All Action, No Talk

Says Haynes, "He wants me to be Mr. Bronco. Well, I'm not going to be."

And now, after his remarkable season, it looks as if Haynes won't have to be. That's a very long way from where Haynes was when the season began.

He had come to Denver in time for the 1986 campaign, in exchange for two second-round choices and a sixth. Immediately he disappointed Reeves. For one thing, Reeves says, "He wasn't in very good shape." For another, he wasn't making the adjustment from left corner to right corner. The former was Haynes's fault, the latter Denver's.

"I can't play the right corner," Haynes says. "I just can't." That has been proved. An All-America left corner as a senior at Colorado in 1979, he was taken by the Giants in the first round and flipped to right corner, where he flopped. It took an injury to Terry Jackson, the starting left corner, to give Haynes a P.O. box at his real position—and those three Pro Bowl berths.

But when the Giants wouldn't ante up the $2.1 million for three years he was demanding—"what other defensive backs of my stature were making"—Haynes changed agents, hiring Howard Slusher and holding out for 93 days. "That," says Vicki, "is a time of our lives I'd just as soon forget."

That also was when Jasmine, the second of the Hayneses' two daughters, was born 3½ months prematurely. Jasmine weighed just over a pound at birth. Doctors said her chances of survival were 50-50. After Vicki delivered, she had a fever for a week and was not allowed to see the baby. Only Mark saw her.

"I remember that first day I saw her," he says. "She seemed about an inch long. She didn't even seem human, all drawn up like that." Through the ordeal Haynes stayed stoic, just as his own dad would have wanted it. "I never liked my children to make a scene," says Arthur Haynes, father of 11. "Didn't like, them to be too emotional."

"I remember, I'd be lying there in bed, and I'd say, 'Is she going to make it, babe?' " Vicki says. "And Mark would always say, 'Absolutely. No question in my mind.' He was always the strength."

Jasmine made it, but not before suffering numerous seizures, during which she could not breathe on her own. She was on a respirator for more than six months, and today, at two, still receives therapy. (Her sister, Iman, is four.)

Jasmine's hospital bills were the main reason that Haynes ended his holdout with the Giants. He signed a one-year deal with the team for $400,000 for '85, but he was not a happy camper. After that, "He never looked like he was giving you an effort," Giant tight end Mark Bavaro told the Rocky Mountain News last summer. "He obviously was unhappy. He wanted to get out."