Dear Jesus, please help the Broncos win

When you think of Denver, what do you think of? The Rocky Mountains, right? But Denver isn’t in the mountains; it’s only near them. Without the mountains, the city itself would arguably be like most any other Midwestern city. There is a river running through it and there are some train tracks that long ago established it as a transportation hub. Aside from that, it has malls, restaurants, a few decent museums and such, but most all of it is merely mediocre in scope and scale – like dozens of other cities of the same size and climate.

But Denver joins a smaller more “elite” group of cities when judged by the number and popularity of its professional sports teams that play here. We have professional baseball, hockey, basketball, and football. (We probably have professional hacky sack, snowmobiling, and pumpkin chunkin’ teams as well, but really, outside of the big four, nobody cares.) And folks in Denver, like in other cities, love their sports teams – especially the Broncos. I suspect it’s because for a few moments it makes people feel almost as good as their friends who choose to live on one of the coasts or in some truly cosmopolitan place with actual culture.

Basically what we are talking about here is the fact that the people in Denver love the Broncos for the same reason middle-aged men buy expensive sports cars. It makes them feel important, virile, and relevant – if only temporarily. Some people here remember when the Broncos were more than a barely mediocre football team and they miss feeling relevant and virile, the same way a middle-aged man misses the hair that used to grow on the crown of his head.

And they’ll do anything to recapture that feeling of glory – even pray. Yep. Every week, Tim Tebow (the second-rate quarterback who replaced the Bronco’s third-rate quarterback some weeks ago) kneels on the sidelines and prays so hard it looks as if he’s about to sprain his eyelid muscles by squeezing them shut too hard. There he is every week, dressed in all that spandex, invoking Jesus’ name and losing game after game in full 60-inch high definition. Meanwhile, Jesus is either too busy to listen or just doesn’t care about football because the Broncos have lost their last three games, including the one just played against the quarterback Tebow replaced.

If you detect a little snarkiness here it’s for a couple of reasons: 1) I’m a little snarky, and 2) I’m embarrassed that the only way we can hope to win a few football games is to pray for help from a deity. I’d much rather the Broncos just tried to win games by practicing and improving, like other teams. But that doesn’t mean I want the Broncos to lose as they move on to their completely undeserved spot in the playoffs next week. In fact, I want them to win badly!

You see, when the Broncos play football, all of the middle-aged men with expensive sports cars are too busy kneeling on their living room floors praying for a win in front of their televisions to be out on the roads. Meanwhile, their wives and girlfriends are presumably too busy heating up another batch of Velveeta and Ro-tel dip to be out shopping. For a few short hours every Sunday, traffic in Denver clears like Moses parting the Red Sea. The zoo empties out, the restaurants are accessible, the need to buy movie tickets in advance is gone, and parking abounds at the mall – a real miracle. So Jesus, I don’t know if you are listening but can you please help the Broncos win a few more games? I need to go to Wal-Mart next weekend. In Tebow's name, amen.