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Denver Dynamite 1987,89-91

On the back of a manila folder while watching an indoor soccer game, Jim Foster began to sketch out an idea. His Idea was to bring football inside to an arena size field. Taking the dimensions of an ice hockey surface, Mr. Foster came up with a way to shorten the field to half the size in both length and width compared to its outdoor counterpart. The teams would place eight players instead of eleven on the field and they would play iron-man football. (Iron-man football is a term used for players who play both offense and defense in a game.) He would also add padding to the walls which encircle the field and rebound nets at each end of the field at the back of the end-zones.

  In 1987, Jim Foster’s idea would become reality and the Arena Football League was born. Along with three other teams, under head coach Tim Marcum, the Denver Dynamite would take to the indoor field and play a six game schedule with a finish of 4-2. The Dynamite would travel to Pittsburgh to take on the Pittsburgh Gladiators in the first ever Arena Bowl. In front of a crowd of just over 13,000 spectators, the Dynamite would defeat the Gladiators 45-16 and claim champions of the Arena Football League in its inaugural season.

  The Dynamite did not play in 1988 but returned to the AFL in 1989 with a new head coach, Babe Parilli. They would play three more seasons with 1991 being the last. Though the Dynamite would go to the playoffs each year, that first championship game would be their only win. Troubled by financial problems during all four years of their existence, the Dynamite would fold up operations just before the beginning of the 1992 season.

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  Some of the financial problems of the Dynamite are legendary; during the first year the team rented u-haul trucks to not only transport the team’s equipment, but the team members as well. After not being paid once during one season, the managers of McNichols Arena, where the Dynamite played, walked into the locker room of the team during halftime of a game and demanded that the owner write a check for the rental of the facility or management would have no choice but to cut the lights. The owner, having no choice, wrote out a check right there and then, the game continued on, and the Dynamite lost.

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