“Go CU… I Mean CSU!”
If Michael Hancock has any desire to try to follow in Gov. John Hickenlooper’s footsteps and become only the second Denver Mayor in the past 100 years to be Governor of Colorado, he should probably not piss off the alumni of the second largest university in Colorado. After CSU’s big win over CU in the Rocky Mountain Showdown on Friday night, Hancock presented the Centennial Cup to CSU’s coach Jim McElwain and promptly called him by CU’s head coach name. McElwain naturally did not appreciate such a slight, as Terry Frei at The Denver Post reports:
Colorado State coach Jim McElwain Monday made it clear that he was bothered when Denver Mayor Michael Hancock butchered his name…
McElwain had concluded the formal portion of his Monday news conference when he brought up the subject himself before he got up and walked away.
“I will say one thing,” he said. “I do understand where we are on the food chain from a relevance standpoint because the mayor doesn’t even know my name.
“The guy needed help, man. Somebody pointed that out, that nobody thinks much of us, even though how many alums do we have in the Denver area? Like the most of any university there is? And yet the mayor doesn’t even know the head ball coach’s name…
Shows you how much they care about Colorado State, right?” [the Peak’s emphasis]
Got to hate it when you yell out the wrong name at a most inopportune time… we’re referring to those times back in grade school when you accidentally called your teacher “mom,” of course. As for Hancock’s Freudian slip, the fact that he graduated from CU Denver certainly won’t allay the fears of CSU alum that he really has no love for them.
If Hancock has any desire to venture outside of Denver politics, he better quickly learn not to yell out the wrong name when he’s lost in an “exciting moment.”