THIS BRONCO SWINGS ON FATHER’S DAY
Dalton invites Broncos’ rookies for early Father’s Day tourney
WIGGINS» Every hole has a story. Half of them are even printable.
“I have a sponsor here,” Mitch Risner says, pointing to the makeshift seventh green — well, more like a seventh brown — as a tumbleweed ambles past. “I won’t name names, but they have definitely anointed this hole as their own. We’ll just leave at that.”
Dalton Risner’s ears perk up. “Who was it?” the Broncos guard asks, grinning wickedly from the cockpit of a nearby Polaris RZR.
“(Name redacted) golfed here last year,” Mitch replies. “And he was just in his boots.”
“You ever see that game, where everyone has four buttons, and you see who holds on to it, and one person gets shocked?” Dalton says. “(Name redacted) grabbed that thing, put one underneath each armpit and put both in his mouth, and turned it on and literally got put to the ground, turned it all the way up.
“And that’s just what it is. Everyone’s just getting together, having a great time. It’s awesome.” You do ties. They do tees. Some families cook out. Others hike, maybe hit the lake or a baseball game.
For most of the last 10 years — play was suspended for a few Junes — the Risner boys have celebrated Father’s Day and Mitch, the family patriarch and Wiggins High football coach, with a nine-hole golf scramble on the family pasture south of town.
“We used to play 18,” Mitch told the 76 players that assembled Saturday on his driveway for the 8:47 a.m. start. “But nobody had the legs or the mental capacity to (finish).”
It’s golf for people who despise golf: Fun and trash talking are encouraged, libations abound, and every entrant gets two clubs and a vehicle of their choice — UTVS are the most popular — to try to navigate the 80-acre course.
The family cattle are penned for the day and a serpentine of fairways and greens are carved into the rolling, bumpy prairie, with distances ranging from 130 to 400 yards. Instead of a hole, proper, players shoot toward a flag with three rings: the inner’s
worth 10 points, the middle five, the outer three.
Mitch, the ringmaster, founder, and CEO, estimates they collected roughly $3,000 in entry fees for the 2019 installment, which they moved up a week from the usual start. Half goes to pay for the catering and set-up; the other half goes into the prize pool. You don’t always have to watch your mouth, but you do you have to watch your step.
“One thing that really exemplifies it, was when we had a couple of our neighbors out there riding and they found like three rattlesnakes that they killed, and brought them up to the house,” Sheldon Risner, Dalton’s little brother, explains. “That’s kind of what this is: People golfing and doing that kind of thing, catching snakes and killing them.”
Into this breach stepped Dalton and three fellow Broncos rookies: tight end Noah Fant, quarterback Brett Rypien and offensive lineman John Leglue. Although only Fant, Rypien and Leglue actually played — Dalton, the former Kansas State Allamerican, served as social director, shuttling friends, family members and cold drinks from house to hole as requested.
“The dude never plays; he’s just the entertainer,” offers Taylor Risner, Dalton’s older brother and a former Northern Colorado safety. “He does not know how to swing a golf club.
“He’s way worse than (Charles) Barkley. Way worse. He tries to manhandle it, it goes 20 yards and it (slices) off to the right. The one time I golfed with him, he took one swing and hit a house, first swing. It was 20 yards, straight off the tee box, straight into the house.”
Although, truth be told, it’s not so much about skill and scores as love and laughter, swapping fish stories, comparing scars.
“When (Dalton) was younger, he wanted to be a running back for my dad (at Wiggins), one of the skill guys, and my dad wouldn’t let him, wouldn’t put him in, he was too big,” Sheldon cracks. “So he was outside and he just kept running into the side of the barn with all these pads on it. And he thought that somehow would help him. He thought that maybe that would prove to my dad that he could be a running back or something.”
“My dad, he thinks he’s still 20,” Taylor recalls. “So (he and Dalton) go out to the field and they go full one-on-one. And my dad would even put on a helmet. And Dalton would make him look baaaad. And rightfully so, right? You’re not going to be at that age and still compete with him. Those two would go off on the field and just get after each other, and Dalton would just bury him in the ground. It’s just something about him — my dad would do anything for him. Anything to make him better. Even if it means getting buried in the ground.”
This year: Broncos. Next year: Working out a way to pair it with Risner Up Foundation, Dalton’s nonprofit.
“Talk to the CEO and see if my foundation makes the cut,” Dalton quips.
“In the Risner Foundation, I work for him,” Mitch says. “But in the grand scheme of things, he works for me.”
“No matter what happens,” Dalton replies, “I’ll probably work for him.”
Every hole has a smile. The kind that never leave you.