2010 Taylor Trade Q & A with Terry Frei

Q: About that title … ?

A: This will sound familiar to lawyers. I’m the son of a major college and NFL football coach. I became a sports writer, going over to the dark side. So please don’t tell my mother. She still thinks I play piano in a brothel.

Q: Three years ago, your book ‘77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age, did well with both the public and critics. Is this a sequel?

A: Yes and no. The magnitude of the reaction to ’77 certainly was gratifying. While I knew I would touch nerves with the recounting of that first Broncos Super Bowl team and season, I was surprised that the time-capsule material about that era drew such extensive and emotional reactions. It planted thoughts of touching on other aspects, times, and figures in regional and national sports history I’ve encountered or researched in my career as a journalist, both on the national and local levels. We’re billing this as an opinionated memoir, combining research and reflection, and I hope I again demonstrate a unique perspective tied to my unique background and a willingness to explore both the high-profile and obscure.

Q: You also say you are, and will remain, a confirmed “liberal” by most standards. Yet in discussing such things as the perceived liberal bias in journalism and issues in sports, you take some stands that some would label decidedly “right wing” or “conservative” – all with quote marks, of course. How do you reconcile that?

A: I’m a “whoa” liberal. By that, I mean I’m a liberal willing to say, “Whoa,” and I happen to believe there are an awful lot of us like that out there, yet we’ve been too reluctant to express that sentiment for fear of being accused of betraying our ideals. 

Q: Your four previous books – Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming; Third Down and a War to Go; ’77; and the novel The Witch’s Season – have been historical works with football as the major theme. You cover the gamut of sports here, covering football, basketball, baseball, hockey, track and field, and boxing. Were you trying to get away from that football niche?

A: To a point, but only in the sense of emphasizing that my career path and interests span a lot more than football. As I said in the opening passage, my father’s college football staff at Oregon included three future NFL head coaches among his assistants. He had players such as Dan Fouts, Ahmad Rashad and Tom Graham, Daniel Graham’s father. That turned out to be a foreshadowing. I wanted to write about the intriguing figures I’ve come across. That includes John Elway and Jerry Rice; Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson and Sugar Ray Leonard; hockey’s Don Cherry, Patrick Roy, Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic, Chris Drury, and Steve Moore; Doug Moe and that crazy cast of Nuggets characters and the 1992 Olympic Dream Team; plus Dave Logan and Frank Shorter.

There also are people in the book folks never heard of again – such as the woman tending wild cats in a Barcelona park as the Olympic marathon passed her by; a minor-league baseball team in hardscrabble Butte, Montana; and the characters trying to get back on their feet after the Loma Prieta earthquake struck before the start of a World Series game. In the historical sense, I visited Damon Runyon and Jack Dempsey’s hometowns and tied them together, again told of the World War II exploits of college football players, wrote a Honeymooners script linking Ralph Kramden with the Brooklyn Dodgers.    

Men I visited and wrote about, including Rice, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, kept showing up on Dancing with the Stars, and I’ve had some fun with that. I love college football and I take you to Notre Dame, to Nebraska, and to a foreshadowing year I spent checking in with Nick Saban when he was a new Big Ten head coach. I’ve covered the Colorado Avalanche’s two Stanley Cup runs and all those great players, and I was there the night Todd Bertuzzi attacked Steve Moore, triggering an international firestorm. Much of this is memoir material, taking you with me, and in many cases, I’ve retold stories within a narrative journalism approach that is becoming more impossible every day in the current market. We’re more concerned with producing Tweets saying how the plane flight went, blogging with an hourly injury update, or getting in that 500-word game story, than we are about writing quality pieces with a shelf life.

Q: You mentioned John Elway. You have a chapter called “The Elway Effect.” How is your perspective on Elway different than the many pieces we’ve read before?

