He's been blind, he's been retired, he's been in jail, he's been on Arli$$. Pops died on him, and Jemaul died on him too, but this is what grew him up. A certain quarterback owes him now, and a certain set of brothers owe him now, and the Denver Broncos owe him now -- $56.1 million, in fact. He is pro football's highest-paid running back, but he used to be a paperboy, and he used to play nose tackle, and he used to earn the NFL's rookie minimum. A Super Bowl validated him, or a migraine did, or a mother did, or a president did, but the bottom line is Terrell Davis was never supposed to be here. He spends his money on air-conditioning, on braces, on vanilla ice cream and on bubble baths, but the best dollar he ever spent was on a medicated headache spray. He has the perfect initials, and the perfect offensive line, and the perfect bedroom, and the perfect home theater, but Pops used to smoke joints in front of him, and his brother was convicted of murder in front of him, and so he knows it is all fleeting, and that the Denver Broncos are saying, "What have you done for me next?"

So he marinated himself all off-season long, working out in the heat, working out after his Campbell's Soup commercial, working out at every Ritz-Carlton he stayed at. A Super Bowl MVP can kick back or go clubbing or drive his free car up the coast, but not this one. This one bench-pressed 275 pounds six times straight -- during vacation, mind you -- and this one gave his MVP Mustang convertible to his brother Reggie, and this one went to bed at 11 o'clock on the evening he got John Elway his ring.

"I just went to sleep, man," he says. "I must have had one of the most boringest nights in Super Bowl history for an MVP. If they want to talk about records, that must be a record."

Who knows what he'll do for an encore, or what he'll do with the strangers who rifle through his mailbox, or what he'll do with the woman who spent the night with him and then gave him the Mile High Salute in the morning. He says he will not change now. He is the same person who used to invite stray dogs into his home, and used to bathe his great-grandfather, and who must take medication the rest of his playing days. He has a lot to live up to, but he looks at it another way -- he's had a lot to live down to.

***

EIGHTEEN YEARS BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL ...

They nicknamed him "Boss Hogg" back then, because they couldn't tackle all 90 pounds of him. It's peculiar to be 7 years old and indestructible and gaining 400 yards a game in Pop Warner -- but that was him. Other teams would shout, "Look out for No. 30," and so his coach would slip him jersey No. 31 at halftime, and the scam would work for a minute or so, until he busted another 60-yarder. Then he'd show up at the next game wearing No. 32.

His mother worked double shifts at a nursing home, but she would pick him up after practice when his teammates were long gone, and that was how his world changed one day -- at dusk waiting for his mother's Chevy Malibu. Who knows what triggered it, but he glanced at the floodlights, turned toward the field and saw ... nothing!

"Well, I could see people, but it was kind of spotty," he says. "I was like, man, I'm going blind. I was praying to the Lord, 'Please, this can't be happening.' I'm whining like, 'Where's my mom at?' Now 25 minutes, 30 minutes have gone by, and I'm scared as hell. 'Cause I've never had my eyes just go like that. I remember thinking, 'Is this how it happens for blind people?' "

His mother finally tooled by, and his vision was intact by then, but then the headache set in. The Malibu's rusty shock absorbers weren't helping, and the car radio wasn't helping, and neither were the aspirin and the hot tea he tried at home, and our 7-year-old Boss Hogg was in the bathroom at 1 a.m., dry-heaving. It wasn't until 4 a.m. that he could eat -- and he chose vanilla ice cream, his beloved vanilla ice cream.

It wasn't the last time he'd go blind. It happened from then right on into high school: in math class, and then when he accidentally smacked headfirst into a pole, and playing football, and in a bowling alley and while he installed a car radio in the midday sun. "I'd always leave the house with that fear like, damn, this is the day it could come," he says. He thought extreme light was causing it. He would sleep as much as he could, and he would tell his buddies to hit the beach without him, and finally, his mother took him in for a CAT scan. The doctors told him he had a normal brain, but he didn't believe them; he thought he had a tumor or two months left to see.

