Life in Denver was good. On a chilly flood-lit Monday at a nearly empty Coors Field. For local fans of the pennant-contending New York Mets. Behind cheers of "Let's go, Mets!" the New Yorkers won this one, too, 6-5, on a wild pitch by exhausted Colorado Rockies reliever Dave Veres. While Mike Piazza and John Olerud slapped high fives, the rudderless Rockies slipped another game deeper into last place. The 10,000 or so Colorado diehards who found themselves at the scene of the crime slipped quietly away.
On the same evening, a mile away in Mile High Stadium, a much larger crowd was watching the defending Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos get their butts kicked 38-21 by the visiting Miami Dolphins. For this orange-and-blue throng, there was no cheering, just a strong suspicion that the party was over, that this Monday-night debacle, enacted before a national TV audience, spelled a sudden end to the Broncos' hard-won dynasty.
Suspicion turned into evidence six days later in inhospitable Kansas City, where the Broncos committed four turnovers, gave up 188 yards rushing and parlayed a raw-nerved quarterback controversy into a 26-10 drubbing by the hated Chiefs. The Broncos haven't started a season 0-2 since 1994, when clueless Wade Phillips was head coach and somebody named Leonard Russell was the leading ball carrier. Now every club in the league can smell horse blood.
"This is when you find out what your team is made of," baffled head coach Mike Shanahan said after Sunday's loss. Shocked Bronco fans had their own answers for that. "What they're made of is brown, and if you're not careful, you step in it at the park," offered stockbroker Bob Wiggins. "Whatever they're made of," Bobby Maestas said, "it's not what John Elway was made of." Both men grabbed up their bottles of Miller Genuine. "You can't help laughing," Maestas said.
Laugh or cry, take your choice. The fact is that Denver's professional sports teams haven't been in a collective mess like this since Steve Tensi was one-hopping passes to Al Denson out at Mile High and the Denver Rockets were blowing easy layups before a crowd of 1,200 in the musty gloom of the Auditorium Arena.
Welcome back to Loserville. Good to see you. It almost makes you nostalgic -- well, doesn't it? -- for the days when tens of thousands of image-conscious Denver citizens, right on up to the mayor's office, worried aloud about what the rest of the country was going to think if the Donks and the Packers had to play Monday Night Football here in a driving snowstorm. Or when a play-by-play man from Oakland -- Oakland, for God's sake -- let slip on a baseball broadcast that at the Brown Palace they brought coffee to the table at the same time as his prime rib.
Loserville. Denver, Colorado, altitude 5,280 feet, After the Fall.
Exhibit A is found in the basement of baseball's National League West, where the disorganized and disoriented Colorado Rockies find themselves 23 1/2 games behind the (second-year) Arizona Diamondbacks, with no hope for improvement. This is the best team $60 million could buy: A supposed number-one starter, Darryl Kile, who went 13-17 with a bloated 5.20 earned run average in his first year with the club and downhill from there in 1999 (8-13, 6.61); a bullpen corps so beat up (good morning, Mr. Veres) and shellshocked (howya doin', Jerry Dipoto?) that they can't get it over the plate at sea level, either; a quartet of sluggers (batting champ Larry Walker, Todd Helton, Vinny Castilla, Bichette) who have all hit thirty home runs at a time when thirty home runs means absolutely nothing -- a couple of Tampa Bay Devil Rays and a pair of Los Angeles Dodgers have also hit thirty homers, and look where they are.
The Rockies' general manager has been fired, and their "new" manager, the miracle worker Jim Leyland, is so worn out after only one year on the job that he's calling it a career come October. Fans are disgusted, the owners are bickering (Bye-bye, Jerry McMorris), and even visiting players can't help getting caught up in the prevailing lethargy: Following the sixth inning of last Wednesday afternoon's Mets-Rockies game, New York starter Orel Hershiser sauntered from mound to the third-base dugout, visibly yawning.
