From a lofty perch in the next- to-last row of the stadium, a Broncos fan just might be closer to heaven than the football field. So maybe it only makes sense that unbridled faith in an NFL team that was hard to love should begin here.
With God as my witness, there were Broncomaniacs who dared to shout dreams of the Super Bowl after Denver beat Cleveland 27-6 on Sunday to become the most unlikely 2-0 team in the league.
“I’ve got to be honest,” roared 26-year-old fan Marshall Ransdell, whose mania is so loud it could make a listener’s eardrums bleed orange and blue. “When Josh McDaniels traded away Jay Cutler, I thought the coach was out to sabotage the Broncos. But now? We don’t have time for crybabies. We win with the players we’ve got.”
The search for the raw, unfiltered Broncos truth is rewarded in Row 27 of Section 512, where 60 bucks spent on a ticket means something that a player paid $2 million per year could never understand. Here, you can listen to stomachs growl each time quarterback Kyle Orton threw an incompletion or hear hope reverberate with every fierce tackle by safety Brian Dawkins.
Two months ago, how many folks in Denver really believed the Broncos had any realistic shot at being alone in first place of the AFC West after two games?
“It doesn’t matter what outside this locker room is said about this team,” Dawkins said after the win. “Anybody else’s opinion of us is not our reality. We make our own reality by the way we practice, the way we prepare, the way we play our game. So people can continue to talk about us in the negative. That’s fine. We don’t believe in that.”
But this much I know is true: Common fans have a big orange crush on Elvis Dumervil and a revamped defense. McDaniels is slowly winning respect from the masses. But Orton never gets a break, because he’s not you know who.
“So what if we win with our defense? Isn’t that the tradition in Denver?” said Joe Grabowski, the reason I watched from the nosebleed seats among the real peeps, rather than being hermetically sealed behind press box glass for the regular-season home debut of Kid McD.
When I wondered aloud during the summer if the departures of Mike Shanahan and Jay Cutler had torn the heart out of Broncomania and offered a free ticket to the home opener as a chance to criticize the team’s new regime, the response was overwhelming, with more than 1,000 volunteers from 37 of our great United States and six continents. (What’s wrong with you, Antarctica?)
Grabowski is a 62-year-old builder who moved to Colorado in 1972 for the skiing and never left. He was selected for this duty because a) his voice is so strong it can recarbonate beer; b) the definition of true fan is a man who can recite the colleges of all the Orange Crush linebackers by heart; and c) during the 1989 season, he attended 19 football games across the country, an odyssey that at one point found him hopelessly lost in a vehicle at the end of a pier late in the evening after attending the Orange Bowl, when Grabowski advised his traveling companion: “It might be time to turn around, because I think we just ran out of continent.”
We were stuck in the cheap seats, but here is where football opinions are hard-earned by working men and women. In the far reaches of the upper deck, where it seems you actually look down on the Denver skyline, the only thing stronger than a sense of vertigo is a passion that rattles the floor with stomping feet.
Whenever the Denver offense faltered, Orton was booed without mercy.
“OK, so our offense needs help,” suggested spectator Eileen McCarty, a Midwest- born Broncos die-hard who insisted when visiting family back in Cleveland the one word strictly prohibited at the dinner table is “Elway.”
“What,” Grabowski replied to McCarty, “do you propose we do on offense?”
McCarty quickly retorted, “Put in Chris Simms at quarterback.”
This was a tough crowd, not easy to impress.
But please understand: When fans in the upper deck refer to the Broncos as “we,” they utter the word with more conviction than receiver Brandon Marshall ever could.
So as the sacks began piling up on Cleveland quarterback Brady Quinn, and turnovers forced by the defense widened the home team’s lead, Grabowski dropped his skepticism about McDaniels and allowed optimism to flow. “With what I’ve seen from the Chargers, Raiders and Chiefs,” he said, “I don’t know why these guys can’t make a run at the division.”
In the nosebleed seats, folks were high on the Broncos.
If only for one giddy afternoon in September, from the view way up here, almost anything seemed possible.
And it felt like heaven.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