One day, he complained to his teachers that he couldn't read the chalkboard and they called Pops in to fetch him. And Pops was the wrong one to complain to. "I was like, 'Ah, I got a headache,' " Terrell says, "and Pops made me hang up my jacket, and I couldn't do it. My depth perception and my motor skills were off. And he yelled at me, and I still could not put my coat on the rack."

Pops gave him a whupping then.

***

ELEVEN YEARS BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL ...

Pops was a welder in his later years, and a great cook, but he was once an armed robber. His name was John Davis, though he went by Joe, and he'd been in St. Louis in the 1960s roaming the streets. He had a wife, Kateree, and two children, John Jr. and James, but he barely had a damn cent. "He was unemployed, didn't have any skills, and I guess he thought armed robbery was the quick way to pay the rent," Kateree says. She says he spent three years in prison, and she had a third son named Reggie Webb by another man while he was gone. When the prison term was up, she took Joe back. They had a fourth son, Bobby, and a fifth, Tyrone, and when she was eight months pregnant with a sixth and final son, Terrell, they picked up and moved to San Diego.

"I was tired of being broke," Kateree says. "I thought it'd be good for Joe to start over in another city." Kateree soon was in a nursing program, and Joe was welding, and they managed to buy a five-bedroom house. But Joe would drink and have the fellas over, and Joe would smoke marijuana in front of the six boys. "I guess he was trying to show them if you're gonna smoke pot and drink, do it at home," Kateree says.

Joe finally cleaned himself up, and if he could behave, so could his boys. He had every one of them saying yes, ma'am and no, ma'am. If they forgot, he would take his belt out and whip them into saying it. "He'd be worn out by the time he got to Terrell," Reggie says. But the boys loved Bonnie, the German shepherd Pops bought them, and young Terrell kept bringing stray dogs home and saying, "Can we keep it, please?" The boys would smell Pops' cooking on the way home from school, and he would take them go-carting, and life was settling in at a reasonable pace.

Little did they know that Pops' body had been invaded by lupus. Terrell was in ninth grade by then, still a 14-year-old Boss Hogg, still a running back you had to see. He was at the park one day when Kateree's best friend bolted onto the field and rounded up four of the boys and rushed them to the hospital. Pops' heart had given out, with Kateree standing by his side. Pops had said, "No, no, no," and those were his last words. The boys absolutely bawled.

They went their separate ways. It got so bad with Bobby driving drunk that Kateree began handcuffing herself to him to keep him in the house. But then Bobby turned 18, and then he had a gun, and then a few years later, he robbed a woman in southeast San Diego and shot her at close range. The woman survived, but she was six months pregnant and the baby didn't make it. Bobby was convicted of murder, among other charges, and was sentenced to life without parole. Though the murder conviction was eventually set aside on appeal, Bobby ended up serving nearly six years. And he had company. Tyrone served time for cocaine possession, and three of the brothers got locked up in a Mexican jail one night. Pops' death had rocked them, rocked them all.

As for Terrell, he closed up after Pops passed away. His dog Bonnie had just died too, and Terrell began spending his weekends at home, sleeping until noon. His headaches returned, and he wanted to quit his paper route, and he drove around aimlessly on his moped, and he went from A's and B's to F's.

"I still remember looking at Pops the day he died," he says. "I remember thinking, 'Blink an eye, get up, say something, say you're playing.' I'm looking at him like, 'This can't be it.' I'd never seen a dead person before. All life just came out of me." And so at 14, he retired -- no more football.

***

SIX YEARS BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL ...

He started playing again, thanks to Jemaul. Jemaul was Terrell's cousin, or so everyone at school thought. The truth was Jemaul was just another boarder in Kateree's home. After Joe died, Kateree took in every wayward soul she could find, and Jemaul's deprived family was invited in. Kateree's grandfather was there too, after suffering a stroke, and Terrell's job was to scrub him and feed him when his mom wasn't around. As many as 12 people were running around that house at a time.

