The first sports story ever to appear in The Denver Post was a recap of horse racing at Overland Park on the front page of the newspaper’s inaugural 1892 edition. Readers were informed in bored, Oxford English prose how “the delightful weather today caused a large attendance” and that “the time was good, the finishes close”.
It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking sportswriting, but that first article epitomizes how much the form has morphed — and how much it’s simultaneously stayed the same — from the time of The Denver Post’s inception to today’s 24/7 news cycle.
The eras changed, the subject matter changed, the writing styles changed and the presentation changed, but what didn’t change is that The Denver Post’s sportswriters were constantly documenting the races, teams, players and games in the Rocky Mountain region and beyond, whether it be by typewriter or laptop, notepad or smartphone.
“Everything’s changed in terms of interacting with the reader and in terms of media choices the consumer has,” said Denver Post columnist Mark Kiszla, who at 34 years is the longest-tenured sportswriter on the staff. “What hasn’t changed is what fans want is good content, and that means solid news and good storytelling. If you can tell somebody something they don’t know, and do it well, how it’s delivered is secondary to that.”
Horse racing, baseball and boxing dominated The Post’s sports coverage in the first several decades of the paper at a time when Denver was still very much establishing itself as the “Queen City” and the local populace’s sporting interests hinged largely upon gambling and amateur athletics.
As the city grew through the first half of the 20th century — and as The Post’s sports desk managed through World War II with only three people on staff — the average Denver sports fan’s interest began turning to semi-pro baseball and basketball.
“If you go way back to World War II and even before that, Denver always had a town baseball team in those days,” said Irv Moss, a 60-year sportswriting veteran of The Post who retired in 2016. “It was a semi-pro type of team, and it wasn’t very organized and there were no leagues. The other big thing on the sports calendar was the national AAU men’s basketball tournament played every spring in Denver as well as the National Industrial Basketball League comprised of teams sponsored by Denver companies.”
Headlining the paper’s sports desk during the World War II era and beyond was the legendary Frank Haraway, who could be considered the godfather of Denver sportswriting.
Haraway joined The Post in 1938 and, over the course of his 44-year career at the paper, was the focal point of talented sports staffs that produced writers such as Moss, Ralph Moore, Bob Bowie, Harry Farrar, Chuck Garrity and Dick Connor.
“Frank was a guy who contracted tuberculosis as a young kid, and it left him handicapped,” Moss said. “When he walked he used crutches, but it didn’t really slow him down much. He’d always hobble up stadium stairs with his typewriter, and when the Denver Bears started in 1947, he became the baseball writer and covered the Bears pretty much throughout their existence.”
The minor-league Bears were Denver’s first professional sports love it could call its own, and Haraway’s coverage of the franchise in a city starved for Major League Baseball — not to mention hungry for other big-time sports after the conclusion of World War II — often blurred the line between homer and journalist.
“In that time, it was perfectly acceptable for a sportswriter to be an advocate for his town and a spokesperson, in a way, for the teams that he was covering,” said John Moore, a former deputy sports editor at The Post and the son of the late Ralph Moore.
“They had a role in chronicling the events, but also in taking some measure of responsibility for it themselves too. Frank represented that era where they were unadulterated fans of the teams that they covered, and they would look at you like you were from outer space if you told them that was ethically compromising in some way.”
By the time the Broncos came to town in 1960 and the Nuggets seven years after that — during a span in which Dorothy Mauk was hired in 1965 as the first woman to work full time in sportswriting at any major metropolitan daily — Denver had taken a big leap forward as a sports city.
The two new professional teams, combined with the visually attractive tabloid-style seen in the paper’s sports section beginning in the mid-1950s, provided further catalyst for expanded coverage in addition to the staff’s extensive hyperlocal focus on college football, high schools and golf.
Haraway and his peers continued to use the burgeoning Colorado sports landscape to make their names over the next several decades and into the 1980s, when the newspaper landscape began to drastically change. The Denver Post was sold to Times Mirror at the start of that decade, switched to a morning paper a year later, and was sold again in 1987.
In the early stages of the changes, the paper’s sports editors clung to their old mores, even as the industry was about to be turned upside down by the round-the-clock, no-holds-barred news cycle.
“One interesting anecdote is how my dad knew about (Nuggets star) David Thompson’s drug abuse in the early 1980s, and his sports editor did not want to run that story,” Moore said.
“Imagine that today — if Trevor Siemian’s stats over the course of a couple months go in the tank, everybody in Broncoland will be wondering about that. My dad was the team’s longtime beat writer and knew exactly what was going on with Thompson, but the editors sort of had the same attitude as if John F. Kennedy was sleeping around — everybody knew it, but it was unseemly to report it.”
But by the time 1990 rolled around, that thinking had changed.
The advertising money couldn’t be counted fast enough and the sports coverage was as expansive as it had ever been. As Moore described, “If you had features or enterprise stories to tell, there was space to print it.” Plus, the arrival of three more professional teams — the Rockies, Avalanche and Rapids — also contributed to the paper’s escalating rivalry with the Rocky Mountain News.
That cutthroat environment opened the door for the rise of a new breed of sportswriter in town — one who, as epitomized by longtime columnist Woody Paige, was willing to stir the pot.
“Woody represented a whole different kind of journalism, because he came into Denver from Tennessee and presented himself as the answer to the Dick Connors and Ralph Moores of the world,” Moore said. “He embraced the idea of a columnist writing to purposefully incite a response from his readers, even if that made him the most hated man in Denver.”
The “impudence and irreverence” of Paige, as Moore noted, trickled down to other sports columnists at the paper — i.e., Jay Mariotti and, most recently, Kiszla — who were unafraid to sound off on local teams.
And while Paige and Mariotti used their time at The Denver Post to become nationally recognized sports columnists (which led to TV gigs), the paper also laid the base for beat reporters such as Rick Reilly, Adam Schefter and Marc Spears to hone their chops for future prime-time gigs.
“It was so competitive because in a two-newspaper town, there was such a premium on Broncos news and breaking stories,” said Schefter, who served as the Broncos beat reporter at the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post from 1990 to 2004. “That, I believe, trained me unknowingly and indirectly for the job I have today for ESPN, where there are a ton of people vying for information on these teams.”
Now, in the present day reality of sports journalism where Twitter is king — and The Denver Post sports staff, as well as the paper’s newsroom and journalism industry as a whole, continues to evolve amid cutbacks and ever-evolving business models — what does the future look like for seasoned sportswriters such as Kiszla as well as the staff’s younger talent such as Broncos lead beat writer Nicki Jhabvala?
It’s bright, Schefter said. And while sports coverage has drastically changed — and still changing — the main tenants of what made The Denver Post sports desk great in the first place remain firmly intact.
“There have been a lot of talented people who came through The Denver Post, and are still there,” Schefter said. “And even though the industry is night and day different even from when I left the beat 13 years ago, the principals are the same. Through all the change, the sportswriters there seem to understand that.”
