Outlaw man.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Mac Freeman

THE SCOUTING REPORT ON FIVE-YEAR DENVER BRONCOS veteran Mac Freeman: Prototypical linebacker build. Six-two, 210. Influenced by Giants legend Lawrence Taylor. Five broken collarbones. Team player. May be underrated for his position.

The thing is, while Freeman does his work at Invesco Field, you won't see him in a helmet and pads. He's vice president of stadium operations for the Denver Broncos's Stadium Management Co.

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On a Sunday afternoon in November, if the beer is cold, the security staff pleasant and the roar of three U.S. Air Force jets perfectly timed to coincide with the final note of the national anthem, Freeman and his staff deserve the credit. But they don't expect to get it.

"In this business, if we do our job we should be unnoticed," Freeman says.

A former manager for Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Freeman is poised to make an even bigger impact on the Denver sports scene. Broncos CEO Pat Bowlen has appointed him vice president of Edge Sports and Entertainment, a Broncos subsidiary that will introduce to Invesco Field this summer the Denver Outlaws, one of four new Major League Lacrosse teams.

In the meantime, Freeman and his staff will host close to 300 corporate events at Invesco Field this year, ranging from rah-rah sales meetings in the locker rooms to on-the-field extravaganzas. Outfitted with plush meeting rooms and carpeted club facilities, Invesco is a generation removed from its spartan predecessor, Mile High Stadium.

"We're not building the same type of buildings that we used to," says Freeman. "What that has done is allowed us to go into other businesses."

NEW STRATEGY

To understand what a former East Coast concert promoter is doing in the sports business at all, you have to go back in time.

In the good old days of professional sports, there was a script for how things worked: A cigar-gnashing oil executive with cash to burn would buy a team from its first-generation patriarch, overpay for a has-been athlete, start hemorrhaging money in year two, realize smart people owned real estate and treasury bonds, not sports franchises, and six years later, on the brink of bankruptcy, sell the team to the next fool for double what he paid, claiming that was the plan all along. Then that guy would do the same thing. This scheme worked perfectly well for decades.

But sometime beginning in the mid-1990s, something happened. The world of professional sports was...