Boulder – Beneath a United States flag hanging in the arena rafters, a coach of a thoroughly American game fought back tears as he watched his young basketball team from Lincoln High School lift the state championship trophy high, as the victory party began with everyone chanting in Spanish.
“Viva Chihuahua! Viva Chihuahua!” shouted players and students alike. It was a loud and proud salute to the largest state in Mexico, where many of them were born.
“These players represent a lot more than a basketball team. That’s what I love about them. These kids are a representation of a melting pot, and that’s what America is all about,” Lincoln coach Vince Valdez said Saturday. “We adopted a motto early in the season: Changing the minds of people, one person at a time.”
This was a game nobody in an old, changing Denver neighborhood will ever forget, because the Lancers’ 63-52 win over Ralston Valley was the school’s first state championship in any sport in more than a generation.
But what made the night truly memorable and what caused a grown man as tough as Valdez to cry was reaffirmation that America remains a land of opportunity at a time when many citizens would like to build a wall around the country.
While dazzling no-look passes, 18 points and 12 rebounds of star guard Jorge Gutierrez in the Class 4A title game were often jaw-droppingly awesome, maybe the greatest achievement of his senior year was conducting his first media interview in English.
“We fought our battles on the court,” Gutierrez said.
At a high school where more than 90 percent of the student body is Latino, with a team largely built on players who emigrated from Mexico, the hardest lessons the Lancers learned all season were not the result of any of their seven defeats on the court.
The players of Lincoln High discovered not everybody cheers for opportunities seized by a Colorado prep basketball team that often dreams in Spanish.
This was a lab experiment more real and gritty than any words printed in a civics book. What happens when a teenager discovers some of the very Americans whose grandparents were drawn from Europe by the beacon of the Statue of Liberty are now uncomfortable with the winning smiles of prep athletes for whom English is a second language?
“It hurts. It hurts a lot,” said Lincoln reserve forward Ismael Ramos, a 17-year- old who did not play one second in the championship game, but whose most vital statistic is that 4.1 grade-point average he scored last semester.
As Gutierrez busted a move down the lane and dished a sweet assist to teammate Francisco Cruz to put the Lancers ahead by 12 points late in the fourth quarter, the most boisterous cheer from the crowd came from a Lincoln student standing in the front row and wearing a form-fitting silver wrestling mask made famous by the movie comedy “Nacho Libre.”
“I got it in Mexico. It’s hot under this mask. Really hot,” said Lincoln senior Gil Coronado, a native of Zacatecas who moved to Colorado when he was in sixth grade.
Asked what a championship would mean to a community in the Denver Prep League, where schools with dwindling enrollments sometimes seem to be left for dead, all Coronado had to do is point with his eyes at the smiles dancing on the faces of his classmates.
The better the Lancers performed on the court, the more they heard whispers of contested birth certificates and endured investigations into player eligibility.
Was that a coincidence? Maybe.
Was it a reminder that even in a land of opportunity, you often have to fight for every chance to succeed? No doubt.
“These young men gave a lot of people a lesson in resilience, with the controversy we faced. We didn’t let it destroy us. Instead, we let it help build us,” said Valdez, whose roster included athletes whose hometowns spanned from California to the Sudan. “There are a lot of people who aren’t comfortable with our team, and how we have so many different faces and so many different ethnicities.”
When it was over, and the Lancers were alone together in the triumphant locker room, Valdez was not ashamed to let his players see him cry.
The tears of an American dream come true are a language we all understand.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
