Part I. Origins.
John Elway sometimes watches his younger self—the Elway that I loved—on YouTube. More than reliving old memories, he likes to see how that guy stacks up to the current guys, the newest models. He’s pleased with the answer. We’re in a bar south of Denver on a May afternoon—as it happens, forty years to the day after Elway demanded and was granted a trade from the Baltimore Colts to the Denver Broncos in 1983. Quick to smile and slim at sixty-two, down thirty-five pounds from a few years ago when he was leading a manic life as the Broncos general manager, he’s just flown in from “a good run” at the craps tables in Las Vegas. He sits with his back to the bar. The lunch crowd points and whispers. It’s hard to imagine a professional athlete meaning as much to a city as Elway has meant to Denver over the years. We talk about beginnings. He tells me about earning his first letterman jacket: Granada Hills Highlanders, 1977. A year earlier his father, Jack, had gotten a job as head coach at Cal State Northridge in the valley north of Los Angeles. Elway can still see the black leather sleeves and the Kelly green wool. His name stitched in white. “Like a trophy,” he says. He remembers the pins he put on the letter, remembers proudly walking the school halls. “Making all-league, trying to make all-city . . .” The jacket now hangs behind glass in a restaurant bearing his name, and the football field at Granada Hills bears his name, too. But there was a moment when one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time didn’t think of himself as a quarterback at all.
Football was once the expression of a certain sort of omnivorous land grab, a bruising ground-level grind to take what we see as ours. But the spiral, a pass—the first known example of which probably came in 1885—and its particular and exhilarating and efficient carve through space, a pursuit and trajectory, metaphysical and mystical and metaphorical all at once, a demonstration of ambition and grace, untethered, bold, full of possibility, brought the game into the realm of discovery. Only in 2020 did scientists pin down the physics of a football in flight, why it turns over in the air rather than sinking to the ground. A spiral can be the offspring of a variety of arm angles, from over-the-top to three-quarters, sidearm, and even sometimes underhand, but no two are quite alike. Joe Namath’s is different from Johnny Unitas’s is different from Terry Bradshaw’s is different from Joe Montana’s is different from John Elway’s is different from Tom Brady’s is different from Patrick Mahomes’s. That wrist snap and twist-swirl, that whip of the finger, it’s a signature, like a strand of DNA, a statement of style and intent. If it didn’t fly in that tight, silent spin, there would be no such thing as a quarterback. Not a magical one. Not of the kind Elway was. Not of the kind I wanted to be.
But it does, and because it does, the quarterback’s power, pressures, and responsibility sometimes seem near limitless. The first time I saw Elway throw a football in person was November 24, 1991, Broncos at Seahawks. I was fifteen years old. The word I’d use to describe his ball’s aesthetic now, but didn’t think of then, is determined. He threw spirals that had muscular ideas and intentions, that knew what they wanted. The ball he threw, and the self-assured—if not outright arrogant—barely contained violence with which he threw it, conspired to make him execute things others wouldn’t try, setting up deep in the pocket and calmly hitting impossible margins on the sidelines and invisible gaps between defenders down the middle of the field. Television never did it justice. You had to be there to see it, and once you saw it you couldn’t shake it. Some of the best throws in Super Bowl history belong to Elway, even in the games he lost. In Super Bowl XXI, on a team devoid of stars and facing the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor and one of the most stacked defenses in NFL history, coached by Bill Belichick, Elway ran left as the pocket collapsed and pulled up to throw deep. It was third and long, second quarter. If you watch it now and pause the video at the point of release, his body is leaning to the left, like a heeling sailboat, as the ball leaves his hand on a diagonal across the field, to the right. The receiver he hits is running a post route away from him. It looked casual; he never truly turned his arm loose, for fear of injury. Nothing about this throw makes sense. Elway lets fly on the hashmark at the Broncos’ 14-yard line and Vance Johnson catches it on the run beyond the right hashmark at the Giants’ 32-yard line. No physics explain it, just raw fearlessness and a gift applied to the max.
I watch it on repeat. You should, too.
In his best moments, Elway bent the logic of the football field the way Michael Jordan refused the laws of gravity and Wayne Gretzky manipulated objects, speeds, and angles. He played free, his own authority on what mattered and what was possible.
“You just feel like you can do anything,” he says.
At fifteen, John Elway was a running back. Calvin Hill of the Cowboys was his favorite player. He wore number 35 because Hill did. He liked to run and to lower his shoulder on contact. Quarterback, as he knew it, was boring. All you did was hand off. And anyway, Elway’s best sport was baseball. But in 1975, on the first day of ninth grade, on Military Hill in Pullman, Washington, his father told him who he was about to be. They were driving in the family’s ’73 Impala—Sheila the Chevy, the Elways called it—on the way to school, and John was talking about going out for running back, and Jack shook his head and quickly pulled the car over and put it into park.
Jack knew what he’d set his son up for, a particular kind of life and prophecy and duty as much as a position to play. A year later, when the family moved to Los Angeles and found Granada Hills, he chose a high school before he bought a house. The program had a progressive passing offense. It threw as a mandate and an imperative and a higher calling, as a way to set up the run rather than the other way around. That’s where John was headed, where Jack was headed, where football, and maybe the country, was headed. Yes, John was the son of the new coach at Northridge. Yes, people saw him as a hotshot outsider coming to dominate. So yes, there was pressure. But the way to survive it, Jack was sure, was to throw. That’s why they’d come. To throw. Jack saw something special in John. Not just the powerful arm—Elway calls it “my security thing”—but the engine inside him, an intense expectation of self and an idea of worth and identity, something burning. When John was just ten, father and son would play Ping-Pong matches until two in the morning, the boy always insisting on another chance to slay the old man and full of rage when he came up short. There were marks on the basement walls from where John threw paddles in anger. Jack wanted to nurture that fire, channel it, see where it could take his son. Raised in a small Washington logging town, the son of a plumber, Jack had made it to Washington State as a quarterback himself, but injuries cut his dream short. He proposed to his wife, Jan, after only a few dates and with only one condition: “I have to have a son.”
Elway says he can’t recall the exact conversation in the Impala. You’re growing. It’s time. You’re not as fast as before, and you need to get stronger, but you’ve got this thing, a singular awareness and singular power. This is the moment. But he remembers the message like it was yesterday. Jack pulled over. Jack talked and John listened. “Fifteen minutes later, I got out of the car a quarterback,” he says.
Copyright © 2025 by Seth Wickersham. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
