John Elway

John Elway was born on June 28, 1960 in Port Angeles, Washington. He grew up in a happy home with his twin sister Jana, older sister Lee Ann, and his parents. His father, Jack, was a college football coach, and the family followed his coaching jobs from Washington, to Montana, to Los Angeles, where Elway attended Granada Hills High School. With his father as his mentor and ad hoc coach, Elway learned the basic elements of throwing, running, and reading defenses, as well as the values of hard work and sportsmanship. In his first football game as a sixth-grader, Elway ran for six touchdowns in the first half.

Elway was talented in football, basketball, and baseball. Washington State University basketball coach George Raveling, who saw Elway at a basketball camp, thought he showed significant promise as a basketball player. As a senior he batted .491, had a pitching record of 4-2, led his team to the Los Angeles City championship, and was named Southern California's player of the year. In his final season on the football field at Granada Hills, he completed 129 passes on 200 attempts for 1,837 yards and nineteen touchdowns. His athletic abilities earned the attention of an array of college football

John Elway

and baseball scouts, as well as professional baseball scouts. The Kansas City Royals selected him in the eighteenth round of the 1979 draft; however, Elway, opting to play college football, signed a letter of intent with Stanford University.

During his four years at Stanford, from 1979 to 1983, Elway set five major National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) records as well as nine major Pac-10 conference records. He completed 774 of 1,243 pass attempts (62.1 percent) for 9,349 yards and seventy-seven touchdowns. Elway also played baseball at Stanford for two years. In his last season as a sophomore, he batted.349 with nine home runs and fifty runs batted in (RBI) in forty-nine games. He was drafted by the New York Yankees and played a summer with the Yankees' single-A farm club in Oneonta, New York. His batting average was .349, and he had a team-high twenty-four RBIs.