SUPER BOWL XXI : DENVER vs. NEW YORK : THE QUARTERBACKS : ELWAY : All-American Boy With the Golden Arm Seems on Verge of Being Bronco Superman

Choices most people aren’t bothered with:

Suppose John Elway had played baseball, instead. Can’t you imagine Dodger Stadium on a summer night with Elway throwing to some star of the ‘80s like Darryl Strawberry.

Oh, it’s already happened?

Try June 6, 1979, the Los Angeles City Section high school championship game, Elway’s Granada Hills team, the defending champion, against Strawberry’s Crenshaw. Granada Hills won, 10-4. Elway relieved in the second inning and went the rest of the way for the victory.

Elway’s father, Jack, remembers his son striking out Strawberry to end the game.

“No,” John said. “I think it was Chris Brown.

“Strawberry took me deep twice, but we got the out both times. He didn’t get around on me, though,” he said, smiling. “Both times were to left field.”

Chris Brown, of course, hit .317 last season with the San Francisco Giants.

“To make the story even better, John hadn’t pitched in 6-7 weeks,” said Darryl Stroh, Granada Hills’ baseball coach. “He had a real bad game, walked some people, hit a batter, and I had some other people. I gave up on him and put him back at third base.

“Then we got into the finals and my pitcher’s really struggling. So I think, ‘I’m going to bring in my best guy, my gamer.’ I think he one-hit them the rest of the ballgame.”

To make it better yet, Elway was appearing on the mound out of a sense of duty. He didn’t like to pitch. He never threw curveballs, since everyone was concerned with protecting Elway’s arm for football. His dad says he was timed at 93 m.p.h. as a high school junior, with a baseball, of course.

What he liked was hitting. He batted .491 as a senior when he was the City player of the year. In his summer as a Yankee farmhand in a rookie league at Oneonta, N.Y., he hit .318. The latest football player turned baseball prospect of the ages, Bo Jackson, hit .277 in the minors last summer.

Potential is a big word, especially when they say you’ve got a lot of it. I guess if we win in two weeks, I MIGHT live up to it.

--JOHN ELWAY, after the Broncos had beaten the Cleveland Browns for the AFC title. And he might not.

Potential can be a pain in the tush when they say you’ve got as much of it as anyone who ever drew breath. To Elway go the privilege and the burden of having so much that little is denied him . . . and whatever he does isn’t enough.

He has been made larger than life, with all things deemed possible and all failures betrayals. Who hasn’t fantasized about having his size, his speed, his grace, his beachboy looks, his money?

So he’s obliged to live our dreams for us. Do you think we grade him hard by accident?

His peers? Their demands on quarterbacks are such that by season’s end, you get the feeling there are only two good ones: whoever quarterbacked the last Super Bowl champion plus Dan Marino. A baseball pitcher can lose a game or two without starting a national debate about his shortcomings.

If that’s the way he wanted it, Elway should have stayed in baseball. Nearing his first Super Bowl start, he hears more than cheers. Don Shula, the Miami Dolphin coach, says that Elway locks onto receivers and doesn’t see the whole field. Allie Sherman, the former Giant coach now working on various networks, asks:

“Will this be the patient Elway or the impatient Elway?”

Well, there aren’t two of them, just two sides to one very human . . .

Kid?

John and Jana, his twin sister, were born June 28, 1960, in Port Angeles, Wash., near Seattle, the second and third children of Jack and Jan. They have an older sister, Leann, so it seems more a coincidence rather than an attempt to give everyone a name that starts with J.

John would marry a woman named Janet, though, and they do have a baby daughter named Jessica.

It would embarrass John to suggest that they seem to have resembled the old comic strip Jackson twins, or some All-American family unit. But then lots of things embarrass him.

The fact is that the kids were accomplished and popular. John, as you might have guessed, was a natural athlete.

“What was apparent early, from the time I can remember, he was interested in any kind of ball,” said Jack Elway, now the Stanford football coach, from his office. “He had the ability to concentrate.

“I just didn’t know how big he’d get. All of a sudden in high school, he started growing. In one year, he grew two inches. He was about 6-2 when he was a junior.

“I was a quarterback at Washington State. I’m about 6 feet. John is the biggest of all the Elways. He’s more like Jan. He has her long legs and big hands. His mother is an attractive woman. I’ve always said I over-achieved when we got married.”

Formally, Jack never coached John. Jack was always a level or two above.

Home was whatever area code Jack was coaching in. In 1976, they moved from Pullman, where Jack was a Washington State assistant, to the San Fernando Valley, where he’d just gotten the job as head coach at Cal State Northridge.

“John was just going into his sophomore year,” Jack said. “At Granada Hills, they really had an excellent passing offense. Jack Neumeier was the coach. They had those passing leagues in the summer. And Jack Neumeier really believed in the pass. I was accused of looking for a home in that district.”

Was it true?

“Yeah, I guess it was true. We just barely got into it, too. When I saw the price, I got a migraine headache.”

Jana made the tennis team. John became a legend.

