Years after most controversial play in Broncos-Raiders rivalry, Rob Lytle's ashes spread on Mile High site

They’ve long since blown away, but there was a time when the ashes of late Broncos running back Rob Lytle were lying in Lot J at Empower Field at Mile High.
It was Lytle who was at the center of the most controversial play in the history of the Broncos-Raiders rivalry. Midway through the third quarter of the 1977 AFC championship game at old Mile High Stadium, the rookie lost the ball at the Oakland 2 on a vicious hit by Raiders safety Jack Tatum.
It looked like a fumble, but it wasn’t one. The officials ruled the play had been blown dead and Raiders defensive tackle Mike McCoy had to stop running with the ball in his hand halfway to the end zone. Raiders players and coaches, with head man John Madden leading the charge, were incensed, but it did them no good.
“I’ve read some articles that that was the worst call ever made,’’ McCoy said.
After an unsportsmanlike call on the Raiders moved the ball to the 1, Jon Keyworth scored on a pitchout from quarterback Craig Morton to extend Denver’s lead from 7-3 to 14-3. The Broncos went on to win 20-17 to earn the first Super Bowl berth in team history. They lost 27-10 in the big game to Dallas, but Broncomania at that time was in full force.
The Raiders have moved three times since then — to Los Angeles in 1982, back to Oakland in 1995 and to Las Vegas in 2020. And they will face AFC West rival Denver in Sunday’s regular-season opener at Empower Field at Mile High.
Plenty of fans figure to be tailgating in Lot J on the northwest side of the stadium. It’s doubtful any will realize that Lytle’s ashes were placed in that parking lot in 2014.
***
Lytle, who played for the Broncos from 1977-83, died of a heart attack in 2010. An autopsy of his brain later revealed moderate to severe symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). About a decade before he died, Lytle had made a request to his wife Tracy.
“Rob suffered from CTE at an extensive level, so I think he knew there were things going on,’’ said Tracy Lytle. “And we would just talk and he would just say, ‘Hey Trace, if anything ever happens, I want my ashes spread in these three places.”’
The three places were Fremont Ross High School, where Lytle starred while growing up in Fremont, Ohio; Michigan Stadium, where he starred in college and finished third in the Heisman Trophy voting in 1976 for the Wolverines; the site of Mile High Stadium, which was torn down in 2001 and replaced by the Broncos’ new stadium.
With Lytle’s family living in Ohio, it was an easy drive for ashes to be taken and spread out on the fields at the first two places. But members of Lytle’s family didn’t make it to Denver with the ashes until they planned to attend an Oct. 19, 2014, game between the Broncos and San Francisco 49ers.
On the weekend of the Sunday night game, members of Lytle’s family met up with Ron Egloff, a former tight end who had been Lytle’s best friend on the Broncos, and his wife Julee. On hand from the family were Tracy Lytle, Lytle’s son Kelly Lytle, Lytle’s daughter Erin Lytle Tober and her husband Dan Tober. Egloff was told of Lytle’s wishes on the plans for his ashes.
“I hadn’t heard about that until then,’’ said Egloff, who played for the Broncos from 1977-83 and has continued to live in Denver. “I think Tracy had some sort of plastic bag or something with the ashes in them.”
As the families discussed the plans for the ashes, Egloff had an idea. He said he would try to find the exact location where Lytle’s non-fumble occurred, and the ashes could be placed there. Mile High Stadium was on the north side of Empower Field when it was last used in 2000 and the new stadium was being built.
Lytle’s family members were all for the idea.
“(Egloff) made the connection like, ‘Let’s pick the spot where we think is closest to where the most infamous play would have gone down,’’’ said Kelly Lytle, 40, who lives in Cleveland, 85 miles east of Fremont. “We said, ‘Why not? Let’s honor dad right here, because this is the play that everyone remembers and one of the plays that helped them get to the Super Bowl because of what didn’t get called.' So we definitely had that in mind when we chose that spot.’’’
Although Lytle never specifically requested that his ashes be placed on the site of that play, Tracy Lytle endorsed Egloff’s suggestion.
“Rob had just said that he wanted (the ashes) in the Denver stadium. But he was always kind of like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s my claim to fame,’’’ Tracy Lytle, who lives in the Cleveland suburb of Aurora, said of the non-fumble.
