Mile-high Madness

A pair of horn-rimmed glasses marched up to me last week and said, "You're from denver, right? Why didn't you people put a roof on Coors Field? This World Series is going to be freezing!"

The tips of my ears started to burn. My neck hair stood up. I actually had to put down my adult beverage.

"How come we didn't build a roof on Coors Field?" I said, grabbing his lapel. "Gee, I don't know. How come Stevie Wonder never bought a camera?

"A roof on Coors Field? Do you even know the Colorado Rockies? Their season is usually over by July! I would've bet that Denver would host the World Surfing Championship before the World Series! Everyone in Denver is looking at each other and saying, 'What will we get next? Wimbledon?'"

Do you have any idea how bat-guano nuts all this is for us? Just a year ago my pal Two Down—America's Most Avid Golf Gambler—had his office broken into. I asked him what they took. He goes, "Nothing. But there were two Rockies tickets on my desk. They left two more."

Put a roof on Coors Field? We never even thought we'd get a team! Sure, minor league ball was enough for my mom—"What's wrong with the Denver Bears?" she'd say—but I'd fall asleep trying to listen to Jack Buck call Cardinals games on KMOX and dreaming of the real thing.

And it's not like we didn't try for the big leagues. We begged, we groveled, we wrote more letters than angry JetBlue passengers. We'd break minor league attendance records—65,666 at one game—and Major league Baseball didn't so much as burp in our direction.

You think Cubs fans have suffered? Please. At least they had a team. Ours was the cruelest kind of suffering—the hopeless kind. Our motto was: Maybe Next Century.

And then, finally, there were whispers we could have a team if we built a stadium ...in Lower Downtown. LoDo, we all shouted, "God, not LoDo!"

LoDo was a dirty, dilapidated old business district, the kind of place gangbangers tiptoed through. When my mom would drag us to those Bears games, she'd reach across and lock our doors when we went through LoDo. It was full of druggies and brutes and three-toothed thieves. And those were the women.