Said Tom Ramsey, the quarterback at archrival Kennedy High, then later at UCLA and now at New England:

“They threw the ball 50 times a game. Now you really don’t think that much of it, it happens so much. But then, it was kind of, ‘Wow!’

“I remember one game they ran a double screen. That was the first time I’d ever seen it. They had a screen on the left side, a screen on the right side and ended up throwing the ball to the outlet guy going across the middle. I said, ‘Wow, they’re really stretching the defense.’

Ramsey, who made his own marks in high school and college, nevertheless lacks Elway’s gifts. As the mortal down the road all their careers, he has heard Elway questions since adolescence.

Was there something larger than life about Elway, even then?

“There still isn’t,” Ramsey said.

As Keith Jackson would say, these were two high schools that . . . didn’t like each other. Ramsey once fought Granada Hills tight end Paul Bergmann on the sideline. They wound up rooming together at UCLA.

Ramsey’s and Elway’s teams faced each other only once, their junior season. Granada Hills won easily.

“But the night before the game, seven of our starting players were suspended,” Ramsey says. “They were caught vandalizing their school.

“Both running backs, a couple of defensive backs. They did a lot of things, from what I heard. I got a call to see if I wanted to go. I said no thanks. A lot of people to this day think I went.”

Ramsey says he still doesn’t know Elway much beyond the chit-chat level, but that he always seemed like an OK guy.

“I have no complaints,” Ramsey says.

What was he like, this kid who had it all so early?

“He was not cocky,” said Bob Johnson, who was his counselor and his basketball coach as a 10th-grade junior varsity player. “He was an All-American kid, the kind of kid you’d like to be around. He was level-headed.

“I think his dad had something to do with that. You know, B basketball isn’t a high division, but his dad came to every basketball game he played.”

John led the B team in scoring but quit basketball after his sophomore season to concentrate on football and baseball. Otherwise, Johnson thinks he would have had a shot at being All-City in a third sport.

Said Stroh, the baseball coach: “He’s a great kid. To this day, he’s the same. He’s still kind of shy. He gets embarrassed easily when you compliment him. That’s the thing that makes him really neat.”

Said Tim Hawthorne, a Granada Hills defensive back when Elway played there: “John was like an easygoing, happy-go-lucky type of guy. He was a good student. I know he had great grades. That’s probably why he went to Stanford. He was never a stuck-up type of person at all. He always had a lot of friends.

“Our team went out a lot together, to the beach, the movies. He was just one of the guys.”

Said Walt Seymour, the backup quarterback: “John was shy, but he was confident. He wasn’t cocky for how he could have been. He was very level-headed. Here’s a guy whose name was in the papers every day. He was headed somewhere, everyone knew that.”

On a football field, he wasn’t likely to be mistaken for anyone. At Denver, they talk of the Elway cross, the X mark the ball can leave on a receiver’s chest if he makes the mistake of letting it get that close. They had that at Granada Hills, too.

“What I remember about his ball is that it whistled,” Hawthorne said. “You’d hear it whistling before it hit your hands. It always had a humming sound. It came at you pretty hard.”

Elway became the starting quarterback midway through his sophomore season. He lost half his senior season to a knee injury, by which time everyone had long since seen enough.

“I remember a game his junior year,” Jack Elway said. “It was against that school from the Valley that developed all the running backs (San Fernando, which produced Charles White). They were coming back, and John threw one into the end zone from around the 20-yard line for a touchdown. There was a 15-yard penalty, and they took it away.

“So he goes back and does it again.

“I looked at Jan and said, ‘I wonder if he’s as good as I think he is.’ ”

Said Hawthorne: “Same route, same receiver. Chris Sutton on an in-and-out 45.”

As little affected as ever, Elway still returns to Granada Hills for alumni baseball games. The last time was 1985, when he left his bride of a year in Tahiti and flew back to Los Angeles. Honest.

Stanford was a triumph. When he graduated, he was the definitive football prospect. George Steinbrenner, Yankee owner--and former Northwestern football assistant--paid him $100,000 for a summer of baseball before his senior year. Maybe just so he could meet him.

Elway intended to play in the National Football League and said so. He didn’t intend to play for the Colts and he said that, too. That produced his first bad publicity and the trade to Denver.

Denver was a deferred kind of triumph. The city was not only football-mad, but in the throes of both a newspaper and a TV war, so they dueled with Elway data.

The Denver Post included a daily watch. “Big Bucks, K mart Budget: For the past two days, Elway has been wearing a pair of flowered shorts and a yellow T-shirt.” The Rocky Mountain News published the price of his house.

Some Bronco veterans favored playing Steve DeBerg. Coach Dan Reeves made the jump to his quarterback of the future, but the future wasn’t quite then. In five games, Elway was sacked 15 times, suffered an injured elbow, shoulder and a concussion, completed only 38 of 83 passes with 5 interceptions and was benched.

“They played their opener against Pittsburgh, and he took about as much physical punishment as any quarterback I’d ever seen,” Jack Elway said.

“And they wondered about his accuracy? I told people, ‘Ever go out and try throwing on Route 101 against traffic?’ ”

Reeves later claimed responsibility, saying he had given Elway too much too soon. Was he always that forgiving? Were there times when he, too, was exasperated?

