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View Full Version : Elway: The drive that never ends (ESPN Magazine)



VonDoom
09-07-2016, 11:19 AM
Great long piece on Elway here. Some highlights:


But the very idea of a comfortable life feels like death. Elway knows he will be a geezer one day, his body surrendering to life the way it surrendered to football, but the biological imperative, the compulsion to win, will still be there, trapped in an irreversible senescence. It's his fate. And so he leans in over his desk, unveiling that familiar grin, and utters maybe the most Elway thing ever: "I've always thought I was going to die ... with a shovel; in case I woke up, I could dig my way out."

His eyes widen. "It's never over over until it's over."


His intensity isn't for everybody. It wasn't for John Fox, who did many things well after Elway hired him as coach in 2011, including winning 46 games in four years. Elway's doubts began after Fox turned conservative on offense and his defense blew coverage in a January 2013 playoff collapse against the Ravens. The next year at the Super Bowl, after a week of disorganized practices, Elway had a bad feeling. The morning of the game, he woke up at 3 a.m. in a dull panic in a dark New Jersey hotel room. He knew his team wasn't good enough. He wasn't good enough. His friends say the offseason after Denver's Super Bowl XLVIII loss to Seattle was as miserable as any in Elway's life. It harkened back to being humiliated as a player who had lost three Super Bowls. Elway gets quiet when he's in a bad mood, orders another drink, turns inward, blames himself, jokes in a nonjoking way about jumping off a building. "When you get older, you feel like you're getting smarter," he says in his office. "You should be better. You should know more."

A rising lack of discipline under Fox prompted Elway to sometimes yell at the team because Fox wouldn't. Before a late-season practice in 2014, Fox turned to a few people on the sideline and asked, "Isn't winning the division enough?" A few weeks later, after the Broncos came out flat in a divisional playoff loss to the Colts, Fox got his answer.


He wanted Manning to practice less and rest more, to pass less and hand off more. Most of all, he wanted Manning to face reality. "All the great athletes, they don't want to admit anything," Elway says. He was more blunt than strategic with Manning, as he often is, and the negotiations became tense. Manning told staffers he didn't think his boss understood how much year-round work he put in to help his body. Elway told people in the building he was prepared to move on to Brock Osweiler.

The negotiation became a test of Manning's will to win, and of Elway's ability to close. In 2012, he had sold Manning on the Broncos by promising to help him become "the best quarterback of all time." Now he tried speaking to Manning as Jack would, to be "a man of his word" who "had the ability to ask the right questions to get the right answers." Elway could see the ghosts Manning couldn't. He knew Peyton would be adrift after walking away. He knew the wiring that helped him achieve heights in football would conspire against him after he retired. They both knew Super Bowls are the only thing people remember.

"Do you want to be considered better than Brady?" Elway asked. "Championships will be the tiebreaker."

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/enterprise-Elway160907/denver-broncos-gm-john-elway-drive-never-end