Editor’s note: In the Colorado Classics series, The Denver Post takes a weekly look at individuals who made their mark on the Colorado sports landscape and what they are doing now.
The next time a sports figure does something so special the public would elect him mayor by unanimous vote, think of Marv Kay.
Kay didn’t win Super Bowls, as did the Broncos’ John Elway and Terrell Davis, or Stanley Cups, as did the Avalanche’s Patrick Roy and Joe Sakic, but he was mayor of Golden. Kay’s sports connection when he led the suburban community west of Denver was just being football coach and athletic director at Colorado School of Mines.
The one thing Kay doesn’t allow is to look at his duties at Mines as the “just” part of his résumé.
“We always felt we had great kids, and we played good competition,” Kay said. “We provided our fans to spend the afternoon watching great football games. Mines and Western State are two of the oldest football rivals in the state. We competed very well.”
Kay didn’t balance the jobs evenly on his daily schedule, maybe to the disliking of his political associates.
“It was always a difficult job arranging time, but coaching always was the priority,” Kay said. “I’d always arrange my city meetings either early in the morning or late in the evenings. I’m sure everybody got tired of meeting at those hours.”
But his associates on the coaching staff at Mines had no doubt Kay could pull off the responsibilities of the two jobs and were certain he would get his chance in the political arena.
Jack Hancock, who coached wrestling and tennis at Mines, probably knows Kay as well as anyone. Hancock recruited Kay out of Grand Junction in 1956 to be on his wrestling team. They have experienced coach- player, coach-coach and athletic director-coach associations.
“He always was working and attending meetings,” Hancock said of Kay. “He never met a meeting he didn’t like. But he has a unique way of bringing people together. He’s never too busy to help. He’d be naked by the time he was done giving the shirt off his back to people in need.
“He was a pretty good heavyweight wrestler, too.”
Kay was part of a coaching staff at Mines that got by on ingenuity and dedication. The school’s athletic program remained kind of a mom and pop operation as the programs at Colorado, Colorado A&M (now CSU), the University of Denver and Colorado State College in Greeley (now Northern Colorado) gained size and status. The Air Force Academy came along.
But Mines held its own for a while with the strong leadership of Fritz Brennecke, football coach and athletic director; Jim Darden, basketball and baseball coach; and Hancock. Darden played professional basketball with the original Denver Nuggets and remained a popular figure throughout his coaching days at Mines.
As their counterparts grew, notoriety for the Orediggers outside of Golden more and more came from occasional side stories such as eventful long rides in school vans to road games or human interest angles.
Hancock once got some ink when he ran an advertisement in local news- papers to find a heavyweight to fill out his wrestling team’s roster.
It didn’t take an ad in a newspaper to get Kay to come east from Grand Junction to the Mines campus. When he arrived in 1956, he was following in his father’s footsteps. His father, Marvin Kay Sr., was a member of Mines’ undefeated football team in 1939.
Kay Jr. arrived to play football for Brennecke and wrestle for Hancock. But before his freshman year was completed, he was back on the Western Slope to help his family when his father died.
Kay returned to Mines and graduated in 1963. He remembered the Broncos holding their first training camp at Mines, with their vertically striped socks.
“They looked great to me,” Kay said. “I was a starry-eyed college kid.”
The Baltimore Colts, with quarterback John Unitas, also trained at Mines during Kay’s days at the school.
Kay had a last fling at football in a brief tryout with the Broncos in 1963. After being cut, he entered private business, and Uncle Sam came calling for a 2 1/2-year hitch in the military.
He began his coaching career at Mines in 1966 and stayed for almost four decades. He also stayed busy as an instructor in physical education, a course still required at Mines.
“We all had to coach a couple of sports,” Kay said. “One sport helped the other. If I was out recruiting and saw an athlete I thought would be good in another sport, I’d give the name to our coach. We worked our tails off, but we worked together.”
Kay, 68, retired as athletic director at Mines in 2003. However, he won’t say he has left because he still is involved in fundraising for the school’s athletic department.
“We had some good teams and came close to a championship three or four times,” Kay said. “But the year I retired as athletic director, we had the best football team we’ve had since 1939. I was lucky and honored to have been associated with all the coaches and people I worked with at Mines.”
Hancock said the feeling is mutual.
“The school depends on him. The city depends on him. I don’t know how the heck he does it,” Hancock said of Kay. “He’s working all the time.”
Retirement hasn’t meant that Kay is winding down. Just the other day, he was out buying a new lawnmower. Another job at hand.
Irv Moss can be reached at 303-954-1296 or imoss@denverpost.com.
