In early January, the wheels of the Broncos’ plane touched down in Denver, and Garett Bolles’ hopes of a dream run were left frozen back in Buffalo. He’d known disappointment for many years. Never quite like this.
He was hurt. But he didn’t go home.
A half mile from Broncos Park in Englewood, the kids at Marvin W. Foote Youth Services Center rise at 6:30 a.m. They sit in the mornings and discuss their goals in a world that has left many of them behind. They take classes run by the Cherry Creek School District. And sometimes — a lot of times — they will get a visit from the man they call “GB.” He is a 300-pound Santa, bearing gifts for the kids who stay on track: buckets of wings, shoes, a bike.
He always says he’ll leave at five. Eugene Forbes, director of the Foote Center, knows he never leaves at five.
“Garett’s here today,” Forbes will tell his wife over the phone.
“Alright,” his wife will respond. “Tell him I say, ‘Hi. And I’ll see ya when I see ya.’ ”
Foster parents Greg and Emily Freeman saved Bolles’ life once, picking him up off the side of the road and taking in a troubled 19-year-old after he’d been kicked out of his home in Utah. The 33-year-old Bolles now tries to do the same for the hundreds of kids in Arapahoe County who come through the juvenile detention system. He mentors them at the Foote Center, and follows journeys from the start of their probation through Magistrate Beth Elliott-Dumler’s juvenile court.
By the time a four-year Broncos extension finishes in 2028, Bolles will have made over $161 million in his NFL career. He spends his post-practice minutes carrying 10-month-old daughter Zaya on his hip, with 6-year-old Ariyah and 8-year-old Kingston in tow. Still, the emptiness of that road in Utah lives in his heart. You never forget abandonment.
“It’s a dark lifestyle,” Bolles told The Denver Post in early August. He might get emotional, he warned. He spoke of the children he knows within the sterile walls down the road. He spoke of a teenage Bolles. They are one and the same.
“It’s, uh, scary,” he manages. “It’s dreary. It’s uncomfortable. It’s — you feel like nobody loves and cares for you. You feel like, ‘Why did God put me in this family? Why did God put me in this situation? Why? Who’s doing this to me?’ ”
This is not charity work. This is a full-time role he’s held for years, alongside his role as the Broncos’ left tackle. You can make an argument for either as his primary job. Bolles owns a second phone dedicated solely to kids in the juvenile system, working with their public defender to be put on their professional call list. He never turns it off. He will almost always answer, because he knows these kids just need someone to notice them.
“I have seen kids with no one else in this world,” Elliot-Dumler said. “And he comes in, and tells them he loves them.”
A funny thing has happened. Bolles first walked into the Foote Center as one of the most reviled athletes in Denver, a first-round pick whose NFL career was drowning in inconsistency and holding penalties. Passion too easily became anger. Lack of focus turned into mistakes.
Bolles has grown up because he’s needed to be the success story and stable vision he presents to the youth in juvie. He holds the kids accountable. They hold him accountable, too. His career has taken off ever since.
After the Broncos’ January Wild Card loss to the Bills, Bolles went straight to the Foote Center. He spent eight hours there that day.
“It gives me a fire to go play on the football field,” Bolles said. “It gives me a fire to be a dad. It gives me a fire to go be the best left tackle in football.
“And all these kids, I put them in the back of my heart.”
•••
The chairs of individual group “pods” at the Foote Center are set in a U shape, so faces can see one another. The furniture is low. There’s nowhere to hide.
The Broncos’ linchpin didn’t want to hide the first day he walked in. He didn’t even ask Forbes if it was okay to sit. He just plopped down directly in the middle, turned to each member of the half-circle, and shook their hands.
Hi, I’m GB. Hi, I’m GB.
The kids asked if he was a football player. Bolles told them he played for the Broncos. He had them hooked, and he told them the story of a boy who was homeless once. In and out of juvie. In a gang. What gang? The gang wasn’t important, Bolles said. He could’ve dropped a pin, and they would’ve jumped. So he turned the conversation back around. He wanted to talk about them, now.
The visits to Foote have followed a similar pattern since that first introduction. Kids will want to talk to Bolles one-on-one, and Forbes will sit with them. Bolles will listen. And then Forbes will see the kid disappear into a giant bear-hug.
“Garett will sit there and be like, ‘Hey, I know you may not have heard this in a long time, but I do love you,” Forbes says. ” ‘I may have just met you, but know that I already love you.’ ”
He tells most everyone he sits with that, Forbes says. A couple of times, kids have gotten up with tears in their eyes.
“These kids come from all different backgrounds, rough backgrounds,” Bolles tells The Post. “Gang violence, and drugs and alcohol, abusive relationships, drugged-down. ‘You’re not worth it, we don’t want you.’
“They go to all these different programs, they get shipped all over the state, they come back. I mean, these kids are just looking for love.”
Bolles had a plan. He had already been working with Elliot-Dumler in an incentive court program where he recorded personalized videos and sent along signed memorabilia for kids who graduated from probation early. He convinced Elliot-Dumler, somehow, to redecorate her juvenile courtroom with photos of him and the mantras at the core of his messaging.
