Terry Frei - Böcker

Asserting that the 1977 AFC champion Denver Broncos were the tipping point for the transformation of Denver, Colorado from an outpost city with an inferiority complex to today's sports and entertainment mecca, award-winning author Terry Frei provides an intimate look at both a professional sports team and the city it brought together at a time of great change. Frei offers profiles of catalyst coach Red Miller and such legendary players as Randy Gradishar, Craig Morton, Louis Wright, Billy Thompson, Tom Jackson, and Lyle Alzado, but doesn't stop there, making readers feel as if they intimately know virtually everyone on the roster as the often ground-breaking narrative of that season continues. Frei describes Denver's evolving 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 go from victory to victory on their way to their first Super Bowl. As '77 wide receiver Haven Moses, part of the famed M&M Connection, put it, "Denver should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize that year. There was more done that year to bring people together than I've ever seen in my life . . . And this brought attention to what Denver was about to become."

Asserting that the 1977 AFC champion Denver Broncos were the tipping point for the transformation of Denver, Colorado from cowtown to today's sports and entertainment mecca, author Terry Frei provides an intimate look at the team and the city it brought together at a time of great change. Along with profiles of legendary players, Frei describes Denver's evolving politics and culture in the late 1970s as the Broncos make their way to their first Super Bowl.

As he did in his acclaimed '77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age and his earlier nonfiction works, Terry Frei combines reporting, historical research, memoir, and opinion, discussing his varied experiences and the diverse characters—including John and Jack Elway, plus 2010 Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith—he has encountered in covering Colorado, national, and international sports since he was a green sportswriter in the era of '77. Those diverse figures include Olympic heroes, Hall of Famers, world boxing champions, and other marquee athletes. He also displays his knack for narrative and inquisitive journalism, introducing readers to intriguing figures and taking them behind the scenes of some very high-profile events and settings. All this follows a blunt and unsparing assessment of the modern newspaper and sports journalism.

In 1939, the Oregon Webfoots, coached by the visionary Howard Hobson, stormed through the first NCAA basketball tournament, which was viewed as a risky coast-to-coast undertaking and perhaps only a one-year experiment. Seventy-five years later, following the tournament’s evolution into a national obsession, the first champions are still celebrated as “The Tall Firs.” They indeed had astounding height along the front line, but with a pair of racehorse guards who had grown up across the street from each other in a historic Oregon fishing town, they also played a revolutionarily fast-paced game.Author Terry Frei’s track record as a narrative historian in such books as the acclaimed Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming, plus a personal connection as an Oregon native whose father coached football at the University of Oregon for seventeen seasons, makes him uniquely qualified to tell this story of the first tournament and the first champions, in the context of their times. Plus, Frei long has been a fan of Clair Bee, the Long Island University coach who later in life wrote the Chip Hilton Sports Series books, mesmerizing young readers who didn’t know the backstory told here. In 1939, the Bee-coached LIU Blackbirds won the NCAA tournament’s rival, the national invitation tournament in New York—then in only its second year, and still under the conflict-of-interest sponsorship of the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association. Frei assesses both tournaments and, given the myths advanced for many years, his conclusions in many cases are surprising.Both events unfolded in a turbulent month when it was becoming increasingly apparent that Hitler's belligerence would draw Europe and perhaps the world into another war . . . soon. Amid heated debates over the extent to which America should become involved in Europe's affairs this time, the men playing in both tournaments wondered if they might be called on to serve and fight. Of course, as some of the Webfoots would demonstrate in especially notable fashion, the answer was yes.It was a March before the Madness.

In 2013, the Colorado Avalanche announced that Joe Sakic, a franchise legend and Hall of Fame center, would be promoted to become the new executive VP of hockey operations. Soon, Sakic was instrumental in the hiring of Patrick Roy, the greatest goaltender in NHL history, a man crucial to the Avalanche’s Stanley Cup victories in 1996 and 2001, as Colorado’s new coach. This book, a collaborative effort between seasoned sportswriters and authors Terry Frei and Adrian Dater, is an opinionated, interpretive, and in-depth look at Patrick Roy’s first season as a National Hockey League coach, and the Avalanche’s surprising 2013–14 season.