Mike Boryla spent 40 years forgetting all about football. Now the 67-year-old former Regis High School star, Philadelphia Eagle and all-pro quarterback talks about it all the time in stark, venomous terms.
“It’s a psychopathic blood sport,” Boryla said recently while sitting in a Castle Rock coffeehouse, where he spends most of his days writing plays. Boryla’s ire toward the game, along with his spirituality, suddenly fired a need to write after a long career in the corporate world.
Nearing age 60, he started penning stories and screenplays, including a one-man show called “The Disappearing Quarterback” that he performed in 2014 in Philadelphia and for a short time in Denver. In it, Boryla talks about his adventures in football, including concussions, and other memories that Philadelphia theater critic Howard Shapiro found meandering but endearing.
“It has elements of insight and candor, and a genuine person on stage,” Shapiro wrote at the time.
He’s penned four other plays that he would like the Denver Center Theatre Company to produce. As many as 400 scripts are submitted each year in hopes they will become a play, and many are written by novices like Boryla, said Doug Langworthy, director of new play development for the company.
He declined to comment on Boryla’s submissions. But, he said, a key factor in getting a play on stage is the unique voice of the playwright. “We are always looking for a good variety of subjects. We don’t always want just a three-part living room drama.”
“We want one with a point of view. It can be serious or it can be funny,” Langworthy said. “It helps if the story is original.”
One of Boryla’s plays is called “Serpent Seed” and is loosely based on the German play “Faust,” in which a man sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and earthly pleasures. In his treatment, Boryla writes about a powerful leader that imposes martial law on the post-apocalyptic country once known as the United States of Football.
Boryla, who moved with his family to Castle Rock six years ago, is clear in his contempt for the game of football. He says the NFL’s top executives need to be investigated for hiding the risks of sub-concussive blows, not only from NFL players but also from the parents of college, high school and younger players.
“What they are doing is clearly a criminal enterprise,” Boryla said. “It is a psychopathic, racketeering criminal mob.”
Boryla claims he was always more comfortable with a book rather than a football, which he excelled at as a youth. He was a Denver Post Gold Helmet Award winner at Regis and was a Stanford University Playboy Magazine All-American.
“But I was always much more of an intellectual than a football player,” Boryla said. He took four years of Latin at Regis and was a Russian history major and strategic arms minor at Stanford.
Boryla played for three years in Philadelphia and he threw two touchdown passes in the final minutes of the 1976 Pro Bowl to lead the NFC to a 23-20 win.
He finished out his career at Tampa Bay before quitting the game altogether in 1979. Injuries didn’t necessarily force Boryla out, but a higher calling did. “I walked away from football because it was like Sodom in the Bible,” he said, referring to one of the sinful cities in the book of Genesis. “I was told by the Lord to quit it and never look back.”
He said he suffered three concussions as a player, twice in Philadelphia. The way team officials handled his third concussion — in which he blacked out for a while — showed him head trauma was regarded as little more than a joke.
“Here is a sport where everything is described in terms of war — ‘a blitz’ or ‘sudden death,'” Boryla said. “But when they took me into the locker room they told me all I got was ‘dinged.’ Like a little bell. Dinged. Then they told me to get back out there.”
For its part, the NFL has paid out more than $500 million in claims approved under a 2017 legal settlement that resolved thousands of lawsuits accusing the league of hiding what it knew about the risks of repeated concussions. Still, NFL players were diagnosed with more concussions in 2017 — a total of 281 — than in any season since the league began sharing the data in 2010.
Concussions are “something which challenges us now to roll up our sleeves and work hard to see that number go down,” Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, told reporters in January. “We take this as a challenge, because we’re not going to be satisfied until we drive that number much lower.”
After quitting the NFL, Boryla went to Stetson Law School in Florida, graduating second-highest in his class. He later earned a master’s degree in taxation from the University of Denver.
He never talked about football while he forged a career as a tax lawyer and mortgage broker. Then, Boryla started writing.
“I always loved books and writing,” Boryla said. “But it seemed I had writer’s block for over 40 years. Then it just started coming out of me.”
He admits some of his passion was fueled by his anger toward his father, the late Vince Boryla. The elder Boryla played basketball for DU and later in the NBA. He became coach of the New York Knicks and at one time was general manager for the Denver Nuggets.
Mike Boryla said his earliest memory was as a boy of 7, seeing his dad get kicked out of Madison Square Garden after a dispute with officials during a game.
“I saw him being hauled out of there, and there I was, a little boy, left on the bench by myself,” Mike Boryla said. “That really sticks with you.”
