Denver’s All-Pro running back, Terrell Davis, says, “When peopletalk about big-time receivers, Ed doesn’t get mentioned. That’s unfair. But the more they ignore him, the better it is for us.” …

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Shawn Springs learned that the hard

way in September ’97, in his second game as a pro. McCaffrey

burned him for eight catches and two scores, and Springs was

penalized three times while trying to cover him. “If you watch

film on a guy like that, you don’t know how good he is,” says

Springs. “You think he’s just this really big white guy.”

The underlying assumption, of course, is that white

guys–especially large, long-striding receivers such as

McCaffrey–are slow. McCaffrey can handle immeasurable grief

about his hair, unhip wardrobe and nervous neck twitches, but

make a crack about his speed and he’s more defensive than

Calista Flockhart. It’s a reaction provoked by years of jabs,

including one by a Giants Weekly writer who said he’d “seen

better moves by Ironside” and another that appeared in a 1996 SI

article suggesting that McCaffrey “should be an Amway

distributor by now, he’s so slow.”

If you’re doing an interview with McCaffrey, speed kills. “Are

you going to rip Ed for being slow again, or do you plan on

writing the truth for a change?” his wife, Lisa, asks as she

bounces through the kitchen of their house a few miles south of

the Broncos’ facility. While giving constant chase to their two

sons–Max, 4, and Christian, 2–Lisa gets off the best lines of

the interview. Noting that her father, sprinter David Sime,

graced SI’s cover in 1956, Lisa riffs, “That’s why Ed and I got

together–so we could breed fast white guys.”

If Ed, whose comments tend to be bland and cliche-ridden, is

plain mustard, Lisa is wasabi. “It’s like a comedy show,” says

former 49ers offensive lineman Harris Barton, a good friend of

the McCaffreys’. “Ed’s the setup guy, and she comes up with the

punch line. They work like a team to try to make you feel bad

about yourself.” …

When Ed and Lisa aren’t breeding fast white guys–they’re

expecting their third son in April–they amuse themselves by

making prank calls. In one of their favorites, Ed pretends he’s

with the water company and tells his victim he wants to check

the neighborhood’s water pressure. “I tell him to turn on all

the faucets and flush the toilets,” Ed says. “If that works, I

ask him to do it again. [Colorado Avalanche right wing] Claude

Lemieux flushed three times before he caught on. The Romanowskis

[Broncos linebacker Bill and his wife, Julie] are a five- or

six-flush family.”

The McCaffreys met in 1990 at Stanford, where Ed was finishing a

stellar career. A three-sport star from Allentown, Pa., he chose

Stanford largely because coaches there fancied him as a wideout

rather than as a tight end. “I was pretty dorky in high school,”

McCaffrey says. “I was pretty much of a recluse. Meeting Lisa

lightened me up.”

Ed clicked with Lisa, then a Stanford soccer player, at a mutual

friend’s birthday party at Max’s Opera Cafe, a Palo Alto

restaurant that would serve as the inspiration for their first

son’s name. “I thought he was pretty hot,” Lisa recalls. “But he

had this terrible ’70s ‘do–long in the back, and bangs straight

across the middle like Moe from the Three Stooges.” Ed doesn’t

have bad-hair days, he has bad-hair decades. The next time the

two went out, Lisa slipped into the conversation, “You know, I’m

really good at cutting hair.”

An hour later they were back at Ed’s off-campus apartment, where

Lisa gave her first-ever haircut. “She was using these little

thread scissors,” Ed says, “and it took her an hour and 45

minutes.”

When the Broncos aren’t goofing on McCaffrey’s ‘do, they’re

making fun of his wardrobe. One teammate says McCaffrey looks as

if he “dresses in airline blankets.” His game-day attire is

particularly unpretentious. “Guys are wearing Versace, Armani,

Gucci,” says Justin Armour, a Denver backup receiver, “and

homeboy will show up in unmatching Polo sweats, old running

shoes and a DirecTV hat.”

But what truly sets McCaffrey apart is what he wears–or doesn’t

wear–once he takes the field. To rid himself of unnecessary

weight, he defaces his uniform. He cuts out the lining, belt

buckle and pockets of his pants, punches holes in his jersey,

even slices off all but a half inch of the band above his

athletic supporter, creating what amounts to a G-string jockstrap.

The only padding McCaffrey wears is a discontinued model of

shoulder pads (Wilson’s 77-I Aggressor) that, according to

Broncos equipment manager Doug West, “you wouldn’t even put on a

junior high kid. I’ve tried to take his pads from him, because

they’re right on the borderline of safety, but he won’t let me.”

This decrease in padding leads to an increase in pain, but

McCaffrey says it’s tolerable. “Getting lighter probably gives

me more of a psychological edge than a physical one,” he says,

“but I guess I had a complex about being slow, because so many

things have been written.”

Ah, the speed trap: The stigma of slowness is tougher to escape

than any defensive back. Yet it’s not applied to all white guys.

No one accuses Ed’s younger brother, Billy, of lacking

quickness. Billy, who played on Duke’s ’91 national championship

team and was an All-America point guard at Vanderbilt in ’93 and

’94, avoided that rap by keeping up with future NBA studs such

as Kenny Anderson and Allan Houston. “Growing up, everyone used

to assume I was faster than Ed,” says Billy, who has played

abroad the past several seasons. “But every time we’d race, he’d

win.”

Shortly before the ’91 NFL draft, Ed says, he ran consecutive

4.38 40s that were timed by the San Diego Chargers. Though

McCaffrey never was a full-time starter with the New York

Giants, who took him in the third round of the draft, he led the

team in receptions in his second year, with 49. His aw-shucks

appearance also made him a primary target off the field. He was

routinely denied access to the team bus by drivers who didn’t

believe he was a player. “Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor would

tell the driver they’d never seen me before and make me wait

outside for five minutes,” McCaffrey says.

Once at Giants training camp, McCaffrey was the last player in

the locker room, and a janitor approached him and began

screaming, “Pick up those damn towels!” When the shocked

McCaffrey didn’t respond, the janitor ordered him out of the room.

After Dan Reeves replaced Ray Handley as the Giants’ coach

before the ’93 season, McCaffrey’s role diminished. …

Reeves, who now coaches the Atlanta Falcons, recently said that cutting McCaffrey was one of the biggest mistakes he ever made.

After a yearlong apprenticeship under Rice and Taylor in San

Francisco, McCaffrey was lured to Denver, which had hired

Shanahan following the Niners’ Super Bowl victory over the

Chargers in January ’95. Bill Walsh, who came out of retirement

to spend the ’95 season as an offensive assistant with San

Francisco, says he was told the team lost a chance to retain

McCaffrey when it balked at paying him $350,000 a season.

McCaffrey won a starting job in ’96 and caught a total of 93

passes for 1,143 yards and 15 touchdowns over the next two

seasons….

The game showed

what a steal Denver had in a player who will earn a relatively

paltry $897,000 a year through 2000. A few weeks earlier Sharpe

had created a stir by telling USA Today, “If Ed McCaffrey was

black…he’d be making three-and-a-half million dollars a year.”