They're a classy bunch.

Until she became a Rockies fan a few years ago, my wife, Jackie, couldn't possibly have cared less about professional sports teams and their adventures. One could say she had all the enthusiasm (read, boredom) of a ski "widow," which she is, sitting around in a day skiers' shelter at some resort waiting for me to get off the slopes. (Naw, she doesn't do that either.)

Now that she's hooked on the Rockies, we're either at Coors Field or she's watching on the tube. Or the last resort, listening on satellite radio in the car. It should go without saying, but I will, that we were ecstatic over the run of games that led to the 2007 NL Championship. We loved being at Coors Field with our broom for the championship game!

But we've suffered, too, with all in the Rockies organization. There was the World Series. And there were this year's April-May doldrums, relieved a bit but not enough in June.

Yet we've neither observed nor heard about any back-biting among the players, their coaches and manager. The positions of injured key players have been almost miraculously covered by exciting substitutes. No Rocky shows up in the papers for snubbing fans or for the disgraceful off-field conduct of the dilettantes passing for "professionals" on too many other sports teams.

All as it should be, but too often isn't.

The event we will never forget, the one that stamped them for us as the kings of class, happened while the National League Champion Rockies were idle, waiting for an American League Champion. Jackie and I were en route somewhere in the car, listening to the play-by-play as the Yankees tried to master the Red Sox or vice versa. Between innings, a personality on the broadcast told us what the Rockies players had done that day, voting a full World Series share - nearly a quarter of a million dollars - to the widow and children of Mike Coolbaugh!

Coolbaugh had been killed a couple of months earlier by a foul ball tragically lined at his head as he coached at first base for the Tulsa Drillers, a Rockies farm club. He had been with the Rockies organization for only about three weeks.

The sportscasting crew for the Yankees-Red Sox game became nearly speechless. Perhaps they were fighting back tears; we didn't even try. To ice the cake, no reporter, as far as I know, was ever able to get a name as to whose idea this was.

Rockies fans are accustomed to this: no one hogs the spotlight, no one is a goat; all share the great and the not-so-great. They're a classy bunch.