His Masterpiece Went Unfinished at the Coliseum

I don’t know about you, but I go to see John Elway play quarterback the same way I’d go to hear Caruso sing, Or Kelly dance, Shoemaker ride, Jordan dunk, Mays field, Andretti drive, Nicklaus putt, Dempsey punch, Ruth bat.

It’s like watching an artist paint.

I mean, you don’t go to the opera to see how it came out. You go to hear Pavarotti hit the notes. You go to see “Singin’ in the Rain� not to see who gets the girl, but Gene Kelly climbing lamp posts.

It’s not so much a game as it is a recital. John Albert Elway at the keyboard. I mean, who’s keeping score?

Elway with the ball is as exciting a sight as there is in sports. In his own field, there’s nothing close. Oh, I know Joe Montana has been more successful (in winning Super Bowls, not necessarily getting to them), but I don’t think you get the same charge when Montana drops back as you do when Elway does.

You get the feeling he’s never more than one flick of the wrist from an 80-yard touchdown pass. Other quarterbacks move their teams down the field like a guy laying carpet, but Elway is much more explosive than that.

You also have the notion he could complete a pass to a janitor. Let’s face it, Montana had Rice, Unitas had Lenny Moore and Raymond Berry, even Waterfield had Hirsch. Elway has What’s-his-name?

Quarterbacks come from western Pennsylvania. Check it out: Joe Namath, Jim Kelly, Joe Montana, John Unitas, Dan Marino, to name a few. Elway comes from Stanford. The San Fernando Valley. He should have been a surfer. Had a board--or a guitar--in his hands instead of a football. He overcame this underprivileged background.

In a way, he is the Denver Broncos. I mean, you’d hate to see them without him.

Take last Sunday. The first six times Denver got the ball, Elway drove them down the field to a score. There were three touchdown passes, three field goals. He presented his team with 20-7, 27-10 and 30-13 leads. The Broncos first punted with 1 minute 20 seconds to play in the third quarter.

When the game went into overtime, Elway’s team got the ball and he promptly drove them down to the Raiders’ 23-yard line for what appeared to be a routine game-winning field goal. It was missed.

Elway completed 25 of 36 passes, which would have been good even if half of them were completed behind the line of scrimmage. But one touchdown pass was good for 54 yards, another for 27. And in overtime, he completed one pass for 20 yards and another for 30. Armed and dangerous, Elway with a football is John Wayne with a 10-gauge. You better scatter.

He is a legend chasing legends. His 34,246 yards put him some distance from Fran Tarkenton’s all-time 47,003, but not that far from Dan Fouts’ second place of 43,040 or Unitas’ 40,239. And with a five-year contract at 34, Elway has only Montana and Marino to pass among active players. And Air Elway, unlike Air Jordan, is not contemplating retiring,

After a game in which he threw for three touchdowns, 361 yards and 25 completions, Elway revealed that he had done it all through a haze of flu. The Raiders were chasing a sick man all day.

They still couldn’t catch him. Elway is as hard to sack as a coop full of chickens. Even with his back turned, he seems to sense the precise millisecond when he has to let go of the ball before the lineman’s paw is about to descend on his neck. Does he have the protective mechanism of Unitas, who was said to have such peripheral vision that he could see his ears?

Elway smiles, shakes his head.

“I listen to the crowd,� he says. “In most cases, you can tell how close the pursuit is by their excitement. When (Greg) Townsend got near me today, my teammates were yelling at me.�

So, it’s not peripheral?

“Naw. It’s preservation,� Elway says with a laugh.

An interception-touchdown ratio of one to one is usually considered acceptable in the NFL. Elway’s ratio this season is 25 touchdowns to 10 interceptions.

Because it was 4,890 attempts ago, Elway has no recollection of his first pro pass.

“But I do remember I was one for eight that day,� he says. “I think they were considering me to hold for place kicks.�

He is at his most dangerous when the game is on the line. The Broncos’ staff has toted up 31 times he has engineered fourth-quarter drives to save the game for Denver. The most famous was the AFC championship game against Cleveland that put Elway’s team into the Super Bowl in early 1987. Elway went 98 yards in 15 plays and threw a five-yard touchdown pass to Mark Jackson, sending the game into overtime. Then he drove the Broncos 60 yards in nine plays to the winning field goal.

So, he gave his team a 30-13 lead Sunday with a quarter left to play. And then he drove the offense into field-goal range in the overtime.

Mozart never conducted a symphony better. Olivier never handled Shakespeare any better. If it was art you came to see, Elway didn’t disappoint. The rest was arithmetic.