SAN FRANCISCO — In this week of pomp and circumstance, this parade of Alcatraz visits and Radio Row and Dodgeball matches for 300-pound grown kids, nobody is having more fun than Garett Bolles.

On Monday, he palled around with contemporaries at a Pro Bowl practice for the first time in his career. He’s up to walk the red carpet at Thursday’s NFL Honors ceremony, with the potential to win both the league’s inaugural Protector of the Year Award and the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. And to cap off the most fruitful year of his professional life, Bolles was named the NFLPA’s 2026 Alan Page Community Award winner on Tuesday, honoring a player who “demonstrates a profound dedication” to impacting their community.

Across a few-minute speech — the baritone-voiced giant sniffling with every sentence — Bolles dove into his continued work with both children with speech disorders and Colorado youth in the juvenile system in Arapahoe County. He’s helped remodel the classrooms at the Marvin W. Foote Youth Services Center in Centennial because he wanted their environment to feel more joyful. Less white walls. Less brown carpet.

"I want to encourage them," Bolles said in his speech. "Give them a why. Why they do what they do."

Bolles' own why has been set since his days playing for Utah, when he realized — as Greg Freeman recounted — that he could actually be good enough at football to have the influence he wanted to have. In 2011, Freeman picked up a troubled 19-year-old Bolles off the side of the road after he'd been kicked out of his childhood home. He and wife Emily adopted Bolles. There were "many times," Freeman recalled, when a young Bolles would sit at the top of their family's staircase, preparing for them to give him the boot, too.

They did not abandon him. They told him they wouldn't. And on Tuesday, the Freemans stood alongside Bolles, his wife, Emily, and their children on a stage in San Francisco, part of a life that has evolved beyond anyone's reasonable expectations.

"There's some shock to it," Freeman told The Denver Post, after Bolles accepted his award. "But he's always had a heart worth of gold."

Bolles will now receive a donation of $100,000 from the NFLPA to his GB3 Foundation, which partnered with speech pathologist Jennie Bjorem to launch the Bjorem and Bolles Apraxia Training Center in Parker this past year. As his reach across the Colorado community continues to expand, Bolles had the best season of his NFL career in 2025, earning his first First-Team All-Pro nod. He was once a maligned first-round draft pick in Denver, sending groans through Empower Field at every holding call, before he began working with the Foote Center in 2020.

That is not by happenstance, to Bolles. His journeys as a player and as a man have intertwined.

"You talk about a legacy, you talk about — from the start to the finish," Bolles said. "And my quote is — it doesn’t matter how you start, matters how you finish. So continue pushing, continue to be the best version of yourself. And you never know when your name is going to get called. I just hung down. I just kept working, I just kept putting in the work. And it’s paid off."

Enough, certainly, to bring him to San Francisco, where Bolles is soaking in every second of available Super Bowl shenanigans. On Monday, at an AFC Pro Bowl practice that wholly undermined the word "practice," the Broncos' left tackle hopped in at center and snapped a few balls to rookie QB Shedeur Sanders. And slung on a backwards cap. And then wheeled out and caught a touchdown in the end zone. He came away from the 45-minute period with a cheek-splitting grin and a message for the world, after the world saw him end up flat on his face in Week 7 when he flared out to try and catch an end-zone touchdown.

"I caught a touchdown. But it's gonna happen (Tuesday)," Bolles told The Denver Post, referring to the official Pro Bowl Games. "So then everybody will be able to see it.

"And then coach (Zach) Strief and coach SP," Bolles said, referring to Sean Payton, "back at home, he'll know that I can catch the ball. So don't ever doubt me again."

At the end of the day, though, this platform is a means to an end. In 2023, Bolles earned his first Walter Payton Man of the Year nomination. It meant more than "anything else," as Freeman said; more than the $82 million extension Bolles signed with the Broncos in 2024.

He'll have the chance to actually win the award on Thursday. For now, though, Tuesday's honor was enough of a measure to show just how far he's come.

"To have this family of his grow and become what it is," Freeman said, "is really special.”

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