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For the conference championship game, Goldberg had another morale booster up his sleeve. Since his company had a contract to demolish a twelve-story building in Denver's downtown, Goldberg had the three-ton ball on his wrecking crane painted orange and hung a sign on the side of the building with OAKLAND painted in huge letters on it. A crowd of hundreds gathered to watch and cheer the destruction. The darker side: when a man walked into a bar and turned on the jukebox during a televised Bronco game, he got into a frenzied argument with irate fans, one of them followed him into a parking lot, shot and killed him, and wounded two companions.
Even the city's traffic patterns have been disrupted. Aside from the fact that an eye-aching number of cars, trucks—even a city bus—have been repainted orange, the police must be called out to keep traffic moving on the roads surrounding the Broncos' practice field. But nothing has been upset as much as the city's image of itself and its team. Bronco Co-Owner Gerry Phipps attributes the mania to "a little inferiority complex that people in the city have. It's their way of saying, 'Hey, look at us!' "
The successful Bronco season has catapulted Denver onto the national sports map. Professional team sports are a recent graft on the Rocky Mountain iden tity. The National Basketball Association Denver Nuggets, while a solid team, are known as the place where former North Carolina State Superstar David Thompson disappeared. A hockey franchise new to the town is struggling with expansion team woes, and a planned sale of the Oakland A's to Denver Oilman Marvin Davis awaits the outcome of Round 57 in the Charlie Finley-Bowie Kuhn brouhaha.
But the Broncos, ah, the Broncos are the Mets of the Mountains. Theirs is a Cinderella story to catch the fancy of underdog rooters everywhere and stamp a presence on the national mind as copper bright and shiny as a new penny from the Denver Mint. It is exquisite, this first flirtation with a world championship of sport. No matter how often it may recur, it will never again be so sweet. It excuses the excesses and lifts the hearts of all who look on and recall.
The long wait and the wonder of it all swelled for the team and its fans in the final moments of the Oakland game. The vanguard of 74,982 fans (they booed the 62 no-shows ex cathedra) swarmed onto the field, tore down supposedly indestructible steel goal posts and carted them away, but not before the long shank of one upright had been passed around by reverent hands, an instant relic of Denver's new religion. Below, players dawdled on the field to wave their exultation to adoring fans in the stands. In the locker room later, Offensive Guards Tom Classic and Paul Howard sat stunned, reassuring one another that it was not some dizzying hallucination. 'Tom. we are going to the Super Bowl," Howard intoned. "We are not going to be watching it on TV this year." Replied Classic:
"I'm too numb to understand that."