The Honorific and the Doomed?
Sunday morning in the Mile High City, and I am drinking at a Saturday Night pace. One hand grips a creamy brown pint of Guinness draft (or is it draught?), the other – a jigger of polish vodka laced with concentrated orange juice. It is game day in the old cow town, and I am bound for it.
I arrived this morning at 11am, a good hour early after a winter-time traverse from our mountain valley went more swimmingly than anticipated due to unexpectedly clear roads. Colorado is in the throes of a snow less glut, a situation that has just about everyone in the entire state racked with a piercing anticipation – whether it be the blunted, edgy skiers, the vacant hospitalitarians, or the dream-shattered vacationers – everyone here has some stake in the good business of bad weather.
The sparsity of road-borne precipitation was much to my favor today, though – which I am grateful for. It is my first winter drive to Denver since my return after having moved from here out to the unfrozen coast of Central California four years ago, and even though I figured the road to be clear for the most part due to the dearth of ill weather, there was no accounting for the two mountain passes between, which are typically pummeled by snowstorms from late-October to nearly June. I’ve been on Highway 70 in times of great distress. The 100 year storm of October, 1999, comes to mind – when the road was scattered with stuck and wrecked cars so badly that it resembled the infamous Baghdad highway that was carpet bombed by the Air Force in the first little Bush Family Gulf Excursion
It was then that I rode this track in a frozen state of amused terror as Johnny “The Mernick” Mernicki flogged his twenty-year-old, 2WD Honda Accord, with five fired-up bachelor party-goers (and all of the attendant indulgences that can be partaken while squeezed sardine-tight into a squirrley Japanese coffin during a historically significant weather event) over Vail and Loveland passes, weaving an impossible path through snowdrifts and automotive casualties. I recall with pickled irony, watching a tow-truck off to the side of the road, yanking a Hummer out of a ditch as we somehow navigated our way through the heart of the storm.
But clear it was on THIS fine day, and here’s toasting that.
So here I are, ahead of schedule, downing cheer at a fancy bar in an elegant, but unfortunately named hotel – The Brown. If there is one word for a color in the English language that refuses to inspire class, it must be the word “brown.” Though, the staff sure does do a hell of a job striving to prove otherwise.
The Visio above the ornately carved whiskey bar broadcasts the Kansas City/Green Bay game. It is the first game started by new Chiefs QB Kyle Orton, who previous to assuming the title of sacrificial mule, was the starter for our home team Broncos over the course of several frustratingly semi-productive seasons.
A 1-5 record to start the season while hot-stepping it on the lid of the bubbling cauldron of inexplicably miraculous phenomena — one Timothy Richard Tebow — in the soup of the Bronco quarterback hierarchy doomed the earnest, but uncharismatic Orton to the Hard Pine of Destiny, who then handed him off to the caroming Chiefs.
It is either his terrible luck, or his own redemptive fate that proposes that his biggest game of the year will likely be next week, when, if the Broncos lose to the Bellichick/Brady machine today, Orton will be tasked with leading his new team against his own personal shame wagon, with a chance to exact some bitter revenge and dash their playoff dreams.
If it comes to pass, that game will be a Shakespearean affair – the old, ineffectual king who had been deposed by the usurping, anointed savoir. The honorific and the doomed. But which is which?
Above all, if the Donkeys blow it here today against the mighty Patriots - as expected and heavily wagered – the Broncos/Chiefs season-end catharsis will be interesting, and that, in a nutshell, is the meat to the question of why people care at all about the game of football.
At least two generations of Shipp’s have just arrived, decked in blue and orange, at the Ship bar. The time to sail is Nye. Away from the rocks!
