The Good Doctor & the Good Coach

They were friends at East Leyden High in Franklin Park, Ill., playing two-on-two football, catching a movie, hanging out at dances.

The class of ’70 selected one of them as the student “Most Likely to Succeed.”

They went their separate ways, started a career and a family, and although they have yet to renew acquaintances, by coincidence each moved to Denver where they now live.

Looking back, says Rosanne Andras, the principal’s secretary at East Leyden High outside Chicago, the question is easy: The school’s most successful graduate “has to be the coach of the Broncos: Mike Shanahan. His picture is on our Wall of Fame.”

And the other guy?

“Tom Stelzner? No, that name doesn’t ring a bell,” she says.

Shanahan’s so big at East Leyden his picture is also in the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, and there is another Shanahan display in the theater where many of the alumni gatherings take place. The school’s students have taken to wearing Bronco jerseys, shunning the hometown Bears.

Outside, the East Leyden High marquee wishes Shanahan and his Broncos good luck in Super Bowl XXXIII.

“We have had a lot of good people go through here, but Mike Shanahan is probably our most successful graduate,” says Bob Johnson, the school’s principal. “We’re really proud of him.”

And the other guy?

“I have not heard that name,” Johnson says. “Who is he?”

Mary Tower lives in Golden, Colo., close to Denver. She knows who Mike Shanahan is, says he’s probably a good guy, but he doesn’t compare to Dr. Tom Stelzner, the class of ‘70’s choice to be the student “Most Likely to Succeed.”

“He came from heaven,” Tower says. “Everybody was telling my girls they best go in and say goodbye to their mother because I wasn’t going to make it. But that man saved my life.”

One became a coach, who went on to win a Super Bowl, preparing now for another. The other became a doctor, an associate professor at the University of Colorado before accepting his present position as co-director of the Intensive Care Unit at Denver’s St. Joseph Hospital .

Not many people know about the co-director of the Intensive Care Unit at St. Joseph Hospital.

Stelzner’s 4-year-old daughter is too young to read the yellowing yearbook pullout of senior notables or to appreciate the foresight of the class of ’70 when it selected her father the student “Most Likely to Succeed.”

But every time they are together in the car, making the turn not far from home in front of the giant billboard with the well-known celebrity advertising jewelry, she blurts out, “There’s Coach Shanahan, Dad.”

When his in-laws learned he knew Shanahan, he grew in stature. “Shanahan is like this big guy,” he says, “so I’m a celebrity because I once knew him.”

Shanahan is big, the coach with the highest postseason winning percentage in AFC history. There are automobile dealers willing to let him drive their car free all year because he is Mike Shanahan. There are no waiting lists in restaurants.

“Going by a television in one of the hospital waiting rooms I saw Mike walking side by side with President Clinton in the White House and I was like whoa there,” Stelzner says. “He was just this normal guy with me in high school and he’s walking next to the president--it blew me away.”

One more win and Shanahan will probably be invited back to the White House. The Shanahan tribute in the East Leyden High theater will get an update making it more impressive for alumni gatherings.

Guessing what his old high school buddy must be thinking, Shanahan somewhat sheepishly says, “Most of time he was in trouble--what’s he doing next to the president?”

They have not seen each other since leaving East Leyden High, although a Denver radio station hooked them up briefly for a “This is your life” episode for Shanahan. And the doctor has never asked the coach for tickets, the coach never offering tickets to the doctor.

“I knew he was going to be real successful,” Shanahan says. “He was bright, related well to people and was raised the right way.”

They laugh separately now at the memories. There were “greasers and dupers” at East Leyden High, the tough guys and those who wore plaid.

“I was a greaser,” says Shanahan. “They were the fighters.”

But he had the ability, says Stelzner--declining to say if he still has some of his old plaid outfits--to cross between groups, making friends and earning respect with his intensity and dedication to athletics. He was small, but a good running quarterback, good enough to earn a full scholarship to Eastern Illinois.Stelzner, fourth in his class, went to Bradley University.

Upon departure, the class of ’70 selected Shanahan, along with Linda Kunkel, “Typical Leydenites,” because he was the all-around athlete and she was the top cheerleader.

Now he’s known best for the Broncos’ success, one of the most recognizable faces in Denver.

“There are probably two million people in this city who were dying because the Broncos hadn’t won a Super Bowl,” says the doctor, prescribing Shanahan with great affection as the cure. “He’s probably done more to boost the spirits of people here than anyone.”

There were 44 stories in the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post the day after the Broncos defeated the Jets. Mary Tower called the Rocky Mountain News to tell the newspaper about Stelzner’s heroics, and they mentioned it in a line in a gossip column.

Here’s what the newspaper omitted: “The doctors had given up,” says Monique Tower, Mary’s daughter. “But Dr. Stelzner picked up the pieces and put her on a ventilator that was experimental--he put his job on the line for my mother. He’s a pretty amazing man.”

After months of being in a coma, the result of complications from breast cancer and radiation treatments, Mary Tower emerged early last year. Now she’s going to the gym several times a week to work out.

“Mary Tower was one of those people who is going to die,” Stelzner says. “For whatever reason she gets better--then one day she’s shopping with her two daughters.”

It was a Stelzner triumph on the sixth floor of St. Joseph Hospital, a place where four or five patients die every week--Super Bowl Sunday no different than any other day.

Try walking into one room, nurses and everyone else thrilled because John Elway has just thrown a 75-yard touchdown pass, and remembering not to cheer a second later entering an adjacent room to console a family of a dying patient gathered for a bedside vigil.

Shanahan will tell you every Sunday during the season is do or die. And he takes defeat hard, his demeanor reflecting the disappointment.

On his Monday return to work recently, Stelzner learned he had lost a favorite patient two nights earlier.

“He had Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and I knew he was going to ultimately die, but not now. . . . it was unexpected,” he says. “I had made a real connection with him a week earlier. He talked about his travels, which had been very important to him. It was such a great conversation.

“He’s 30 years old and he dies and he doesn’t have the time to do the things I already did. Right away I’m thinking, my God, what could I have done differently?”

And then the man’s wife called.

“She said how much her husband liked me and how he had really trusted me,” he says. “It was a comfort to her.”

It had been the last week of this man’s life, the highlight being his opportunity to reflect on his fondest memories, and knowing this now, the doctor says, “it was exhilarating. You have a lot of people dying in the ICU and you take your victories where you can.”

Stelzner has patients “that can be a real pain;” Shanahan has the media. A doctor needs to develop defenses over the years or death will drag him down; a coach will tell you “defenses win championships.” Both doctors and head coaches contend they are always right--just ask them.

But who is more successful?

“When I read the little note in the gossip column in the Denver newspaper, I felt that implication,” says Stelzner, one of two physicians selected for the local Kaiser Permanente Award, the medical version of Coach of the Year. “It’s not like I’m a skid row bum.”

He left that message on the gossip columnist’s answering machine the following morning, but if he’s going to treat the world for a lack of perspective, he has a lot more telephone calls to make.

“It’s pretty sad isn’t it? It happens when you’re on the tube all the time and people recognize who you are,” acknowledges Shanahan, who needed the very best medical help in college after losing a kidney. “I would have loved to have been as smart as him.

“I can’t think of anything I’d like for my son more, than him be a doctor, or have that type of education.”

Denver vs. Atlanta

Sunday

3:15 p.m.

Channel 11

* THE SPIN

Falcons arrive in Miami but one player didn’t want to depart in orderly fashion. Page 8

* NOTES, Page 8