DENVER—It flew over the fence and landed on the patio every morning, folded inside a rubber band that sometimes stretched so taut, it could be hard to remove without feeling the harsh snap of the rubber lash against the inside of your wrist.
The Rocky Mountain News.
Any Denver native of a certain vintage will remember “The News” (not “The Rocky,” as it is so often called these days) as the first way to get the day’s sports news in Denver.
How did John Elway look at training camp yesterday? What did a box score with David Thompson scoring 73 points for the Nuggets really look like? Were the Rockies—the ones who played on ice—truly as bad as they looked?
No need to rifle through sections of the paper. Just open the front page of the conveniently sized tabloid, see where the sports started and find out what you missed the night before: What you didn’t see on SportsCenter, because there was no such thing.
Those were back in the days when Denver was a two-newspaper town, but you always went to one of them first to see what happened last night.
The Denver Post, which will be the only paper in town beginning Saturday, was an afternoon publication back then—mostly playing second fiddle to that flippable newspaper with the sports page you had to read.
Well before he became a national, multi-platform celebrity, a columnist named Woodrow Paige worked in Denver at The Rocky Mountain News. Woody moved to the other paper in 1981, even left sports for the news section for a while. Back in the day, he seemed to play everyone off everyone, kind of the way sports writers at the two papers did the good cop-bad cop thing with coaches and players in Denver, looking for scoops.
It was long one of the most competitive sports-newspaper markets in the country, and good competition benefited readers the most.
It gave dusty ol’ Denver, still a cowtown in many people’s eyes, a big-city feel back when it was a one-horse … make that, a one-Bronco town.
As the Rocky and Post proved in their never-ending quest to best each other, there was no bit of Broncos news too arcane to cover—which is how we came to know about not just the Broncos’ pass patterns but the kind of Halloween candy Elway passed out, too.
Even after the Post went to mornings in the 1980s, started selling more papers and eventually sacrificed the News’ Sunday edition as part of the papers’ joint operating agreement, there was something familiar and convenient about opening up the tabloid to see what happened the night before.
Yet as the names and news in the headlines flew by—The Orange Crush, Elway, that first, fantastic Super Bowl win … Don Cherry, Pistons 186, Nuggets 184, the CU Buffs wearing powder blue uniforms—the guys at the News became the underdogs.
They had been talking about the inevitable for at least the last 10 years. No way these two papers could survive. No sports fan really wanted to believe it.
But it happened. On Friday, the competition ended. The tabloid has gone away and there will be only one option in Denver for those who want to know a little more than what they learned when they watched the game on TV, heard the score on cable, read about it on the Internet.
Every day, with news of bankruptcy filings, vanishing advertising dollars, the Internet replacing newsprint, stories are filled with quotes from experts sounding warnings about how having fewer options is worse for the readers.
In Denver, we now get a chance to learn about it firsthand.
And for those who grew up reading a newspaper in the Rocky Mountains, that walk to the patio will never be the same.
