If local professional coaches and athletes didn’t know at first, they realized it pretty quick: When Mark Kiszla comes around, look out.

The longtime Denver Post sportswriter, who is celebrating four decades at the paper and three decades as a columnist, always has a take. And those takes are often critical of, or at odds with, the people and teams he covers.

“He was tough on me as manager, and he’s always been tough on everyone (in local pro sports),” said former Rockies skipper Walt Weiss. “I used to joke that during the years I was managing, when he would show up and be part of the media scrum, I’d start out the scrum by saying, ‘I must be in trouble — Kiz is here.’”

Kiszla, 66, is known to pull no punches in his writing.

In recent years, that’s meant harsh criticism of the struggling Broncos and Rockies, as he repeatedly called for football coaches to be fired and Rockies owner Dick Monfort to sell his ballclub. He once wrote then-struggling Colorado ace Jon Gray had a “ten-cent head.” He called Avs coach Jared Bednar a “Ken doll,” five weeks before Colorado won its third Stanley Cup. The long list of underperforming Broncos QBs has been subject of his scrutiny. Even during the Nuggets’ title run, he wrote the “P” in Michael Porter’s MPJ nickname “can still stand for pouting.”

Those are just a few examples of Kiszla’s gloves-off approach. It rubs some readers, and many coaches and athletes, the wrong way. But it certainly does generate a reaction, which as Dave Logan points out is “true to the role of the columnist.”

“Kiz has mellowed a bit over the years, but I would term him a fiery columnist, especially back in the day,” said Logan, a longtime high school football coach and radio voice of the Broncos. “He’s not afraid to stir it up, and he’s not afraid to state what he thinks is true even if it goes against public opinion. You have to have those qualities if you’re going to be a good columnist.

“He probably feels compelled, at times, to go all-in on the Broncos. Over the last six or seven years, they’ve given him plenty of fodder with how they’ve played. At times, have I read columns from Mark and go, ‘Ok, did you have to really go that far?’ Sure, absolutely. But again, the role of the columnist is to elicit reaction from people who read the column. If you were to judge him based on that, he’s pretty good at his craft.”

Both Weiss and Bednar said they didn’t take Kiszla’s written barbs personally. Many athletes, however, likely feel different, regardless of the caliber of Kiszla’s prose.

“He’s been hard on me at times in the past, which is fine,” Bednar said. “I’ve got thick skin. If you’re sitting in this chair, you expect some of that. But like in whatever profession you’re in, if you’re able to do the job in one spot for as long as he has, I think that speaks to the quality of writer you are.”

Kiszla officially began his columnist career as the backup to Dick O’Connor, the Hall of Famer who was a 22-time Colorado Sportswriter of the Year. Kiszla’s won that award four times himself, most recently in 2022, and twice been honored as the best columnist in the country by The Society of Professional Journalists. But unofficially, Kiszla was a columnist long before he ripped coaches and athletes under his own byline.

In the 1980s and early 90s, Kiszla honed his snark in The Post’s renowned “Pikes Peek” segment. Like a Twitter-jab long before Twitter existed, the bite-sized, quick-hit print column ran a couple times a week and Kiszla was one of its primary anonymous scribes. It was in that forum that Kiszla’s oft-recited descriptor of Denver as a “dusty old cowtown” was born.

Now, there’s nothing anonymous about Kiszla’s takes, or when he shows up on game day with “a sheepish smile and you just know he’s up to something,” as former Rockies manager Clint Hurdle recalled.

But for three decades, Kiszla’s been able to straddle the line between critical columnist and occasional heart-strings-puller while covering the coaches and athletes he covers. Some subjects were more endeared to him than others, like Mike Shanahan, who had a number of dust-ups with the columnist during his tenure as the winningest Broncos coach from 1995-2008.

Shanahan noted that “every newspaper has a guy like Mark, (who) usually takes the negative side that people like or dislike, but people do read his column.”

“It’s a difficult job in that there are times you are going to say stuff that will either offend, or hurt the feelings of, or appear to be mean-spirited,” Logan added. “Other times, you write stuff that flows with a warm, fuzzy feel to it. The really good columnists can bounce back and forth between those two areas, and do it well, and Kiz has done that.”

Hurdle said he gained respect for Kiszla through his willingness to own up to the heat during a time when the columnist was the subject of intense criticism.

In 1998, Kiszla found himself embroiled in a clubhouse controversy at Coors Field after he examined a pill bottle from the locker of Rockies outfielder Dante Bichette. After the incident caused a stir, Kiszla apologized to the team in a closed-door meeting and let the players address their concerns directly with him.

“Some of the players were quite passionate, some of them were quite angry,” recalled Hurdle, who was Colorado’s hitting coach at the time. “Some of them were very pointed. And Kiz, in a very professional manner, he didn’t react to any of it. He just let everyone have their say, and didn’t try and defend or talk his way out of it…. at the time I thought it was very commendable, not that it made it right or a lot of people were going to feel differently about him. But I saw him in a different light and thought, ‘I’m going to keep my eye on this guy (in a good way).’”

Hurdle said Kiszla’s columns about his daughter Madison, who was born with the rare Prader-Willi Syndrome in 2002, showed him a different side of the oft-cynical columnist. And later, columns about Kyle Blakeman, the 15-year-old Colorado kid with cancer who inspired Hurdle during the club’s Rocktober run in 2007, cemented his belief that Kiszla is not always out for negativity or to take personal shots.

“I saw a different side of Kiszla through all that,” Hurdle said. “He was reporting on courage and what going through personal hardship can look like. After that, our conversation took a different turn, maybe because in my mind there was some human capital involved. He’s written columns that honored a lot of things. At the end of the day, if I saw Mark tomorrow I would ask him how he’s doing, maybe even put an arm around him and say, ‘What are you up to?’ And we might have a, ‘Remember when?’ or ‘What else is going on?’

“Despite some of the shots he took I have no ill-will, no pent-up resentments, no nothing… At the end of the day, you knew he’s a really good reporter. And, nobody stays around for 40 years if you’re not any good.”