Keeler: How Nuggets’ run to NBA title inspired Denver man to find his feet again: “Those guys have no idea how much this means to me.”

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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.”

Nuggets fan Greg Hatter (left) poses with a friend before attending a watch party at Ball Arena for Denver's contest against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3 of the NBA's Western Conference Finals in May 2023. (Courtesy Greg Hatter)
Nuggets fan Greg Hatter (left) poses with a friend before attending a watch party at Ball Arena for Denver’s contest against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 3 of the NBA’s Western Conference Finals in May 2023. (Courtesy Greg Hatter)

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.’”

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