A Mile-High Pile of Reasons to Share Bronco Fans’ Pain

I go back a ways with the Denver Broncos--at least long enough to share all their Super Bowl pain. As football fans know, there’s plenty of that to go around.

I moved to the Mile High City just before the start of the 1977 National Football League season. Before long, I was in the midst of the kind of football hysteria I hadn’t seen since leaving Nebraska a week earlier.

For most of their short history, the Broncos were perennial losers. But as the ’77 season unfolded, they seemed charmed. Not overly talented, they won several games in a row to start the season, eventually winning their division and finishing 12-2. One of my early

assignments as a Denver Post reporter was to do a story on the newly emerging “Broncomania.”

To a football fan like me who’d never seen an NFL game in person, a trip to Mile High Stadium was quite a thrill. I wangled tickets to both playoff games--against the Pittsburgh Steelers and Oakland Raiders, the teams that had won the three previous Super Bowls--and when the Broncos beat the Raiders to win a trip to the Super Bowl, I was almost as excited as longtime Denverites.

Then came the first pasting. In Super Bowl XII, the Dallas Cowboys crunched the Broncos 27-10, with Denver delivering one of the more inept Super Bowl performances up to that point. In subsequent years, however, the Broncos would elevate Super Bowl ineptness to dizzying heights.

After the 1986 season, Denver lost Super Bowl XXI to the Giants, 39-20. The next season, the Broncos jumped to a 10-0 lead over the Redskins in Super Bowl XXII, then gave up 35 points in the second quarter and lost 42-10. Two years later, they were back again and, matched against the 49ers, sustained the worst loss in Super Bowl history, 55-10.

That ran the Denver tally in Super Bowls to 0-4, and on the short end of a cumulative score of 163-50.

So we arrive at today, XX years since my first introduction to Broncomania, and wondering what horrors await when Denver takes the field in Super Bowl XXXII. The tendency in Denver is to say things can’t possibly get worse, but if you’ll review the ever-mounting tale of destruction from Denver’s previous Super Bowls, you’ll see that things not only could get worse, they always did.

That said, you can bet the house today that Denver won’t lose by more than 45 points. If only for that reason, the Broncos will be on the road to recovery after the game. The Green Bay Packers are defending Super Bowl champs and favored by something around two touchdowns, which would be a landslide margin in a presidential race but a squeaker by Denver Super Bowl standards.

Maybe because I know things can’t get worse for the Broncos, I’m approaching the game sanguinely, and I don’t even know what the word means. I’ve become so light-headed in the last day or so that I think the Broncos might even win the game. When I say “win,” I don’t mean in the Denver definition of coming within three or four touchdowns of the opponent. . . . No, I mean actually score more points than the Packers.

Much has been written about Denver quarterback John Elway being a sentimental favorite because he’s played the role of rag doll in three of the four Denver Super Bowl losses. I’m not so sure about that. I was still in Denver when Elway came to town, and to me, the guy has always seemed touched by the gods.

He became a millionaire the day he signed a contract out of college, and he went on to become a local hero, husband and father. If memory serves, he recently sold some car dealerships he owned for something like $80 million. Maybe you can get sentimental over Elway, but I can’t. He’s lucky enough for 40 or 50 people.

However, if it’s sentimentality you want to dispense, give it to the citizens of Denver. They’re the poor slobs who aren’t millionaires but who pay good money to support the Broncos. They’re the ones who see shrinks after Super Bowl debacles. I remember a psychologist in my Broncomania story telling me how a city identifies with a sports team and feels elation or dejection as the team wins or loses.

Imagine how you’d feel if your team had lost the biggest game of all--four times, no less--by a combined score of 163-50. I’ll tell you how you’d feel: pretty darn small.

So if you want to root for someone who could really use a boost, root for people like my friends Tim and Joe and Kris and Diane. They’re back in Denver and are the kind of fragile souls whose psyches may not be able to handle another Bronco thumping.

If only because I don’t want to feel their pain again, I’m predicting a 23-20 Denver victory.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.