From Folsom Field to the Ellie Caulkins Opera House

March 19, 2012
Denver Post

Keith Miller, former CU football player, makes Denver debut as opera singer
By Ray Mark Rinaldi
The Denver Post

They're the same drill really, football and opera. You make the team, put in the practice, and when the whistle blows you perform like your life depended on it.

Still, they don't overlap much among fans. Chances are that half the people who read this story — it is about a football star who became a world-class opera singer — wouldn't know which NFL team has won the most Super Bowls. The other half couldn't tell you who wrote "Madame Butterfly."

The answers, for the clueless and the clueless, are Pittsburgh and Puccini, and it's a safe bet that Keith Miller would get both. He's the former University of Colorado fullback who found a new life as a bass-baritone. These days, he performs at concert halls across the country, though he still has the swagger of an athlete, and the triceps. When he talks about his fledgling career, it's all about conditioning, getting ready for the big play.

And there's no downtime for an athlete in training, not even between gigs at The Metropolitan Opera House and Carnegie Hall, or here in Denver, where he makes his debut Saturday night with Opera Colorado.

"You can take the preseason off and play it safe, or you can put the work in," said Miller, who at 38 is just getting to the place where many baritones start to do their best singing.

A player stays focused.

"I know what's in front of me," he says. "I know what I need to do to be my best."

It's a story with the sort of wide turns Rossini might compose a score for (he wrote "The Barber of Seville," football fans). And it starts in the little town of Ovid, Colo., where Miller was raised. His dad worked for John Deere, his mother was a school teacher. Of course, there was a family farm, and Miller was up at 5 a.m. helping with sugar beets, tending to cattle.

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