A look back at Denver's storied roster of TV sports broadcasters | John Moore

Growing up in my house, you could roll off the names of Denver’s sports broadcasting legends like players on a championship roster: Starr Yelland, Lynn Sanner, Bob Kurtz, Gary Cruz, Ron Zappolo, Jim Conrad, Mike Nolan, and eventually Les Shapiro, Tom Green, Gary Miller, Steve Harms, Vic Lombardi and one of my own personal heroes: Marcia Neville. On the radio, it was Bob Martin, Al Albert, Larry Zimmer, Irv Brown, Dave Logan and perhaps the most controversial name of them all: Sandy Clough.

If they had trading cards, my brothers and I would have collected them all.

In the days before cable, Yelland was part of a 10 p.m. Channel 7 news team that consistently commanded 60 percent of the metro viewing market. He was everyone’s beloved grandfather. According to pioneering Denver Post sportswriter Dorothy Mauk, when the struggling Denver Broncos hosted a desperate ticket drive to save the franchise, Yelland hawked tickets nightly on his sports segment. When Dorothy Hamill won the Olympic figure-skating gold medal in 1976, Yelland personally organized her homecoming parade.

His 50-year run made him the longest-running broadcaster in Denver TV and radio history. And when his son, Sherman, was thrown from a roller coaster at Elitch Gardens in 1962, it was as if all of Denver stopped, prayed and rallied with him. Sherman struggled for 2 1/2 years before dying in 1965. It was Denver’s trauma, because Denver loved Starr Yelland. The city also loved Channel 9 Sports Director Lynn Sanner, who became critically ill one summer and was replaced for a few weeks by none other than Regis Philbin at what was then known as KBTV.

Getting to love the newer breed, though, was sometimes a process: Just like when a young Rocky Mountain News rabble-rouser named Woody Paige blew into town from Tennessee and broke all the dusty old rules of newspaper sports writing, Denver TV audiences had no idea what to make of Ron Zappolo, now generally considered the most recognizable Denver TV sports personality of the past 50 years. When Zappolo took to the Denver airwaves in 1977 with his thick Boston accent and that seemingly mile-high chip on his shoulder, you weren't sure if he was coming into your living room to tell you the scores – or pick a fight with you. He was Denver’s first TV sports performer. He sold the news.

I was an invisible Denver Post sports clerk in 1987 when the boss assigned me to go to every home Broncos game that season, sit in the Mile High Stadium press box and type the play-by-play into a computer. It was the most thrillingly mundane assignment a sports cub could ever hope to get.

I literally typed lines like this one over and over into my company-issued Radio Shack laptop (and I could still do it in my sleep today): 2&8 D43: Winder left for 3 (Long). That would mean: On second down and 8 yards to go from Denver’s 43-yard line, Sammy Winder took a handoff to the left side for 3 yards before being tackled by Howie Long. And we’d dedicate half a page in the next day’s paper to printing all of it. I was in sports-clerk heaven.

In those flush newspaper days, I was among a Denver Post crew of eight or nine who gathered in the Mile High Stadium press box for every home game. It was like we made up our own massive state delegation at a political convention. And I happened to be assigned a seat that was right next to Zappolo – the King of Denver TV, and a similarly massive Channel 4 contingent.

Before the very first home game, then-Denver Post Broncos beat writer Jimmy Armstrong kindly introduced me to Zappolo, who gave me a passing, Fonzie-like, “A, how you doin’?” For whatever reason, Armstrong repeated this introduction the following week, and he found it absolutely hilarious that Zappolo indicated no memory whatsoever of our recent meeting. So Armstrong started a devilish little pool among my fellow Posties. The bet: How many times will Armstrong introduce me to Zappolo before he says, “Yeah, we’ve met.” Everyone went in on it, and the winning bet was “never.” (Pretty sure that was Post sports columnist Mark Kiszla’s guess.)

This story has a sweet ending. The Broncos went to the Super Bowl that year, and in the two-week build-up to the big game, every media outlet was scrambling to cover any conceivable Broncos story that could be covered. During that whirlwind, the Broncos hosted a 10-year reunion dinner at a local hotel for members of its first Super Bowl team back in 1977. And because area reporters were stretched so thin, Zappolo and I were the only two who showed up to cover it. To make it super awkward, we were told we could not be in the ballroom during the actual dinner, but we could wait outside in a tiny hallroom and conduct player interviews afterward. So Zappolo, his cameraman and I were banished for two cramped hours that felt like 10. But, swear to God, Zappolo broke the ice by calling me by name. A great conversation ensued. It was, to that point, the highlight of my young journalism career. Ron Zappolo remembered my name.

Zappolo put in 36 years at Channels 4 and 9 before leaping head-first into Fox31's news-anchor chair. To many, he was, and remains, the dean. Given rapidly changing demographics and ratings these days, it’s hard to imagine anyone ever again reaching the same popular zeitgeist Zappolo did.

