Book Review: '77

by Doug Farrar

If there was such a thing as "right place, right time" for this football fan, it would have to have been Denver, Colorado, in 1977. The small Farrar family (my mom and I) moved there from mom's native Michigan in September of 1976, as she had friends there and was looking for a change of scene. We both fell in love with the city right away -- with the mountains, with the clear skies, even with the crazy weather that could see short-sleeve temperatures and several inches of snow on the same late-spring day.

Most of all, we fell in love with the Denver Broncos. Because we had to. To understand true football fandom is to understand Denver in the 1970s. Though there were the NBA Nuggets, the NHL Rockies, and the AAA Denver Bears (one of the best minor league teams of all time in the late '70s, just ask Bill James!), it was the Broncos that gave the city its first and most lasting taste of "big league." To those pundits on either coast, Denver was either a Wild West relic town, with its Frontier Days overflows and unreconstructed rednecks, or the metropolitan outpost for a series of ski resorts.

To us, Denver was the major city that nobody knew. The Broncos became the main point of pride for an entire region.

It hadn't always been that way. The early Broncos, one of the original AFL teams, were mostly famous for their vertically striped socks [1]. They went the entire decade of the 1960s without a winning season (a streak that continued until 1973), and the first team history, published in 1975, was appropriately entitled Barely Audible.

1977 changed all that. The team went 12-2 and made it all the way to the Super Bowl, where they got demolished, 27-10, by the Dallas Cowboys. It was a season of firsts: The Broncos won their first division title, their first playoff game, and went to their first Super Bowl. Veteran quarterback Craig Morton, the first near-elite signal-caller in team history, and first-time head coach Red Miller gave the team an offense to match their dominant Orange Crush defense in their first seasons in the Mile High City.

I was nine years old in 1977, and it was the first year I watched football. Terry Frei, the author of '77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age [2], began that year as the Denver Post's newest beat writer, hired at the age of 22 in December of 1976. Frei's father Jerry once coached the Oregon Ducks, so the football knowledge was there. His brother Dave was the Broncos' assistant public relations director, so the understanding of the team's internal workings was a given. And Frei himself, who still writes for the Post as well as for ESPN.com, brings his own considerable experience to a project that illustrates the trap of the single-season review: merging a year's events with several character studies, and mixing in enough historical perspective to give full flavor to the proceedings. Well, it's a tough go.

There are two ways to attack the challenge. You can go with what I call the David Halberstam method, displayed in peerless fashion in the late author's Summer of '49, in which plots and people are woven together in a seamless narrative. Then, there is the more practical process, whereby the author takes a series of biographies and drops them block-style into a season review, with the history providing anything from background music to commercial interruption, based on how skillfully it's done.

Frei takes the latter road, but that doesn't mean that '77 is a substandard book. Quite the opposite, though I wonder how interesting it would be to those who aren't diehard Broncos fans and/or weren't in Denver during that time. More than anything, the book is an all-encompassing tribute to a team that finally turned it around after so many hopeless years, for a fanbase that had been selling out the home stadium since the mid-1960s.

The one thing remembered above all from those crazy days was Broncomania -- the fan frenzy like no other. Relentlessly growing for years, rooted in the heart of a city with a big chip on its shoulder. And in 1977, that love for team and town blew up in a way I've never seen since. Frei does an admirable job of telling this story.

The mention of local landmarks brought back a flood of memories -- the Elitch Gardens amusement park and its Mister Twister roller coaster, Red Rocks Ampitheater, Bandimere Speedway, and McNichols Arena, where the Nuggets and Rockies played. Still, that's my perspective, and I wonder how much these things would be of interest to those who weren't there. My sense is that Frei's love letter to those days is primarily intended for those who were, and I'm grateful for it. A reader who grew up in New Jersey or Texas might not care so much.

I can't call '77 a hardcore football book in the sense that you'll get play-by-play of the games that made the season so special -- the 30-7 win over the hated Raiders, with the fake field goal touchdown pass from Norris Weese to Jim Turner, or the 21-7 regular season victory over the Steelers. The Broncos beat those two teams -- winners of the three previous Super Bowls -- once each in the regular season, then beat them both again the playoffs. Frei doesn't get as much into the particulars as most FO readers would prefer, but he does bring the thoughts and feelings of the players to life. And that, above all, is what makes '77 a must-read for any football fan.

I can get running back Otis Armstrong's stats from a host of sources, but this book was where I first learned about his childhood medical problems and his longtime friendship with Darryl Stingley. I knew that Randy Gradishar and Tom Jackson were the heart of the best 3-4 linebacker corps in the league, but I knew less than I should have about Bob Swenson and Joe Rizzo, their underrated battery mates. I knew that defensive coordinator Joe Collier was the architect of that wonderful defense, but I didn't know the extent to which Miller, the old-school new kid, motivated his players above and beyond predecessor John Ralston.

The one player I did meet that year, defensive end Lyle Alzado, is still the closest to my heart. My mom was running her own advertising company, and bought ad time on Broncos flagship station KOA. Alzado was contracted to do a voiceover on one of the ads, and I got to meet him at the station. The gigantic Alzado was an impressive sight to a little kid (I remember looking up ... and up ... and up ... seemingly infinitely, until my gaze reached the top of his head), but he couldn't have been nicer -- not then, and not at the Nuggets games where I met him a few more times. When Alzado died in 1992 of the brain cancer that he blamed on his steroid use, I though of him less as another tragic stat or cautionary tale, and more as an old friend gone too soon.

And that's what I like about '77 -- the feeling of community and camaraderie, the places I revisited 30 years later in my mind, and the players I'm now learning more about.

However, subtract points for Frei's failure to mention legendary radio announcer Bob Martin. Imagine a book about the 1975 Steelers with no mention of Myron Cope, or the 1965 Dodgers sans Vin Scully, and you'll understand the egregiousness of this omission. It was Martin's call at the end of the AFC Championship win over the Raiders that most eloquently represented what it was all about. That year, that city, and that team: "The miracle has happened! The Broncos are going to the Super Bowl!" That's what it was, and that's how it felt.

I enjoyed '77 as a chronicle of the year that fueled my lifetime obsession with football. No matter where you first caught the bug, I suspect there'll be enough in this book to bring you back to a few memories of your own.