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Sporting News, The, June 30, 1997 by Joe Hoppel

Seconds after Rob Lytle lost the handle on the ball, Denver found the handle on its identity. Or so it seemed for many residents of that sports-crazed city and other fans around the nation.

Lytle's near-fumble on New Year's Day 1978 was nearly calamitous as far as fun-and-games transgressions go; conversely, Denver's ensuing fate after the bobble turned out to be plain fortuitous.

What it was, was the AFC championship game between the villainous and creepy Oakland Raiders and those longtime pro football laughingstocks, the Denver Broncos. And nine minutes into the third quarter of this Super Bowl qualifier, the Broncos were guarding a 7-3 lead at Mile High Stadium when running back Lytle soared over the Raiders'massive defensive front at Oakland's 2-yard line. Lytle crashed into an immovable object -- a stone wall named Jack Tatum -- and the football went belly up. Where it went, no one knew for what seemed like the longest time. Then, there it was. In the clutches of one of them. But before hulking tackle Mike McCoy could get up a reasonable head of steam, the head linesman had the good (OK, questionable) judgment to whistle the play dead. Lytle, it was ruled, had been separated from the ball after the play was completed.

If the Telestrator, his broadcasting tool-to-be, had been around, Raiders coach John Madden might have been pondering an appropriate place to stuff it. From my vantage point behind the visiting bench, this longtime Broncos season-ticket holder watched as Madden gestured wildly at the striped-shirt set while not exactly wearing his hardware-hawking happy face. And he became downright grouchy when Jon Keyworth dived into the end zone on the next play.

I'm not about to try to pinpoint the exact time when all of the forces in the cosmos came together and made Denver a "major league" city, but my best guess would be the moment the zebras gave the Broncos another chance at the Raiders' goal fine that day. You just knew that the Super Bowl -- with all its attendant glamour and hype, directed at the franchise and the political and sociological entity known as Denver -- was destiny about to happen for the first time in these parts. No more jokes about the franchise that didn't have a winning season until its 14th year; no more cracks about the team that in its first two seasons wore vertically striped socks; no more yuks about the club that once went without a first down in an entire game; no more poking fun at a team that lost 19 of its first 20 games against a division rival (the Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs). And no more calling Denver a minor league town, or, worse yet, a minor league cowtown.

Denver and its Broncos had become players on the national stage, a certifiable Broadway act. A Canal Street act anyway, with the triumph over the Raiders (the final score was 20-17) sending our heroes to New Orleans for Super Bowl XII. And now, nearly 20 years later, the city's sports largesse has evolved into a many-splendored thing. Denver not only has the Broncos and their zealous sellout crowds since 1970, it has the Rockies and their yearly gate of nearly four million, it has the Avalanche, the Nuggets and, nestled alongside the Flatirons 25 miles up the road, the rambunctious University of Colorado football team. Why, it's enough to earn a city the billing as the best sports venue in the country (which, in fact, is what The Sporting News proclaims Denver to be in this issue's cover story).

In my mind, though, it didn't take a Super Bowl appearance to make Denver a major league city. In terms of quality of life (the things that really matter), it had such a big-league feeling when I moved there 30 years ago -- at the time, the Broncos had a 26-69-3 record in their seven years of existence, the Nuggets (then called the Rockets) had yet to play a game, the baseball team was a Class AAA club called the Bears and minor league hockey was in a dormant phase (University of Denver hockey was a superior attraction, anyway). We basked in the beauty of the city and the region, took pride in Denver's civility, its arts and its schools, and marveled at its progressive attitude. Admittedly, what was progressive to us was sometimes viewed as aberrant by others. One example: Denver was awarded the Olympics for 1976, and, yes, we couldn't wait for the sports world's premier event to roll into town. Until, that is, we started thinking about the effects the Games might have on our precious environment. So, we turned around and told the Olympic pooh-bahs -- via the ballot box -- thanks, but no thanks. Take your show elsewhere. And they did.

Don't misunderstand. We loved our sports and our teams and appreciated all of the recreational opportunities available in the great Rocky Mountains. We just didn't get terribly caught up in this "major league" thing -- although we sensed the grandeur of it all when Floyd Little, the man with the remarkable running skills and the equally remarkably work ethic, burst upon the scene with the ne'er-do-well Broncos; when those same Broncos became the first AFL team to defeat an NFL team, somehow winning a not-so-meaningless exhibition game against the Detroit Lions in the summer of '67; when Spencer Haywood put Denver on the pro basketball map with his astonishing 1969-70 season with the ABA Rockets; when, in the early 1970s, Colorado's football team ended Penn State's 31-game unbeaten streak one year and finished third in the final AP poll the next; when David Thompson, Dan Issel and Bobby Jones made the Nuggets one of the most exciting teams in pro hoops; when, in the fall of 1976, the Nuggets entered the NBA and the long-forgotten, puckvariety Rockies -- the former Kansas City Scouts -- began play in the NHL