It’s too quiet around here. The cheers have dried up. What Denver needs is a victory parade.
A city once home to champions now settles for mediocrity.
Is the Colorado Crush big enough to satisfy a jones for the adrenaline rush we can only get from winning?
Three victories separate the Crush from the Arena Football League title. Do Denver sports fans care? In honor of a championship, would the mayor give the team keys to the city, or at least free passes to Elitch’s? Could we hold a victory parade, even a small procession on the 16th Street Mall, with three fire- trucks, two boxes of confetti and a marching band?
“Maybe an indoor parade,” joked Rich Young, who plays fullback and linebacker for the Crush.
Can the Crush get a little love?
Nobody’s suggesting winning the championship of indoor football would match the thrill of seeing the storied Stanley Cup and shiny Lombardi hardware in this city’s trophy case.
In fact, a case could be made that AFL players who bounce off walls for touchdowns and get tackled on a brightly colored Brillo pad should not only play in a padded room, but live in one.
Every other professional franchise in Denver, however, could learn something essential from the Crush.
“Championship football. That’s what this team is all about,” Young said Thursday. “We want to be the top of the food chain. We won’t accept anything less. What would a championship mean to us? Everything.”
Pardon me?
That sort of bold sports talk has become so rare in Denver, I almost forgot how real ambition sounds.
Around here, championship banners have been replaced with whiny laments of “maybe next year, if the ball bounces our way.” The aspirations of Denver fans have been set so low, we are supposed to believe that losing in the first round of the playoffs is a major accomplishment.
The last time I saw Avalanche captain Joe Sakic shoot the puck in town, he was a ringer in a match between local financial planners who had trouble skating backward on the ice.
A good week on the road for the Rockies is when they score twice.
The Nuggets have not won a division title since 1988, way back in the days when Jerry Rice was a bona fide superstar instead of a dusty old conversation piece grabbed by an NFL franchise desperate for attention.
The man who operates the Crush is John Elway. Nags don’t ask if he can win a championship without Mike Shanahan.
“When you have John Elway at the top of your organization, that’s the standard. Winning championships. That’s what he has accomplished, that’s what he wants,” said Crush coach Mike Dailey, whose team opens the playoffs at home, where Colorado has won 13 of 16 games the past two seasons.
“I really believe in my heart we will win a championship with the Crush. But I always joke with my coaches that winning a championship is also my biggest fear, because the day it happens, John Elway will walk in the room and say: ‘Good job, guys. How we going to win it again next year?”‘
Maybe the Crush never will make the cut as major-league entertainment. Maybe you can easily dismiss arena football as the gag gift in the toy department of sports. Maybe Colorado star Damian Harrell will never shine bright enough to lead a parade through downtown.
But the Crush has something the big boys in Denver have lost.
The size of the paycheck has no correlation to the amount of passion an athlete brings to work.
The Avs would rather argue about money than play hockey. The Rockies hold the paying customer in such low regard, they expect us to buy their excuses for losing. Trying hard, the Nuggets hope to grow up to be contenders one of these days. Growing old, the Broncos are stuck celebrating too many yesterdays.
“How our fans in Denver make noise for us is bananas now,” Harrell said. “If we won a championship, it would be off the charts.”
On the big scoreboard of Denver sports, every Crush victory is a small one.
But at least there is one pro team in town unafraid to say it wants to win it all. Right here. Right now.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
