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Seven on 7

John Elway has provided fond memories for SI's writers
Seven of them reminisce ...

Issue date: February 10, 1999 Special Collector's Edition: 1998 Denver Broncos

Ninety-eight yards of hell

In one five-minute onslaught, Elway drove a city, and a family, to despair

By David Fleming

The dog was the first to leave. You know the theory that animals can sense impending disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes? Well, that's what seemed to happen on Jan. 11, 1987, when my family gathered in the wood-paneled basement of our suburban Detroit home to watch the Broncos take on my father's beloved Cleveland Browns in the AFC Championship Game.

When the Browns, holding a 20-13 lead, pinned Denver on its two-yard line with 5:32 to play, the entire family began dancing on the couch and on the unsightly green-corduroy chair that was my father's throne. The entire family, that is, except Spooky, our cockapoo mutt who--apparently having spied Elway trotting confidently onto the field--slunk away from the celebration and up the stairs.

"Where the hell is he going?" I remember Dad asking. Turns out, good ole Spooky was the smartest one of the bunch.

The rest of us stayed and watched as the horror unfolded before our eyes. Before I go further, allow me to explain that Dad is a relatively normal man--until the Browns enter the picture. Born and raised in Cleveland, he has been rooting for the Browns since 1946, when his grandmother used to let him skip church and ride the railcar downtown to attend games at Cleveland Stadium. The guy's Michigan license plate still reads BROWNS. Having considered the possibility that the Browns will not play in a Super Bowl in his lifetime, he has proposed being cryogenically frozen, so that his body might be preserved until the day that Cleveland finally reaches the Big One.

My three brothers and I agree that we learned our first swearwords listening to Dad as he watched Browns games. Elway would stir some choice ones out of the old man on that 1987 day. The one outburst I most vividly remember is, "Mother-scratchin-frable-fricken-gobble-farkin-sheeby-deeby!"

But it was Spooky's departure and the subsequent exodus of other family members during the Drive that told the story that day. When Elway made a seemingly impossible 11-yard scramble for a first down at the Denver 26, my brother Greg, usually the most stouthearted among us, suddenly remembered some homework and bolted up the stairs. Then came completions of 22 and 12 yards. Just like that, Broncos' ball on the Cleveland 40. My oldest brother, Bill, a future FBI agent, was next up the stairs. After an incompletion and a sack for an eight-yard loss, Elway tossed a 20-yard completion to Mark Jackson at the Browns' 28. Little brother Bryan? Gone. And finally, after Elway scrambled nine yards to the five, it was my time.

Mom, who, god bless her, can still recite Cleveland's lineups from the early 1960s ("O.K., at the guards you got Gene Hickerson and John Wooten, at the tackles..."), was the only one to stick with Dad to the bitter end. Elway to Jackson for the tying TD with 0:37 left in regulation. Elway to Steve Watson for 28 yards in overtime to set up the Broncos' winning field goal. "John Elway ripped the hearts out of a million Browns fans that day," Dad says now. "I remember that game like it was yesterday, because I've never seen someone make an entire team, an entire stadium and an entire city just wilt."

Ultimately that will be John Elway's legacy: the 47 game-saving drives he engineered in the fourth quarter. He surely must have derived a sinister pleasure from going into the toughest stadiums in the NFL--the opposition's end zone 98 yards away, a few ticks of the clock left and 80,000 fans throwing dog bones and waving ELWAY SUCKS T-shirts over their heads as they did in Cleveland that day--and just slicing a city's dreams to bits with grace, guts and cold, calculated precision.

Thanks to a generous coworker of mine, Dad received a ticket to Super Bowl XXXIII. Before he arrived in Miami for the game, however, Dad called me to say he wouldn't cheer for Elway under any circumstances, even if it provided his son with the perfect ending to this story. "I hope I run into Elway on an elevator or something," he said. "I already know what I'd say. 'John, I compliment you on the athlete you have become and the person you appear to be as a father and husband. But I am a Browns fan, so please get away from me, you son of a bitch."

Which, I suspect, John Elway would rightly understand as words of the highest praise.