The original designs for the Rocky Mountain Extreme logo/ Michel Beindorff, via Mixbook

Hats off to Icethetics.com, a site devoted to strange sports logos, most of which never happened.

What almost happened: the Avalanche were supposed to have been named the Rocky Mountain Extreme. That was the vision of former owner Charlie Lyons, a one-time Colorado ski bum who never forgot his “extreme sports” days and wanted to rename the Quebc Nordiques the Rocky Mountain Extreme.

Why did that name never happen, despite the logos designed above and other marketing materials all drawn up? Well, I’ll take my share of credit for that.

To sum it up in a nutshell: I got the early scoop on the new hockey team’s name, and wrote a late-summer, 1995 story in the Denver Post exposing it to the world. Other than getting the actual scoop that the team would be sold and moved to Denver from Quebec, this was going to be my next-biggest exclusive of my early career, and I can’t tell you the excitement when I saw the story that early 1995 and DIDN’T seen anything about it in the bitter rival Rocky Mountain News that same day.

Believe me when I tell you that it was a real newspaper war back then, where every little morsel of news was fought over like a scrap of meat by two hungry lions. All day long, I reveled in the scoop, accepting literal and figurative pats on the back from colleagues and readers.

And then, the Dave Logan Show happened. I think he was on KOA even back then, but all I remember was Logan fielding call after call during his afternoon radio talk show from fans just ripping the hell out of the hockey team’s new name. It was just a, ahem, avalanche of negative public opinion. Everybody hated it.

But what did I care? I had the scoop, and so who cares how bad it is, it’s in the books. Except, it wasn’t.

———



“Hey Adrian, it’s Shawn Hunter,” said the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Hey Shawn, what time is it?” I remember mumbling, at what I think about 6 a.m. or so.

“Hey, I don’t think what you had in the paper is going to be accurate,” Hunter said.

And then I knew right away what was going to happen. Burned by all that bad publicity the day before, the “Extreme” would get cold feet and pull the whole concept, then deny it ever was a possibility. And that’s exactly what happened. As I woke up and grabbed that day’s Rocky Mountain News off my apartment front stoop, at 7925 W. Mansfield Pkwy. in Lakewood, I suddenly felt like I’d been whacked in the head by a 2×4.

Stripped across the top of the front page of the sports section was a story by News columnist Bob Kravitz, the gist of which can be summed up as: “Extreme? What Extreme. There was never going to be any Rocky Mountain Extreme. The other paper got it all wrong.”

It’s a bad feeling when you get scooped by the other paper. It’s an even worse feeling when the other paper has a lead story saying yours was all wrong. I felt like I wanted to dig a hole in the front yard, jump inside, cover up and never come out.