But Terrell paired up with Jemaul, and Jemaul would ask him to go to the library, so Terrell began pushing a pencil again. Jemaul had a videotape to prove it. Jemaul began videotaping Terrell in class and playing football at Lincoln Prep High, not that he was a star anymore. He had not played for three years, and he was a backup fullback now, and a nose tackle and a kicker.

He would still get those headaches, and Jemaul would serve him tea and hush the rest of the house. The two of them graduated, with Jemaul joining the Navy and Terrell signing with George Allen at Long Beach State. They began to map their lives out. Terrell would be an accountant, and he and Jemaul would open a club in San Diego someday, a nonviolent club, and they would stay out of harm's way in the meantime.

But Terrell ruined that one. Visiting home from college, he and some so-called friends stole wheels from a car, and the police saw them plain as day. "He spent the night in jail, and I wouldn't go get him because I was so angry," Kateree says. "He was different than my other boys. He was a homebody. He liked video games. He was just a good kid, after dealing with all those knucklehead brothers. That's why I was so angry. Not him, too!"

He returned to college, but when Long Beach dropped football a year later, he wanted out of California. He transferred to Georgia, where the coach was the rigid Ray Goff. Sometimes Goff would bench him for going half-speed in practice, and sometimes a groin injury would bench him too, and he was never a lead back, never at peace. So Terrell wanted Jemaul there with him. Jemaul was out of the Navy by then, and Terrell thought they could help each other, and he begged him to fly in and live with him. "Get out of that place, man, get out of San Diego," he told him. A week later Jemaul was dead, shot by a guy he was gambling with.

Terrell attended Jemaul's funeral as stoic as he could be. Pops' death had taught him to "expect the unexpected," and that had become his motto. Bobby's murder trial had clarified that. And Jemaul's death only clarified it further. "I began thinking anything's possible in this world," he says. "Anything. Bad or good. Anything."

***

ONE YEAR BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL ...

And just like that, they figured his headaches out. "You ever heard of migraines, Terrell?" the Georgia trainer asked him. "You've got the classic symptoms." The trainer put him on an anti-inflammatory called Indocin, a pill he now pops every day, and what you had was a brand-new running back.

He ran only a 4.7 40 at the pre-draft combine, but the Broncos needed somebody to take the heat off John Elway and picked Terrell in the sixth round. He gained 1,117 yards as a rookie and was a lead tailback for the first time since he was Boss Hogg, for the first time since Pops' death. "Well, I was just back to my natural position," he says.

It helped that the Broncos' linemen held their blocks longer, perfect for a 5'11'', 210-pound cutback runner like Terrell, who says, "I run downhill." His mother in San Diego would ask about his headaches, and he would say, "I got that covered." He had begun to wear braces on his teeth to stabilize his jaw and help prevent the attacks -- "Makes me look like a little-ass kid," he says -- and he also bought cartons of Migranal, a spray that helps abort migraines once they start. Before every game he would tell the Broncos trainer, "Here, hold this Migranal. Just in case."

Then, in his second season, he took a hit in Tampa and started to go blind again, and he called for the Migranal. A few weeks later, against San Diego, he took another whack, and he started to see double, and he signaled for the Migranal. He finished both games, but he heard the whispers. What if he were to get a migraine in a big game?

***

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE SUPER BOWL ...

He figured the best antidote was sleep, and so he turned his Denver bedroom into a "cave." He painted the walls black, and he bought tight window blinds, and he followed a nightly routine. He would shower or bathe before bed, and he would blast the air-conditioning and the fan, too, and he would turn on jazz or R&B and play it low. The sheets had to be fresh, and no one was allowed to touch him or call him before 9 a.m.

So the night before the Super Bowl, nobody called, nobody dared. He turned the AC up in his room, and took a bubble bath, and ate his vanilla ice cream, and while most other Broncos tossed and turned, he was knocked out.

