite target in the red zone, was being not-so-quietly trashed behind his back for refusing to play through a chronic ankle injury. Star receiver Demaryius Thomas was perplexed by teammates who seemed fearful the road to the Super Bowl might well force the Broncos back to play the AFC championship game in New England, where they had been trounced 43–21 during the regular season.

  With the skills of Manning in irrevocable decline and Fox, Del Rio and Gase all released from the coaching staff as Elway cleaned house, it seemed as if the Broncos might require a major overall before they could make another serious attempt at climbing to the top of the NFL heap. Rather than admit flaws in his football philosophy, however, Elway doubled-down on his bet that the talent on Denver’s roster was on the verge of the franchise’s greatest success since he retired as quarterback way back in the spring of 1999.

  “There still is no Plan B,” Elway insisted. “Plan A is still the same. And that is to win the world championship.”

  In a jam, Elway knew exactly what to do. He called an old friend. Gary Kubiak was the obvious choice to be the new coach in Denver, if what Elway wanted was a wingman to play Cougar to his Maverick.

  From the time they joined the Broncos as rookie quarterbacks in 1983, they bled orange together. Elway wore No. 7; Kubiak was No. 8. They quickly grew as close as the numbers on the back of their jerseys.

  They hung out at the Smiling Moose Bar after long, hot summer practices at training camp in Greeley, Colorado. Elway called his little buddy Kubes. While the rest of Broncos Country crowned Elway as the Duke of Denver, he was known simply as Woody to Kubiak. The
y could be friends because they were never rivals. Elway won the most valuable player award in 1987, and made regular appearances on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The biggest moment of Kubiak’s playing career might have been a windy November night in 1989, when Elway came down with food poisoning and his backup stepped in, leading Denver to a road victory against Washington.

  So of course it was a no-brainer for Kubiak to accept the job when Elway asked for his help. “The contract took about five minutes,” Ku­biak said. He signed a four-year deal and was formally introduced as the 15th coach in team history on January 20, 2015. “Coach Kubiak knows how to win,” said Broncos president Joe Ellis, citing the championship rings the team’s new hire had earned during previous stints as assistant in San Francisco (1994) and Denver (1997 and ’98).

  When Kubiak went to work for Elway, they had been friends for nearly 32 years. The NFL was a much different place way back in 1983, when players knocked the slobber out each other during brutal full-contact practices and even a superstar never complained about sharing a hotel room with a teammate during road trips. So it might seem old-timey quaint to football fans of today, but let me tell you how Elway and Kubiak become football brothers for life. Their bond started with a television flickering deep into the night.

  “The Andy Griffith Show,” Elway recalled.

  When bunking together, two young NFL quarterbacks discovered they shared an affinity for the classic sitcoms that were at the height of their first-run popularity during the 1960s, when Elway and Kubiak were kids in elementary school.

  “John couldn’t fall asleep unless the TV was on in the room. And I couldn’t stand the noise, so I’d get up in the middle of the night and cut it off,” Kubiak said. “But he’d wake up at 3 a.m. and tell me, ‘Hey, turn it back on!’ The compromise was we both liked all those sitcoms from the days when shows were in black and white. We must have seen every episode of The Andy Giffith Show at least five times.”

  Elway and Kubiak nodded off to sleep laughing to the wackiness of rural America, whether it was the Andy Griffith Show episode when townsfolk were worried Mayberry might blow sky high after a stray goat ate sticks of dynamite for lunch, or it was a Deputy Barney Fife going on one of his trademark rants, explaining why he gave a septic tank as an anniversary gift to his parents. (“Well, they’re really hard to buy for. Besides, it was something they could use.”)

  So I had to ask: If Elway developed his leadership style by watching the unflappable calm of Sheriff Andy Taylor in a crisis, then which citizen of Mayberry helped prepare Kubiak for the patience required to deal with the craziness of being a football coach? Floyd the Barber? Aunt Bee?

  “Oh hell, I don’t know,” said Kubiak, chuckling as he dismissed my silly question with a wave of his hand. He had more important things to do, because 24 hours seems inadequate for the tasks an NFL coach must complete each day.

  Kubiak does have serious coaching chops. In Denver, where the sun rises and sets with Elway, Kubes has the gift to steer his famous friend’s thinking without stepping on the toes of a legend. What made Kubiak a quarterback whisperer is the ability to criticize without grating on the ego of a star player. He mastered the skill during 12 years as an NFL assistant, while coaching Steve Young in San Francisco, Elway in Denver and later serving as the buffer in an often volatile relationship between Mike Shanahan and Jake Plummer.

  But perhaps Kubiak’s most spectacular work was on display when he landed his first NFL head coaching gig with the Houston Texans in 2006. He not only made the playoffs twice with journeyman Matt Schaub taking the majority of the team’s offensive snaps at quarterback, Kubiak also made the thoroughly unremarkable Schaub look good enough to be rewarded with two trips to the Pro Bowl.

  In November 2013, however, stuck in a rut of losing 11 of 13 games, a bad streak that would get Kubiak fired in his seventh season leading the Texans, he collapsed on the sideline at Reliant Stadium and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed a transient ischemic attack, which occurs when a clot in an artery briefly shuts down blood flow to the brain. Stressed out by losing, Kubiak suffered a mini-stroke.