What is Your Why?
It Does Not Matter How You Start. It Only Matters How You Finish.
It wasn’t enough. Bolles would see kids finish probation, run into trouble again, and wind up back at the Foote Center. So he came to Forbes.
At first, when Bolles promised himself so deeply to the youth at Foote, Forbes raised an eyebrow. Some Broncos had come before, said some things, and left.
Maybe Forbes was a bit biased, too. He’d go to Broncos games with his friends early in Bolles’ career, and they’d find themselves roaring in the stands at No. 72.
“We’re like, ‘This dude’s garbage, this guy’s just — why are we paying this guy first-round draft money?’ ” Forbes recalled.
Eventually, Forbes started to see Bolles in himself. The program director grew up in the foster system and started playing football in high school to avoid getting in fights. Forbes wore No. 74 in high school; so did Bolles. They became friends and partners as Bolles kept coming back.
“I started going from, ‘Man, this guy irritates me ’cause he’s constantly holding, or getting our quarterback sacked,” Forbes said, “to, ‘This guy is a genuine human being. Just love for everyone.’”
•••
In September of last year, Bolles stared down an all-out blitz from one particularly inquisitive youth at a table in the Foote Center. Bolles didn’t want to talk about himself. The kid didn’t, either. He peppered Bolles for half an hour with a nonstop stream of questions.
How much do you bench? Bolles didn’t bench. Don’t you have to bench? He did other strength stuff. You gotta know how much you bench. He didn’t.
Bolles simply sat and absorbed. The next time the Broncos tackle came back and sat with the kid, the rush began. Bolles countered.
“My turn to ask a question,” he said. The kid opened up.
Forbes walked away chuckling to himself. Good play, Garett, he thought.
“I think the kid asking all those questions was him trying to see, ‘Can I trust you? Are you actually listening to me, or are you just here?’ ” Forbes said.
Bolles’ work at Foote starts with trust. He’s taken kids to dinner. He’s bought them bus passes to make their court date. He’s sat in the audience for those court dates. If a kid works their way through different phases of probation, Bolles will sit with them at a computer and let them pick out a pair of shoes.
“It’s hard to change,” Bolles said. “It’s hard to change those habits. And when you do it, you need to be rewarded.”
Bolles knows. He struggled as a kid with attention deficit disorder. He spent a night in jail. Even after the Freemans adopted him and set his life straight, earning a scholarship to Utah and a first-round bid to Denver, the NFL didn’t treat Bolles kindly.
“He was always told, ‘You’re too dumb to play in this league,’” uncle McKinley Oswald recalled.
He recorded a remarkably low score on the Wonderlic, an NFL pre-draft test to measure cognitive ability. He led the NFL in holding penalties his first two seasons, a stretch that earned him so much vitriol that even Broncos general manager John Elway chimed in.
Bolles’ career took off with a second-team All-Pro nod in 2020, the year he started working with Forbes. That was no coincidence. The kids in Arapahoe County have become part of his life, as much as wife, Natalie, and his own children. He wouldn’t be where he is, he believes, if he didn’t have them.
They rip him at the Foote Center, same as Broncos Country, if he picks up a few flags. They rip him if he loses, Bolles smiles. They also celebrate him and accept him, as he does them. And in turn, he has accepted himself.
“I’m not going to change who I am as a person,” Bolles reflected. “Not gonna change my passion that I bring on the football field, the love I have for my teammates, the love I have for the city. Like, I’m not changing that.
“But what I do change is — I change the way I view myself,” he continued. “I’ve changed from the inside out. I’ve learned to control my anger and my attention issues. I’ve learned to focus in the moments I need to focus in. I’ve learned to be a better father and a better husband.
“And, I’m a big believer in — it’s like, the way that you live your life off the field is how you’re going to perform on the field,” he finished. “And that quote has hit me, ever since I turned my career around.”
•••
Bolles is still here, even though many Broncos fans might not have wanted him here, for a time. He shook his head, unable to quite find the words. Hell of a ride, he mused.
He’s gone from “villain to hero,” as Forbes put it, in the city that’s made him.
“I feel like my life has done a complete 180,” Bolles says, “with Eugene and his staff, and Majesty (Elliot-Dumler) and her staff.”
Once one of the Broncos’ most unstable pieces, Bolles has become a rock. He continues expanding his GB3 Foundation, hosting a free youth football camp for hundreds of kids this summer. He has been named the director of player development at Legend High, working with new coach and longtime buddy Jake Heaps. And he has become the elder statesman of the Broncos’ locker room, the anchor point of a franchise aiming for championship waters.
Late last year, when Bolles was on the final year of his contract and in the middle of extension negotiations with the Broncos, he told Elliot-Dumler that he’d find a way to continue his work with her court even if he ended up playing somewhere else.
Football, though, is still a motivator. In May, the NFL announced a new Protector of the Year award, given to the league’s best offensive lineman. Forbes and Bolles started talking about the trophy at a dinner hosted by his foundation this offseason.
No, dude, Bolles told Forbes. That’s gonna be mine.
“And, just, the look in his eyes, just — the same as he talks with these kids,” Forbes said.
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