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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

One cool dude

The author had every reason not to like Elway, but the author was, like, wrong

By Michael Silver

We were lounging on Waikiki Beach, sipping mai tais and scarfing sashimi as the sun dipped down over the Pacific, when the guy from the Beach Boys showed up to pay his respects. A few days after leading the Broncos to their stirring triumph over Green Bay in Super Bowl XXXII, John Elway had brought his victory tour to paradise, and now the great quarterback was soaking up hugs and high fives from everyone under the sun. Our oceanfront table at Duke's Canoe Club was besieged by an endless swell of well-wishers. Some thanked Elway for helping them make bank with their bookies; others said he had made them cry; one attractive young woman told him it would make her life complete if he would just sign her thong bikini.

Elway handled it all with grace and a refreshing lack of pretense, even when the onslaught bordered on the ridiculous. When a shirtless, shoeless, sun-weathered, fiftysomething man with eyes that didn't quite focus pushed forward and claimed he was a former Beach Boy, everyone else at our table went wild. Elway simply smiled.

The odds against this being true seemed steep. Was this guy Brian Wilson? Hardly. Mike Love? He might as well have claimed he was Courtney Love. "You said you once played with the Beach Boys?" one of us asked. The guy drew up his flabby, overly tanned torso and declared, "No, I was a Beach Boy, and I still am."

As Ralph Tamm and Scott Adams, two of Elway's former teammates, broke into a hearty chorus of Surfin' Safari, Elway just maintained that Cheshire-cat grin on his face and posed for a photo with our alleged celebrity guest. They happily rapped for a couple of minutes until the next wave of back-slappers broke through.

After the sun went swimming for the night and our bill moved into the four-figure range, I settled on some truths about Elway.

It's a hard thing to quantify, but I realized that the guy is one of the coolest football players, if not the coolest, I have ever known. To put it in street terminology, he's probably the realest dude in the NFL. With Elway, it goes beyond the glow of sharing genuine space with a superstar. It was evident in the way anonymous linemen like Tamm and Adams connected with him, and I'd seen it at his home in the way he goofed on some TV show while his amused kids pretended to do their homework. It lets you know he's not a fraud--and, just as important, that his "I'm no better than you" vibe is no act.

Most people I know have trouble believing I've become such an Elway fan. I was trained to hate the guy. He's a valley dude; I'm from West L.A. He went to a horribly stuffy school called Stanford; I had the good fortune to enroll at Cal the year Elway turned pro. As a high school senior in 1982, I watched Elway lose to Cal on the Play--the Bears' surreal, five-lateral kickoff return through the Stanford band. Elway complained that by not blowing the play dead, the officials had ruined his last college game.

It wouldn't be the last time that he'd be labeled a spoiled whiner. Elway was held up as a symbol of greed and selfishness when he used his leverage as a baseball prospect to force a trade to Denver following the 1983 draft because he believed--correctly, it should be noted--that playing for Baltimore would be a miserable experience. He took grief for not tipping well enough on his social forays around town; I've talked to cocktail waitresses and bartenders who claim he's tighter than a Billy Corgan guitar solo. People say he plotted the downfall of Dan Reeves. And after the O.J. police chase, everyone got a laugh telling that Elway joke: Slow, white Bronco--get it?

My guess is that most of these critics haven't had a chance to spend time with Elway outside the insanity of the spotlight. Each time he's in public, Elway faces pressure to be a certain way: polite, patient, eternally interested. But I've had the pleasure of watching him when he can let his hair, and his guard, down. And it's all good.

I was thinking about this last January as we sat at Duke's telling stories and feeling at peace with the island gods. Elway was so clearly one of the guys, it seemed almost absurd. "I see you've let this Super Bowl go right to your head," Tamm said to him. "You've really turned into a d---." Everyone cracked up, another round of mai tais arrived, and then Elway excused himself and bid us goodnight.

A few minutes later, the rest of us decided to give up the table. We found that the check had already been taken care of and, as I recall, the tip was pretty hefty.