“Oh sure,” Reeves said. “The big thing John and I have in common, we’re both impatient. We both wanted it and we both wanted it to happen yesterday.

“It was two guys who were immature in their situations, who had to grow up. I think John, because of his dad, really realized the position I was in. I’m sure he’s been mad at me and I’ve been mad at him. But that’s part of a quarterback-head coach way of growing.”

Since then, Elway’s graph has trended up, if erratically. In the last three seasons, he and Dan Marino have each quarterbacked 34 victories, high in the NFL. But Elway has just been named to his first Pro Bowl. His numbers have always flattened out late, and his admirers have always found someone else to admire.

In ‘84, his touchdown pass-interception ratio was 17-11 for 14 games and 1-5 for the last two.

In ‘85, he was 19-15 for 12 games, then 3-8.

This season, when the world really got back into deifying him, he went from 13-4 in the first nine games to 6-9.

What’s going on?

For one thing, the Bronco running game, such as it is, tends to bog down as the season wears on. Maybe Elway gets a little crazy trying to get them over the hump?

This season, though, he and his teammates got off to their best start. When they were 8-1, he had thrown only four interceptions.

Had he learned his lesson?

Well, in the seventh game, against the New York Jets in the Meadowlands, he was chased into his end zone, started to come out, reversed his field, went back into the end zone, was knocked down and, while falling, threw an underhand pass to Gerald Willhite at the seven-yard line. Back to the drawing board.

But after the usual, late-season fade, theirs and his, Elway and his teammates staged a mutual recovery in the playoffs. It all culminated in that 98-yard drive in Cleveland, his greatest moment.

It still looks like progress by fits and starts, but people are asking if this could be his version of Joe Montana’s 89-yarder against the Dallas Cowboys in the ’82 NFC championship game? The curtain going up on greatness?

I’m just a kid.

--JOHN ELWAY Darned if he isn’t, too.

He is 26, he has a wife and a daughter, and the Broncos are trying to sign him to an annual $1.5-million contract for the rest of his playing career. And yet, as he stands among reporters on a Bronco practice field, he seems uneasy.

He’s friendly and laughs at himself. He’s so well-mannered that when he replies to the Miami coach’s critique, he calls him “Mr. Shula.” He isn’t being ironic, either.

“You see these kids yelling, ‘Elway! Elway,’ ” he says, shaking his head. “I was raised to call anyone older than me mister. “

Unlike the modern Bernie Kosar-style prodigies who know how to talk while revealing nothing, Elway will let you know if he’s happy or wounded or would rather be somewhere else. He is given to boyish exuberance. The night the Bronco charter from Cleveland was greeted by thousands, for instance, he kept screaming into the p.a. mike.

Before a Raider game this season, he was asked about having almost become the Raider quarterback, and replied: “They could use one, that’s for sure.”

But reciting his life’s story on a daily basis doesn’t do it for him. He keeps edging this way and that in a never-ending dance until you’re not sure if you’re interviewing a quarterback or Rex, the Wonder Horse.

After all this time and adulation, he still seems embarrassed by it.

Is that amazing, or what?

“I’m still pretty much shy,” he said. “It really bothers me to be stared at. I don’t like to stick out. It’s not a comfortable feeling, having people come up and ask for autographs.

“There’s no happy medium, it’s like everything else. It’s at extremes. There’s people who aren’t getting (publicity) who want more and all of a sudden they’re getting it and they would like it low key.

“I think I’d like to be somebody else, but that’s never going to happen. It’s part of what I’m getting paid for, I guess. To me, 70% of what you get paid for is what you have to deal with off the field.”

Or what his wife has to deal with. A year ago, John threw five interceptions against the Kansas City Chiefs, with Janet watching.

“A guy was sitting behind me at Mile High Stadium,” she told the Rocky Mountain News’ Teri Thompson. “ . . . (He) yelled, ‘You can get your (bleep) wife pregnant but you can’t do anything else.’

“I turned around and slapped him.”

It’s enough to make a kid philosophical.

“You know, I was thinking about that today,” Elway said. “At what point would I fulfill my potential? What would I have to do? It’s a big word. They say I’ve got a lot of it.”

Does he doubt that?

“I’ve said before, I wouldn’t trade one thing I’ve got for one thing anybody else has,” he said. “But then again, that word potential pops up. You start wondering.

“Does anybody reach their potential?”

Most of his peers get pretty close. They have to or they would have been on the waiver wire years ago.

Has Elway won himself a new level of respect?

Does he get to keep it?

What will happen Sunday if he gets an OD of LT, or doesn’t play great?

“I’m kind of glad he’s an underdog,” Tim Hawthorne, Elway’s high school teammate, said. “He doesn’t have much to lose.”

That’s a theory, anyway. Whatever, there are problems in what seem to be storybook lives but on balance, John Elway’s seems OK. The holder of a degree in economics, he was asked if he ever goes so far as to consider retiring and becoming a stock broker.

“No,” he said grinning. “Never that far.”