  Before Elway tossed his buddy back in the pressure cooker of working for a franchise where every year is Super Bowl or bust, he made certain Kubiak had learned not to let all the blame regularly heaped on a coach ruin his health.

  “I remind him all the time about it, and say, ‘Listen, we want you here in Denver for a long, long time, so let’s make sure you take care of yourself,’” Elway told Andrea Kremer in an interview with NFL Network.

  Talk about stress: All Kubiak had to do in order to justify Elway’s faith in him was exceed the gaudy 71.9 winning percentage achieved by Fox and not only return the Broncos to the Super Bowl, but win it.

  To make things even tougher, Kubiak had to figure out a way to implement his run-heavy, play-action-pass offense with a veteran quarterback that didn’t like operating under center, and whose old, heavy legs were not equipped to roll out of the pocket. “This was a major challenge and it was not easy,” Manning admitted.

  Even worse, the Hall of Fame skills of Manning had eroded so badly he could no longer consistently perform at a Hall of Fame level. Need proof? In 2013, Manning turned a tough-as-barbed wire Baltimore defense into papier-mâché, shredding the Ravens for seven touchdown passes in the season-opening game. During the entire month of September in 2015, which included dates against Baltimore, Detroit and Minnesota, Manning threw a grand total of three touchdown passes.

  Guess who shouldered the blame when the Broncos offense encountered difficulty reaching the end zone? Kubiak.

  “He didn’t sign up for this,” Manning said.

  Oh, yes Kubiak did. In fact, he was signed to mold a football team that would no longer be defined by Manning.

  After being far too dependent on Manning bringing his “A” game for far too long, Elway had decided to seriously revamp his approach to winning a championship, even before Kubiak was hired. The watershed moment was November 16, 2014, when the Broncos were thumped 22–7 in St. Louis. Manning flinched in the face of the Rams’ fierce pass rush. He was asked to throw 54 times, and that was a mistake, especially when a deep pass in the third quarter to Emmanuel Sanders fluttered weakly in the air for so long that it allowed safety Rodney McLeod to load up on a vicious tackle that knocked Sanders from the game with a concussion. “Any time a player gets injured on the end of one your passes, my heart drops,” Manning admitted.

  Manning would never again throw 50 times in a game during the remainder of his career with the Broncos. In the wake of that ugly loss to the Rams, team management made the tough decision to emphasize running the football, which took it out of Manning’s hands. It was not a popular move with Manning or Broncos fans in the beginning. But credit Elway with having the nerve to boldly shift the focus away from a 14-time Pro Bowl quarterback, and gamble that Denver could build a defense that would intimidate foes and dominate games.

  The “D” in Denver has always stood for defense. The first chapter of pro football glory in Colorado was written by the Orange Crush. In basketball, Nuggets center Dikembe Mutombo wrote his ticket to the Hall of Fame with a wagging finger he used to admonish foes after blocking a shot. And the steely blue eyes of goalie Patrick Roy were the force behind two Stanley Cup championships by the Avalanche.

  But son of a Bum, the man who created a defense to beat them all was Wade Phillips, a 68-year-old football lifer pulled off the unemployment line by Kubiak. Football is fun with Phillips, a defensive coordinator who would rather his players attack aggressively than worry about mistakes. To keep the vibe loose, it was not unusual to see Phillips dancing in the locker room or find him talking smack in his Twitter posts. The Broncos loved every minute of it. “I was surprised because he told us he liked Drake,” defensive end Malik Jackson told Troy Renck of the Denver Post. “We asked him why and he said: ‘I started from the bottom and now I’m here.’”

  How to describe the attitude Phillips i
nstilled in the Broncos’ defense, from the opening kickoff to the final snap? All inside linebacker Brandon Marshall needed was two tiny syllables.

  “Nuh-uh,” he told me.

  Nuh-uh means no way, no how, not in tour house.

  “That’s the attitude we have. Every play. Every down,” said Marshall, who made 101 tackles for the Broncos during the 2015 regular season.

  What defined this Denver defense was fiercer than the pass rush of outside linebacker Von Miller and nastier than the disposition of cornerback Aqib Talib, known to poke a foe in the eye just to make a point that you don’t mess with Denver. The real, core strength of the defense was based in the brotherhood, which Marshall described as a deep trust and genuine affection rarely found in NFL teams during the salary-cap era, when financial realities cause constant roster churn.

  “I love these guys, man. “And I love going to war with them, because when it looks all lost, we find a way,” Marshall said. “We have the best defense in the league. This is the best defense I’ve ever been around in my life. Our players are so headstrong. And we’re the brothers, man. We’re all brothers.”

  Crunch the numbers, and there’s no denying how Denver’s defense brought the pain in 2015: The Broncos ranked No. 1 in the league in total defense, allowing a stingy 283 yards per game. They were No. 1 in sacks, recording 52 takedowns of the quarterback. They scored five defensive touchdowns, including a fumble recovery for a score by cornerback Bradley Roby that allowed to Denver to escape Kansas City with a victory in the final minute of the fourth quarter and a 74-yard interception return for a touchdown by Chris Harris Jr. that proved to be the difference in a road win at Oakland.