Product Description
Also requested through bottom of listing...
Could we add Kenn Bisio (photos) (Kenn is correct) to the author listing. Thanks.
From the Publisher
NOT MANY PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAMS can claim to have changed a city forever. The 1977 Denver Broncos, coached by firebrand Red Miller and led by the stellar "Orange Crush" defense, can--because they did.
In '77, award-winning author Terry Frei compellingly argues that the AFC champions of that season were the tipping point for the transformation of Colorado's capital from an outpost with an inferiority complex to today's sports and entertainment mecca. As in his acclaimed earlier books, Frei--a rookie Denver newspaper reporter in 1977--displays a historian's ability to place sports within the context of evolving politics, culture, and society.
Drawing from voluminous research, many hours of interviews, and firsthand knowledge of both the city and football, Frei profiles such legendary ' 77 Broncos as Randy Gradishar, Lyle Alzado, Louis Wright, Billy Thompson, Tom Jackson, Craig Morton, and Haven Moses--but he doesn't stop there. As the often groundbreaking narrative of that Denver season continues, even the most fervent of Broncos fans from that era will come to more intimately understand both the stars and the lower-profile players they thought they knew, and the uninitiated will marvel at these compelling stories up and down the roster. It's all here: Tom Jackson's notorious taunt of Oakland coach John Madden ("It's all over, fat man!"); the journeymen quarterback and receiver, Morton and Moses, becoming the "M&M Connection," and Morton's amazing courage to even make it on the field for the AFC Championship Game; and Gradishar and Wright again experiencing the sort of stellar seasons that should have landed them in the Hall of Fame.
Of course, it didn't happen in a vacuum. Frei describes Denver's transformative politics that year-- when Richard Lamm was a young and controversial governor and Bill McNichols was one of the last machine-style mayors--plus the metro-area culture in the late 1970s as the Broncos, for so long one of the NFL's most downtrodden franchises, progressed toward their first Super Bowl.
The portrait emerges of a football team as uniquely influential in the transition of a city still smarting over the decision not to host the 1976 Winter Olympics-- a campaign Lamm led as a self-proclaimed "hippie" legislator. Certainly there have been many other teams in many sports that generated and earned fanatical support, won a lot of games in glorious seasons, and fleetingly brought a city together, but after this season Denver would never be the same again. And although the ' 77 Broncos came up short of an NFL championship, they were part of an atmosphere that was far different than the Denver of the late 1990s, when the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup and the Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls.
Maybe you had to be there to truly understand it. So if you weren't, Terry Frei takes you there. If you were, '77 is a replay from countless heretofore unseen angles. As unique as this tale is, it also has its elements of universality for readers--not just sports fans--anywhere.
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