But there is something comforting about seeing affable, easygoing familiar faces like Tom Green, who brought such a refreshing sense of humor to his 13 years of sports reporting, back on the air at 9News (if not in sports). Off the network dial, the most likable sports guy on TV has to be Vic Lombardi, who has been at it for 25 years and still looks like he just graduated from Holy Family High School. As a rare homegrown sports broadcaster who oozes a tough love for the local teams, Lombardi was an instant hit on Channel 4 and for the next 18 years before jumping to Altitude Sports as the studio host for broadcasts of Nuggets and Avalanche games that, thanks to an infuriatingly enduring four-year contract impasse, I STILL CAN’T WATCH – thank you, equally greedy Comcast and Kroenke Sports.

Lombardi is every bit the showman Zappolo was, perhaps most hilariously when he tried out for the Colorado Crush arena football team, an experience he shared with viewers. And, more soberly, when he confided his diagnosis of prostate cancer, further cementing his very real connection to everyday Denverites.

Sportscasters tend to come and go, but the ones I miss the most are those you can just tell by watching are good human beings. And on that score, you don’t get better than the relentlessly positive former Channel 4 sports anchor Mark McIntosh, who recalibrated his life from TV news to helping people coming back from incarceration, homelessness and addiction even while living through his own diagnosis of amyloid (which prevents the kidneys from functioning properly).

I’m thinking back on these legends of Denver TV sports this week in the wake of KUSA Sports Director Rod Mackey’s Thursday announcement that he is leaving 9News after 23 years to join Romi Bean at CBS4 Denver. In January, Bean became the first woman to be named a main sports anchor in Denver TV history. No one has taken a more circuitous route to history than Bean, twice a Denver Broncos cheerleader who paid her dues and is quickly becoming one of the great stories in local sports TV annals.

Mackey and Bean will own the hometown loyalty card. Mackey attended Evergreen High School; Bean went to Cherry Creek. Both graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder.

But this is the definite and kind of ominous end of a 23-year era at Channel 9 – one that makes Lionel Bienvenu the leader in the clubhouse with 22 (mostly) uninterrupted years at Channel 7. (He took a brief sports sojourn to host Denver7’s morning and afternoon shows but returned to sports less than a year later.) 

Even though Yelland and Channel 7 had a stranglehold on the local news ratings for 20 years, 9News has always been considered an (if not the) authority in local sports coverage because of the consistent, veteran leadership in its newsroom. That goes back to the halcyon days when John Rayburn, Ed Sardella, weatherman Stormy Rottman and Sports Director Bob Kurtz formed a formidable news team in the late 1970s. Kurtz went on to co-anchor the very first sports program on CNN when he and Nick Charles hosted "CNN Sports Sunday” on June 1, 1980.

For the past two decades, Mackey has been a sort of bridge between the old guard and the wildly new world of TV sports reporting as coverage has shifted from an emphasis on reporting scores to purely finding ways of entertaining viewers for three sports minutes. Mackey rose from pup to sports director with uncommon and unwavering decency and deserves credit for transforming Mike Klis from veteran Denver Post ink-stained Colorado Rockies newspaper beat writer into a bona fide go-to Broncos expert and TV personality. Klis and Woody Paige are among the very few reporters who have been able to successfully transition from the printed word to the unforgiving TV screen.

Mackey’s departure leaves 9News vulnerable in a way it never has been before simply because of the enormous amount of institutional knowledge that leaves with him. Over the past few years, Mackey has been grooming a very promising trio of talented young sports reporter/personalities in Arielle Orsuto, Jacob Tobey and Scotty Gange, whose cumulative time at 9News does not quite yet total nine years – and none of them go back further than 2019. Orsuto is, in all likelihood, the barrier-busting first openly gay sportscaster in Denver TV history. 

They are very different, very appealing and complement each other in uncanny ways – and they all have the uncommon and invaluable advantage of already having taken part in covering two Denver sports championships – the Colorado Avalanche’s 2022 Stanley Cup and the Denver Nuggets’ 2023 NBA title. (I mean, many of the city’s biggest TV sports legends never covered a Denver sports team winning anything.)

It will be fun to see if any of the “9 three” put down roots and wend their way into viewers’ hearts the way Mackey and so many others have done the only way it really can be done – over time. But in this day and age, young TV reporters (sports or otherwise) never seem to stay in one place for long anymore.  

“It’s really been a fun ride,” Mackey said in making his on-air announcement alongside Kim Christiansen. “Growing up and going to elementary, junior high, high school and college here, and getting the chance to come back – it’s been great. But I am looking forward to a new chapter.”

One that begins at Channel 4 as soon as next week.