A: To start with, I’ve been around long enough to be a part of the infamous “Elway Watch” of his rookie training camp and season, which especially in retrospect was trend-setting in this era of overkill with breathless minutia rather than quality. Over the years, I covered him both as a newspaper journalist and a magazine writer. Finally, our fathers, Jerry Frei and Jack Elway, both were former Pacific 10 college head coaches, shared an office as Broncos executives, were close friends, and ultimately died only two months apart in 2001. The Elway family gave me a copy of a picture of Jack and Jerry together in the Broncos’ winning Super Bowl dressing room in Miami, and we ran it in Third Down and a War to Go. I don’t claim to know John well; I claim to have had a unique perspective.   

Q: And Dave Logan, the former CU All-American and NFL receiver who now is – among other things – a top Denver radio personality, the Broncos’ long-time radio play-by-play voice and the state’s top high school football coach?

A: When we moved to Denver when I was a junior in high school and my father informed me I would be a Wheat Ridge Farmer, my reaction was, “But dad, I thought we were moving to the big city!” I settled in, though, and played that spring on the baseball team with Logan. He pitched. I caught. Or tried to. I never have properly thanked him for enabling me to set what still must be a state high school record – most passed balls in one season. But he was a great athlete and even more so, a great competitor. The chapter on him is about that perspective and his background as one of the two men to be drafted in all three major sports, his pro career, and what he has become. It also includes a team picture of us. He’s the tall one in the back. I’m the short one in front.

Q: You have a chapter called Fourth Down and a War to Go. How is that related to your book Third Down and a War to Go?

A: I said all along that while Third Down and a War to Go was about a particular team – the national champion 1942 Wisconsin Badgers – I knew I could write a similar book about many other teams in that time of national commitment, sacrifice and heroism.

I had picked that team for very personal reasons – my father was a sophomore guard who ended up flying 67 combat missions as a P-38 fighter pilot before returning to college and to football in 1946. After he died, I was stunned to find out how few of his former players and even co-workers even knew of his wartime service. He never talked about it. I decided to research the stories of all the other players in that Wisconsin team picture on the wall of his den, and what I found stunned me – and drew heartfelt reactions from readers of the book. Since the book came out, I’ve been a speaker at veterans museums and conferences – most recently (September 9, 2010) the World War II Glider Symposium where I shared the podium with Jim Megellas, the most decorated officer in the history of the 82^nd Airborne – so that’s been emotionally rewarding, too.     

While I was researching Third Down, I came across the names of two heroic football-playing Marines who crossed service paths with Wisconsin players in the horrific Pacific island fighting. One was Bus Bergman, a Denver native who had starred in three sports at Colorado State (A&M). Another was Bob Spicer, a CU football player. I researched the 1942 Colorado-Colorado A&M game and the found about the combat death one of A&M’s stars, Dude Dent. CU’s captain, future Congressman Don Brotzman, was one of his close friends. I eventually met A&M’s John Mosley, who became a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. The stories of those men, and many others who played in that ’42 game, are in the chapter and buttress the point that I could have expanded the original book to cover far more than the Wisconsin Badgers. So I just added a down to the title for this rather extensive chapter.

Q: This is your fifth book. Former President Clinton praised your first, Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming, in his autobiography. Did that surprise you and how did it come about?

A: It did surprise me for two reasons. One, through a spokesman, President Clinton had declined to talk with me for the book. Two, his draft status in 1969  – and how he managed to get his induction notice quashed – is a significant part of the book, and the material is not completely complimentary. It culminated with the famous angst-filled letter Mr. Clinton wrote to Colonel Eugene Holmes, the head of the Arkansas ROTC program who also was the father-in-law of star Arkansas tailback Bill Burnett, on December 3, 1969, after Clinton drew a low number in the draft lottery that week. I spoke with Colonel Holmes, and that passage in Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming was the first public statement he had made on the matter since his affidavit was released during the 1992 presidential campaign. But I believe Mr. Clinton and his staff concluded I was fair to him; heaven knows avoidance of Vietnam-era service was a bipartisan phenomenon.