The Color Orange

The Denver Broncos' 1986-1987 season was an extraordinary one-the first year in which Hall-of-Fame quarterback John Elway won the NFL's MVP award, the season that finally ended the team's decades-long laughingstock legacy, the year Elway's heroics helped forever secure the team in the hearts of fans throughout "Broncos Country." Back in print at last, this is sports writing at its very best. In The Color Orange, bestselling writer Russell Martin offers a series of reports from the city at the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains, letters posted from a football town during the course of a single season, beginning with the long hot days of training camp in mid-July, climaxing in the emotional tumult of the play-offs in frigid January, and ending in a sun-drenched Pasadena Super Bowl. They are letters concerning an illness called Broncomania, letters about the relationship between the team and its city, its region-focusing on the players who work wearing pads and plastic helmets, who are celebrated or ignored depending on what they have done for Denver lately; on the owner and his administrators and coaches, for whom football is big and serious business; on the beat reporters who cover the team as if the assignment were the State Department, and the television "talent" who stand in front of video cameras to record facile practice-field updates; on the bookies and bettors and the souvenir sellers; and, of course, on the fans-the fans who, over the cascade of years, have spent more money than they care to admit to buy tickets to more games than they care to remember, the fans who surely bleed in blue and orange, who root religiously for the home team, who are affected by its fortunes in ways that are not simple to explain. This is a book about football-how the game on the grass (or on the imitation grass) is sometimes enlarged by us into something mythic, something hugely important.