Power of Caring
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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

Making his marks

Early on, the Broncos' would-be savior left indelible imprints, especially on his receivers' bodies

By Rick Reilly

I'll never forget the first time I met John Elway. It was the spring of 1983. I was 24. Elway was 22. The Denver Post had flown me out to Stanford to profile the man who would certainly be the No. 1 choice in the upcoming NFL draft and, as it turns out, go on to win more football games than any other quarterback in history. The secretary in the Stanford football office directed me to a little grass field maybe 50 yards long, and there he was in sweats--mop-haired, big-toothed, pigeon-toed, throwing passes to one man over and over again.

Did I say passes? I take that back.

The closer I got, the more I realized these were passes in the same sense that the Lamborghini Diablo is a passenger car. They were twice as fast as anything I'd ever seen. Even from 20 feet away, you could hear them whistle. They had no arc; if anything, they rose. He released them and they arrived, it seemed, at the same instant. My eyes bulged.

Elway and his partner stopped for a rest, and I walked up. The receiver was a former Stanford wideout and then Chicago Bear named Ken Margerum, and as I shook his hand I couldn't help but notice the size of his thumb. It was roughly four times the thickness of his other digits. It looked like Fred Flintstone's thumb after he's hit it with a hammer. It was huge and red, and the nail was purplish black, the Spruce Goose of thumbs.

"My god! What happened to your thumb?" I asked, slightly revolted. He looked at Elway, who just laughed.

"Catching Godzilla," Margerum answered.

He and Elway had been doing this for three years, nearly every day, in season and out, Margerum working on his routes and Elway on his timing. But the sheer violence of Elway's right arm had given Margerum a grotesque souvenir for the rest of his life.

Young boy: Grampa, did you really know John Elway?

Margerum: Know him? How do you think I got THIS?

Young boy: Aaaaaaarggggghhhh!!!

His receivers with the Broncos would know the same feeling. Many times during Elway's first month at camp they'd huddle after practice and compare the sting marks left by his throws. The passes came in so white-hot that each actually made a little red X on the chest or the palm of the hand. It became known as the Elway Cross, football's version of the red badge of courage.

Where the power in that arm came from was a complete mystery. Some 14 years later, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED would pose Elway naked from the waist up, holding a football straight out from his side. It was the single most unimpressive right arm in history, one that had endured years of surgeries, swollen bursal sacs and 45,000 yards of overuse. You looked at it and you swore it was about to fall off. When flexed, the right biceps looked like Olive Oyl's, just a round little bloop. SI's editors took one look at the film and stashed it in a drawer somewhere. To run the photos would've crushed too many kids.

Anyway, later on that spring day in 1983, Elway and I walked around his fraternity house, where I saw his tiny room and, further down the hall, a little duty roster on the wall: ELWAY/DISHES. Here was a stud who was already making large bucks as a hot baseball prospect for the New York Yankees, who was in the headlines every day nationwide and who would soon sign the richest rookie contract in NFL history. It didn't matter one whit. For the next week, Elway would be scrubbing the ketchup off greasy plates.

It would all change, of course. Life as the only celebrity in Denver would be a huge shock for him. But he didn't yet know this on the day two weeks later when the Denver front office, in the single biggest larceny in NFL history, snookered Baltimore owner Robert Irsay into trading Elway to the Broncos. The press conference to introduce Elway to the Denver media was a colossal, frantic gathering, probably the biggest press conference in the city's history to that point, and surely the biggest Elway had ever seen.

When it was finally over, he walked out the exit, turned to a little p.r. guy and sighed, "Wow! I'm glad I'll never have to go through that again!"