BOULDER – Being a sports fan is no easy task. It requires time, patience, dedication, and more than anything, the want to keep tradition alive. You'll cheer your team on in the best of times, and stand by it when it's going through the worst.
It's hard to argue that anyone knows that better than two sports fans from CU-Boulder. Most people know them as "The Twins."
Betty Hoover and Peggy Coppom have that passion. The 91-year-old women have attended close to every Colorado home football game and basketball game since 1940. For those of you counting, that's 75 years of devotion.
Betty and Peggy's passion for sports started young. Born on Nov. 19, 1924 in Walsenburg, Colorado, their family moved around the area until eventually settling in Haxtun.
"We had a band and it was like you see in the movie 'Friday Night Lights,'" Hoover said. "Everybody went to the high school sports -- football and basketball. That's how we learned to like sports. That's what you did in a little town."
After their sophomore years of high school, the Great Depression forced their family to move. They settled in Longmont, where their father opened a meat market. A year later, the family picked up and went further west, to Boulder.
Hoover and Coppom called the move "big time," as Boulder was a much larger city than their previous homes. It didn't take long for the twins to make friends, and soon they were named Boulder High's cheerleaders.
"It was different then, you didn't have to be a tumbler or any of that," Hoover said. "We just had two girls and two boys at Boulder High as cheerleaders in those days. You just had to have a lot of spirit and know the game."
Following their graduations, Hoover and Coppom started at the CU-Boulder in 1943 during the Second World War. They attended for one year.
"Peggy's boyfriend came back from his 25 missions in England, and they wanted to be married, so no more school. I decided that I needed to help out more at home. We didn't go back the second year. I went to work and she got married," Hoover said.
Coppom and her husband married in 1944. Peggy had three children, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Of the six grandchildren, there is one set of identical twins girls and one set of twin boys who are not identical. Coppom's youngest son, Gary, takes the twins to all of the games.
"He's our guardian angel, taking care of us to go to all the games," Coppom said. "We're very fortunate."
Hoover and her husband were married in 1946. Like Coppom's husband, he was also a United Airlines pilot. The couple moved to Chicago shortly after they were married, but missing home, they put in for a transfer, and were back in Boulder four months later. They had four children, six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. One son is deceased, her second son went to Colorado State University.
"We're for CSU unless we play them. We like the Colorado schools," Hoover said.
Unlike her sister, there aren't any twins on Hoover's side just yet, but she's hopeful.
"When the next two [grandchildren] get married they'll come through with some twins maybe," she said.
Coppom and Hoover's husbands have since both passed away, and it was at that time that Hoover moved her football season tickets so she could sit by her twin. The ladies have been at every game together since and they never leave early.
"To us, they're young men out there doing the best the can under the circumstances. Whatever it is, and they have to stay," Coppom said. "Nobody says, 'Okay, we're not doing well you can go home now.' They have to stay, they need someone to be here to cheer them on, and we've always had that attitude."
The Twins have also made the effort to meet every student-athlete at Colorado, including former CU quarterback and national champion Darian Hagan, who remembers meeting the twins when he was a teen.
"[I] made eye contact with them, and from that point on I've just been their biggest fan, they've been my biggest fan," he said. "They're really really special ladies, they represent the University of Colorado well. When you see them, you can have a bad day, they bring an instant smile to your face."
Hagan says it takes a special person to breathe Colorado athletics like the twins.
"I think you have to be passionate for it, but at the same time, you've invested a lot of time, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of your life into the program. They're not fair weather fans, they're here through thick and thin, good or bad. And that says a lot about them," he said.
The Twins were on hand to watch Hagan and the Buffs play Notre Dame in the national championship games in both 1989 and 1990.
"I'll tell you that first year, when we didn't win and played Notre Dame, it took me six months to get over that. I thought, this is stupid, why am I so down?" Coppom said. "It bothered me, so when we got the chance the next year to go and play Notre Dame again it was unbelievable."
The Twins are hopeful the Buffs will get back to their peak glory days, but win or lose, they'll continue to be in the stands, matching outfits and pom poms in hand.
"What do we think about the future? I hope we live long enough to see another National Championship in football."
(© 2015 KUSA)