So Egloff did some research before the game against the 49ers. Looking online and using his local knowledge, he determined the approximate location of where the drama had unfolded.
“I lined it up in proximity of where the round hotel was back then that is now (the Turntable Studios apartments),’’ he said. “And the north end zone (of Mile High Stadium) was just west of the Mile High monument, where they have that little stadium replica. We had a pretty good idea of where 'X' marks the spot.”
The plan was set for the six to meet there a few hours before the game. Egloff sought to add one more person to the ceremony in former punter Bucky Dilts, who had worked in the funeral business several years earlier and also was a good friend of Lytle’s when they were Broncos teammates.
“Ron had told me he actually had done some work in the parking lot to discover the exact spot where the infamous fumble, non-fumble occurred and they wanted me to do something at that spot,’’ said Dilts, Denver’s punter in 1977 and 1978. “So I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’
“I had actually worked for a guy in the funeral business for two or three years starting in 2008, so I had been exposed to that business. … Ron wanted me to be involved in a kind of ceremony. So I said a few words about how special Rob was and how they wanted him to be back here and then we sprinkled his ashes there. It was probably one of the most unique things I’ve done.”
Lytle’s No. 41 Broncos jersey was placed alongside the ashes and photos were taken. All in all, the family appreciated the moment.
“It was a nice ceremony,’’ said Kelly Lytle. “It was a nice moment for my sister and I to reflect on a father who was an amazing friend, an amazing parent, an amazing everything to us and to my mom, a husband whom she started dating when they were in high school and they spent the better part of their lives together.”
The moment was bittersweet. While those who were there reflected on some of Lytle’s glory days in football, there also was the remembrance of how he had numerous surgeries during his NFL career and afterward and how he was in pain later in his life before dying at the age of 56 in Fremont.
“He always said that the longevity of an NFL running back is 56 years old and that’s when he actually passed away,’’ said Tracy Lytle. “So it’s so crazy.”
***
After meeting at Fremont Ross High, Rob and Tracy Lytle both attended Michigan and married in 1977, when Lytle was a second-round pick by the Broncos. After rushing for 1,469 yards as a Michigan senior in 1976, Lytle finished third in voting for the Heisman Trophy behind running backs Tony Dorsett of Pittsburgh and Ricky Bell of USC. He would be named posthumously to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2015.
“He was an awesome player in college,’’ Egloff said. “We played against him when I went to Wisconsin and he went to Michigan.’’
Game analysis and insights from The Gazette sports staff including columns by Woody Paige and Paul Klee.
Lytle had a solid NFL rookie season, rushing for 408 yards and being one of four Denver running backs to gain between 311 and 489 yards. The Broncos, with Morton directing the offense and linebacker Randy Gradishar leading the "Orange Crush" defense, stunned the NFL by going 12-2 and making the playoffs for the first time in the 18-year history of the franchise.
The Broncos beat Pittsburgh 34-21 to open the playoffs at Mile High Stadium, with Lytle opening the scoring on a 7-yard touchdown run. Then in came the Raiders, who had won Super Bowl XI the previous season, for the AFC championship game on Jan. 1, 1978.
Midway through the third quarter, with the Broncos up 7-3, they faced first-and-goal at the Oakland 2. Morton called the play at the line of scrimmage and Raiders defensive tackle Dave Rowe recognized it.
“There’s 70,000 people screaming, but I was able to hear the quarterback make the call and he said ’30 power on two,’’’ Rowe said. “So I told Jack Tatum, ‘I heard the play. They’re going to be coming up the middle.’’’
Tatum, who died in 2010, was nicknamed “The Assassin’’ for being one of the hardest hitters in NFL history. He moved into position to rush. And when Lytle got the handoff from Morton, Tatum blasted him and the ball came loose.
“It was clearly a fumble,’’ Rowe said. “There’s no doubt in the world it was a fumble.”
McCoy scooped up the ball and started running for the end zone. But the action soon was stopped, with head linesman Ed Marion saying the play had been blown dead due to Lytle’s forward progress being stopped.
“There was no whistle,’’ said McCoy, listed at 6-foot-5, 284 pounds. “I started running and nobody was near me and even I could have scored. And all of a sudden, I see John Madden with his hands over his head. It was amazing. That call changed the whole game.”
With Keyworth scoring on the next play, McCoy said the 14-3 deficit was too much to overcome. Rowe remembers then-Raiders owner Al Davis, who died in 2011, being outraged by the call.