***

THE SECOND QUARTER OF THE SUPER BOWL ...

So, who knew? He was running to daylight, and the Packers were shouting, "Look out for No. 30," and then Green Bay's LeRoy Butler conveniently kneed him in the head. The Broncos were near the goal line then, and the first quarter gun sounded, and he had to walk 80 yards to the other end of the field, and he turned to see ... nothing!

"I was like, 'Not today, man,' " he says. "You're seeing spots. You're seeing half of whatever. The only thing I can tell you is it's like a collage. Like if you've got a bunch of pictures, and you cut them up and put them on a board. A million pictures on a board. S--- is everywhere."

So he called for some oxygen and for the Migranal, but the coach was calling for him. They were on the 1-yard line, and Mike Shanahan needed him, but Terrell said, "I can't see." Coach told him he didn't need to see, it was a fake, and Elway would roll for a TD. "I wasn't going to argue, man," Terrell says. "But I told him, 'As long as you know I can't see. You need to know that.' Of course, I'd run that play eight billion times. I could run it blind."

Hell, he did run it blind -- and somehow he didn't get decapitated. He says it was like "looking through a glass shower block," and that he could squint and see the Packer colors. He made sure to run "where there were no colors" and "they somehow missed me." Elway scored, and then the Migranal kicked in, and then Terrell scored three times, including the TD that won the game, and then Elway was off the hook. And 157 yards later, here was your MVP.

***

FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE SUPER BOWL ...

He could have endorsed everything from panty hose to orthodontists, but instead, Terrell Davis endorsed some of the staples in his life: Campbell's Soup, Sony PlayStation, Migranal. "The Rolling Stones go on the Budweiser Tour; Terrell Davis went on the Migranal Tour," says his agent, Neil Schwartz. He gave speeches, and migraine sufferers thanked him for admitting he was one of them. He smiled his tin smile and opened a migraine foundation. He visited the White House with the team, and he, not Elway, gave Clinton a jersey and a salute. "The dude even knew my name," he says. He moved his mother into his Denver neighborhood, and she needed a big house, because she has adopted two children and is having 10 people over at a time, like the old days.

But his privacy was gone. Now, people saluted him in airports. The makeup artist on Arli$$ saluted him too (in the episode, Arliss causes the Super Bowl migraine by giving him chocolate at a pregame party). People were ringing his doorbell and shuffling through his mail, and the ultimate was that woman saluting him after their night together. So he decided to stay home more. He turned his basement into a theater with a marquee that said "TD's Cinema" (later, "Club TD's"). He became a recluse. "I don't feel safe," he says.

His brothers wanted a piece of him too. They'd fallen out of touch with each other. So Reggie and James called a brothers-only meeting in San Diego. They had not been in the same room together since Pops' funeral, and Bobby the ex-con was between jobs and was moving into Kateree's new home, and John needed help too. Terrell wanted to fix it all, by starting a construction company and offer every one of them a job. He told them to just wait until he got paid, that the Broncos promised he'd get paid, they'd really promised.

***

150 DAYS AFTER THE SUPER BOWL ...

Training camp was almost here, and the team, which had redone his contract twice, was going to tear it up again. He didn't have a moped anymore, but he had a motorcycle, and he rode it to clear his mind, to think about Pops and Jemaul, and going blind, and how nothing surprises him anymore.

Then he got a phone call the day before camp, and the caller said, "Hey, it's Mike."

"Mike who?"

"Mike Shanahan -- your coach!"

"Uh, what's up, man?"

His average salary was up 532%. He got a nine-year, $56.1 million deal including an $11 million signing bonus, and Shanahan was phoning his No. 1 player (Elway being 1A) to congratulate him on his "lifetime" deal.

Boss Hogg hung up the phone then ... and went back to sweeping the kitchen floor. He'd already lived a lifetime.

This article appears in the September 7, 1998 issue of ESPN The Magazine.