Greg Hatter turned up Thursday to say thanks. Not because the Nuggets gave him a reason to party. Because they gave him a reason to live.
“It’s funny. They look at me like, ‘You had a stroke?’” Hatter chuckled Thursday after watching Denver’s first-ever NBA championship victory celebration at Civic Center Park. “I say back, ‘Hey, I may look like a Lamborghini, but inside, at times, I look like a Yugo.”
That engine’s purring again, thanks to a lot of love. A lot of hands. A lot of prayers. And this basketball team of tough, smart, misfit toys, led by a Serbian bear who passes like a point guard.
“Watching the Nuggets and what they’ve been doing, this has been an inspiration for me,” Hatter said proudly. “As the they got going, I was growing stronger, too.”
He felt strong enough Thursday morning to slap fives with Christian Braun and Jack White as they passed. He looked up at Jamal Murray, puffing away at another victory cigar, and saw a little of himself.
“I didn’t know if I would make it or not,” the 54-year-old Hatter told me. “So I wanted to come out to Colorado and finish out what time I had left.”
A Marine veteran, Hatter’s bounced from the VA to the Denver Rescue Mission in recent years, sometimes homeless, sometimes not, trying to find his feet again. Greg suffered a stroke more than 24 months ago, the result of a brain aneurysm while on the job in Mankato, Minn.
He said his blood pressure checked in at 200-ish-over-180-ish when he collapsed. The doctors told him he was five minutes from dying altogether.
“The next thing you know, I’m in the back of an ambulance,” he recalled. “And (the medics) kept calling me a ‘BB.’ I said, ‘What’s a BB? They said, ‘You’re a brain-bleed. A blood vessel burst inside your brain.’”
Within six months, he was walking again. Gingerly. The cognitive pieces took a little longer.
“I went, 20, 4, 9, 8, 0,’ and I thought I’d counted down from 20 to 1,” he recalled. “They asked me what time it was, I looked at the clock and I had no (expletive) idea what they were talking about.
“They asked me who the president was, I said, ‘As long as it’s not Trump, I think I’m all right.’”
Steady employment proved fleeting, and the pandemic didn’t help: Hatter got hit with COVID-19 twice, and the second punch, which landed last June, sent him to the hospital while the Avs were celebrating their Stanley Cup title.
“I’ve had to do two years of work to recover,” Hatter recalled. “It’s funny that all these things are happening at the same time. Before the Western Conference Finals, I never went out. But I spent a lot of time at home sitting and studying the Nuggets.”
And just to prove that not all Front Range Lakers fans have sold their souls, about three weeks ago, a few friends who bleed purple and gold went up to Hatter and asked if he’d join them for the Game 3 watch party between the Nuggets and the Lake Show at Ball Arena. He went. He walked. He ate it up.
“It was incredible,” Greg laughed. “I told my father, ‘It was my first time being out in public like that.’ And it felt so good.’”
Thursday felt even better. Bruce Brown teased. (One more ride! One more ride!) Nikola Jokic said a naughty word in front of 700,000 of his closest friends.
Murray signed a portrait from atop a fire truck. Braun stood on another truck, shirtless, draping a WWE belt over one shoulder like The Rock.
At Bannock Street, Jeff Green borrowed a cop’s bicycle and pedaled into the madness.
“I’ll be back,” Green vowed. “I’ll be back.”
A few feet away, Olivia Sandoval of Westminster sat on her father Jaime’s broad shoulders and lobbed red roses at the passing Nuggets staffers, coaches and players, aiming as high as she could.
“It’ll be for at least 20 minutes, 25 minutes (straight),” Jaime laughed during a pause in the rose-tossing. “You have to take breaks … but it’s a good day.”
Good with a healthy pinch of goofy. Jason Toler dyed his hair green, threw on white makeup and followed the parade route dressed like a comic book version of The Joker, in honor of you-know-who.
“Forty-seven (bleeping) years,” said Toler, who grew up in Littleton and around Colorado Springs, grinning in character even as the green dye bled out from his sideburns. “I am 52 years old and I’ve been watching these guys since Day 1. We used to get Nuggets cards from the police department, when the ‘80s Nuggets were doing their thing. But we just could not get past the Lakers.
“The best thing is, we swept (Los Angeles) in their house. So it kind of erased all those four losses (to them in the playoffs) with the four wins. Isn’t that ironic? This is extra, extra special. It was time. It was time for the Nuggets to finally get respect.”
Bow, Lakers Nation. Bow to your Mile High Overlords!
“We swept them and Lakers fan friends, they didn’t tell me ‘Congratulations, way to go,’” Hatter groused. “They said, ‘We got 17 world championships. You got one.’ We get no respect.”
Hatter’s been following the Nuggets from afar since the late David Thompson days. The high points. The lean years in between. He’s visited the Rescue Mission for the last five months or so, getting things lined up through its Next Step program, which encourages residents to create goals that put them on a path toward living and working independently again.
“I always say you’re as young as you feel,” he cracked. “Some days, I wake up, I’m 65 (years old) or I wake up and I’m 70.”
Still, he’s got his eye on an apartment. He’s getting his ducks in a row, one by one. Physical. Mental. Emotional. If the Nuggets can do it, Greg figures, why the heck can’t I? And why the heck not now?
“For them to win it all, it felt like, as they crossed the finish line, I feel like I’m crossing the finish line,” Hatter said, voice as soft as a kitten’s footsteps. “Those guys have no idea how much this means to me, too.”
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