“I’ll never forget Al Davis saying, ‘That play killed us,’’’ Rowe said. “It wasn’t fair. We would have been in another Super Bowl. If they had instant replay back then, the call would have been changed.”
As for Lytle’s take on the play, Tracy Lytle said he didn’t remember any of it.
“It was the hardest he had ever been hit and he had no recollection of it,’’ she said of Lytle, who was helped to the sideline after the play. “He was totally knocked out when that happened, so he did not know whether he had the ball or not.”
Lytle did return to the game and finished with 26 yards on seven carries. Two weeks later he scored a touchdown in Super Bowl XII on a 1-yard run. Lytle saw replays of the hit by Tatum, and he was asked about it many times during the remaining 33 years of his life.
Did he think it was a fumble?
“If you knew Rob, he would just smile when he was asked about it,’’ said Tracy Lytle. “If you read into it, you would say, ‘It was a fumble.’ But would Rob say that? No. … But the smile said it all.’’
Morton played it coy when asked if believed the play should have been ruled a fumble.
“The referee blew his whistle because he did not see a fumble,’’ Morton said. “To me, it wasn’t a fumble. To me, it was the Raiders complaining.”
Morton lives in the San Francisco Bay area and has heard numerous Raiders fans complain about the non-call for years. Morton doesn’t deny it was an important moment in getting the Broncos to the Super Bowl, saying, “It was a break that he didn’t fumble.”
After having what would be his best NFL season in 1977, Lytle began to be hit by injuries. He did get into all but four games over the next five seasons but often played hurt and had a limited role. He retired from the NFL after playing four games for the Broncos in his final season, 1983.
“He had nine major operations when he played (for the Broncos) — both knees, both ankles, both shoulders,’’ said Egloff, who has a photo on the wall at his Denver home that shows him holding a fallen Lytle after one of his injuries. “So he was physically destroyed.”
For his NFL career, Lytle rushed for 1,451 yards. That was 18 fewer than he gained in his final Michigan season alone.
“He had a such a successful college career and then he got off to a great start his rookie year and they go to the Super Bowl,’’ Kelly Lytle. “But then most of his Broncos years were spent in the training room or in the operating room or having surgery or recovering from surgery. He always struggled because he never felt he was able to let the Denver fans see what he could have been had he been healthy.”
Not long after he retired, Lytle moved back to Fremont and operated a clothing store with his father. But all the injuries he suffered during his playing career, and the need to have additional surgeries to correct ongoing ailments, took a toll.
“He was suffering from depression and he was in a lot of pain,’’ said Egloff, who kept in touch with Lytle for the remainder of his life and visited with him in Ohio and Colorado and on vacation in Florida. “He was tired of all the surgeries. … It weighed on his mental health. He wasn’t in a good place mentally.”
It wasn’t until 2005 that Dr. Bennet Omalu, who had studied the brain of Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster after he died in 2002,
Published his findings on CTE in a paper entitled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player." And it was several years after that before CTE became readily acknowledged by the general public.
“When (Lytle) died in 2010, the CTE and mental side of what football can sort of bring to its players wasn’t really well known,’’ said Kelly Lytle. “We were still operating on, ‘Dad had gotten his bell rung quite a bit.’ I think one of the hard things was a lot of his suffering was in silence. So it was after he died that our family was able to recognize some of the signs that he wasn’t all there.
“He had challenges with vertigo and other ailments and moments of being at the grocery story and having to call my mom because the world was literally spinning out of control. I knew something was going on, but I didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know it was his brain failing, but you knew there was a fog there because in conversation he was several steps behind.”
The family got the diagnosis of Lytle’s condition after donating his brain to Boston University’s CTE Center. Since then, Kelly Lytle has written about his father’s condition, including a piece earlier this year for USA Today in which he wrote that “football took him to his grave.”
Still, Kelly Lytle has been been able to celebrate his father’s football accomplishments. One celebration was in parking lot J on Oct. 19, 2014.
“We had a chance to kind of put his jersey on next to the ashes and take some photos,’’ he said. “So we definitely had some moments there and a chance to have a little bit of a memorial moment. It was always his wish that he wanted to be memorialized or left where he played the sport that he had loved so much in those three places.”
One of those spots was at Mile High Stadium, or at least where it once stood.