This morning I took a short, early morning stroll from the team hotel to Levi’s Stadium.
“Or as we call it in Denver,’’ I tweeted out after taking a picture of the place, “Von’s House.’’
The tweet took off. Bronco fans remember.
In Denver, they call this Von's house. #9sports pic.twitter.com/BDg5fHh2Zw
— Mike Klis (@MikeKlis) August 16, 2017
Von Miller will hopefully play 10 more years. Great as he is, I doubt he will ever have a more epic performance than the one he had here a year-and-a-half ago.
On Wednesday, Von returned to Levi’s Stadium for the first time since he received his Super Bowl 50 MVP trophy.
“Walking on to the field this morning, it's a whole lot different,’’ Miller said. “It's a lot more red than what it was last time. Before it was just gold and black and a whole bunch of white, all the Super Bowl stuff.
“It still had the same feel. San Francisco has always been good to me. The Bay Area has always been good to us. Throughout my whole career, I've only lost one game here. Preseason, the Oakland Raiders, the San Francisco 49ers, I've only lost one game here and have a lot of great memories for me, as a team and as an organization. San Francisco is good for us.”
At the joint practice with the 49ers on a field just outside the stadium today, Miller had a tough time escaping the clutches of 49er Trent Brown, whom Von called the best right tackle in the game.
As Von Miller’s mom knows, Von gets held a lot.
“My mom, she always says, 'Von, why don't you go to the refs and tell them that they're holding,’’’ Miller said. “And I'm like, 'Mom I cannot do that, that's just not part of the game.' That's more of a soccer or basketball thing, where you get in a relationship with the refs and you complain.
“I just try to go out there and I just try to be great. If I'm worried about the guy holding me then he's getting the best of me. I just try to go out there and control what I can control and be dominant and consistent. It's been working for me for seven years now. So, sorry momma, I'm not going to complain to the refs, that's part of the game.”
Miller’s iconic performance at the stadium here on Feb. 7, 2016, wound up making him a lot of money. In fact, at $19.1 million a year, it helped make him the NFL’s highest paid defensive player.
The place cost $1.3 billion so it’s not really Von’s House. But he could buy up a piece of end zone where Malik Jackson recovered his strip-sack fumble of Cam Newton.
