TORONTO – I opened up the Sunday edition of the Denver Post last week to find not one, but two stories on the front of the sports section declaring the Colorado Rapids were finally headed back to the MLS Cup.
The articles were, of course, buried down the page and beneath an enormous preview article ahead of the Denver Broncos’ afternoon kickoff against the Kansas City Chiefs, but that’s no surprise. The Broncos invariably live above the fold in Denver and the Rapids simply rent the space out from time to time, popping up there on occasions just like this one: a shot at history.
The Rapids arrived in Denver when Colorado was booming. The state’s population shot up 30 percent during the 1990s (it rose just 14 percent during the 1980s), topping off at 4.3 million residents by the time the decade was through. The bulk of the population dropped right down in the urban corridor that snakes down the Front Range along Interstate-25 from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs, and of course, right through the heart of the Denver metro area.
The city was suddenly fertile ground in the eyes of prospective sports franchise owners, and so it was: We built it, and they came. Denver added three major league sports franchises from 1993 until 1996, a feat not matched by any other city in the country in the past 20 years. We went from a cow town in a time zone no one cared about to a legitimate outpost on the sports landscape.
[inlinenode:323760]The Rapids, in retrospect, probably suffered a bit from the sudden saturation. They arrived still very much in the middle of a euphoric love for baseball in Denver after the Colorado Rockies debuted in 1993 and slugged their way into the postseason in 1995.
And suddenly we had a hockey team, too. The Colorado Avalanche emigrated from Quebec and stunningly went ahead and won the Stanley Cup in their first year on the Front Range in the summer of 1997, introducing Denver fans to names and figures we adored for a decade: Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg, Patrick Roy.
It was bad enough, in fact, that even Brian Mullan had trouble paying attention.
“At that point, I was a big hockey player, so I was very excited about the Avs coming,” said the Rapids midfielder, who won a big-school state title as a soccer player his senior year at Regis Jesuit. “Back, then it was all very compartmentalized. The soccer community loved it, but that’s as far as it went.”
Early Beginnings
Still, it was better than the alternative. Before the Rapids came along, we shuttled down to Jefferson County Stadium near the foothills south of Golden, the town known for the Coors Brewing Company and not much else. The Colorado Foxes played there in the A-League and we spent plenty of chilly nights watching from the bleachers of what was essentially a high school football stadium, although the high school playoff games certainly drew bigger crowds.
Put it this way. My dad did his part to drive me and my brother to see Foxes games and what do I remember best? We stopped at Wendy’s on the way down to get some Biggie fries.
“Really,” Mullan said, “there was nothing there before.”
The Rapids, though, were something entirely new. They played in Denver proper, and at Mile High Stadium no less. The inaugural game was replete with the befitting ceremonial gala on a sparkling day in May, and we drank it in like we were thirsty pioneers who had just crossed the plains of Nebraska during the dust bowl.
The Rapids didn’t necessarily have the star power of other teams in those days, let’s be honest. The dispersal of the US national team stars from 1994 gave us Marcelo Balboa, while New England got poster boy Alexi Lalas, San Jose got Eric Wynalda and Tony Meola went to the MetroStars.
Balboa was no slouch. He was, after all, that dude with the ponytail who somehow completely inverted his 6-foot-1 frame and whipped a bicycle kick inches wide of the goal during the US’ watershed 2-1 win over Colombia in the World Cup two years before, the match that every single aspiring American soccer player watched on national television.
But Balboa didn’t actually score that goal, and that said it all. The Rapids got the guy who just missed the goal, while everyone else got the rock star or the striker or the loudmouth goalkeeper we all adored.
Instead, the Rapids team that reached the MLS Cup in 1997 was made up of workhorses and guys who would eventually help shape the league. Current Sporting Kansas City coach Peter Vermes was there, as was current Seattle Sounders technical director Chris Henderson and Paul Bravo, who’s now the Rapids’ technical director.
“We were certainly a blue-collar bunch,” Bravo said. “We had guys who had been around, but I don’t think we were taken seriously.”
[inlinenode:323761]Colorado reached the US Open Cup final in 1999, but effectively spent the next few years in neutral. They reached the conference final in 2002 but largely missed out while other franchises carved their identities in towns like Chicago, San Jose and Washington using a simple formula: winning.
Denver, like any town, will embrace a winner. But the Rapids simply didn’t win enough to pry any of the limelight away from their counterparts. The Broncos, meanwhile, won back-to-back Super Bowls in 1998 and 1999 and the Avalanche added a second Stanley Cup in 2001.
The Rapids also changed logos in 2001 and began playing in the entirely sterile Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium a year later, but what mattered most was results. The Rapids simply didn’t get enough.
“Honestly,” Bravo said, “we lost focus for a while there.”
Return To The Big Time
Pablo Mastroeni joined the team from the Miami Fusion in 2002 and has been the face of the franchise ever since, but he was reluctantly at the center of a strange dynamic. He played titanic games abroad for the US national team and then came back to Denver, only to find his franchise was still, as Bravo put it, “way behind the eight ball.”
“You’re playing teams like Germany and having decent results against some of the best teams in the world, and then you’re coming back and it was just like, there were 1,500 or 2,000 people at Invesco Field,” Mastroeni said. “It was kind of embarrassing.”
[inline_node:323762]Those were the lean years of the franchise, which made the conference final in 2005 and 2006 but never gained the traction they expected even after nearly a decade on the MLS map. A lack of real success and resonance outside the insular soccer community was simply part of the culture.
“We had an air of mediocrity that has run through the club, even in my days as a player,” said Bravo, who returned to the club as the technical director in 2009. “When I came back, success was something we always talked about, but it was just hot air coming from we’d been in recent years.”
“The 1997 MLS Cup brought some awareness and put us on the map, but it’s been a long time coming for that city for soccer,” Bravo added. “We have some die-hard fans there, but not a lot.”
Interestingly enough, the Rapids team now on the brink of the club’s first MLS Cup title reminds Bravo of that 1997 team that first paved the way. Colorado still sits on the fringe of the mainstream makeup of Major League Soccer the way they did back then, and the players have embraced an identity as underdogs and perceived also-rans heading into perhaps the most formative moment in franchise history.
And in the end, success on Sunday will decide where the Rapids find themselves in Monday’s morning edition and beyond.
“This group is as strong as we were in 1997, as far as that mentality and the drive,” Bravo said. “It won’t be easy, but we’re hoping that this is the start of something we can sustain.”
