To be a professional sports owner in the 1960s was to confront the prickly subject of race in America. Many in sports were breezily confident that, nearly a generation after the NFL and Major League Baseball fields were integrated, sports was setting a societal standard of racial equality. Those who were younger and closer to the games saw a harsher reality of entrenched double standards, glass ceilings, and persistent bias about the capabilities of blacks.
Lamar was hardly a protester in the civil rights movement, but he also was more sensitive than most owners to the plight of the black athlete, and he had taken pains for much of the 1960s to make sure African-Americans were treated equally.
This was appreciated within the team, and yet as the Kansas City Chiefs gathered at William Jewell to prepare for the 1969 season, they did so against a backdrop of protracted racial tension that had enveloped the country for years and had, by then, made its presence felt in the world of sports as well. In the summer of 1968, Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated wrote a celebrated five-part series on “The Black Athlete,” one installment of which focused on the racial division among the St. Louis football Cardinals. Weeks after the series debuted, John Carlos and Tommie Smith gave their one-gloved black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics.
No integrated sports team was impervious to the issues of the ’60s, but from all accounts, the Chiefs had dealt with the issue with more foresight and tolerance than most clubs. In 1969, they would become the first team in pro football history with a majority of African-American starters. This came six years after the Chiefs were the first pro team to hire a full-time black scout, Lloyd Wells, and two years after they became the first team in pro football to start an African-American, Willie Lanier, at middle linebacker.
Lamar and Hank Stram had set the tone early on: At a time when the Southwest Conference had no black players, the Dallas Texans went out seeking the best football players they could find. The signing of Abner Haynes and the other African-Americans on that first Texans team in 1960 wasn’t radical—the NFL’s Dallas Texans had featured running back Buddy Young back in 1952—but it still generated its share of hate mail. One note, written to H. L. Hunt and unsigned, arrived at the Hunt Oil offices during the inaugural 1960 season, where the father passed it on to the son, apparently without comment. It read: “Your well known patriotism and contribution to Christianity and Americanism is to be congratulated. I understand your son, Lamar Hunt, is the prime factor in engaging negro football players on the team he owns. Many feel this is an act oc [sic] communism support and hastening the intermarriage of negro [sic] and whites. I wonder if you concur in such actions. If your son wants to sacrifice the white race for a few dollars I imagine it hurts you to see your son take such an attitude.”
Haynes, of course, wasn’t merely recruited by the Texans, he starred for the team, won the AFL Player of the Year award in 1960, and developed a special relationship with Lamar. “He was a good man, with pure intentions,” said Haynes.
Which is not to say that the Dallas Texans were an idyllic oasis. Very early in the team’s history, Bunker Hunt began hanging around the team’s training camp. While Bunker was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan or any of the other onerous organizations of white supremacy, his views were consistent with many Texans at the time. “You got too many blacks on your team,” he told Stram more than once. “You get too many on there, and everything goes to hell.”
Stram had seen his own share of prejudice, for both his size and Polish heritage, and he bridled at the suggestions. “Bunker, tell me something—if a black scores a touchdown, does it count? If a black player makes a tackle, does it count? We’ll keep the best players.”
Steadman was far less virulent than Bunker but had already developed his own preconceptions. In discussing the team’s training camp in 1962, he singled out African-American players: “I recommend we only bring in colored players whom we know have the potential of making our squad. I think we learned from our experiment last year that they have very little playing ability and good eating ability.”
Lamar had seen too much pain and suffering in blacks that he cared about—most especially the Mount Vernon staff that had helped raise him—to not empathize with the blacks he knew. But he was not one to lecture, preferring instead a more subtle, often entirely personal approach.
“He’d say, ‘Hey, Abner, let’s go to lunch,’” said Haynes, “and he’d take me somewhere, and I’d walk in with him, and I could tell that there’d never been a black man served at this restaurant before. But I was with Lamar, and nobody said anything.”
The players noticed Lamar’s youth, his approachability (well into the ’60s, he continued to show up for training camp, stay with the team at a dorm at William Jewell, and occasionally run wind sprints or catch passes in warm-ups). He was still a good enough athlete to engage in these activities without it becoming a source of humor or derision. As importantly, at a time when there was, at best, a patriarchal distance between owners and players, Lamar was unfailingly polite—he helped serve drinks and dinner to the team on flights back from road games. When traveling on the team bus to a hotel for a road game, Lamar made a point of checking his luggage in the stowage compartment along with the rest of the team and carrying his own bags into the hotel.
In the mid-1960s, the Chiefs scoured the country for the best players available, winding up often on campuses of historically black colleges and universities, where Lloyd Wells was a celebrity in his own right.
Back at the team offices in Dallas and, later, Kansas City, Stram set a policy of strict impartiality. “We’ll play the best players,” he said, “We don’t care if a man is purple.” More than rhetoric, he refused to play favorites. The summer of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, in 1965, the Chiefs’ training camp was marred by a fight between a white player named Doc Griffith and a black player named Ron Fowlkes. Team leaders were heartened when Stram, in response, cut both players.
From the owner to the coach to the scouting department, the Chiefs aspired to an open-mindedness, willing to draft and sign players at positions where they hadn’t traditionally played in pro football. One of these was Willie Lanier, the smart, physically intimidating middle linebacker from Morgan State in Baltimore. The Richmond, Virginia, native had decided to travel north to college, rather than stay four more years in the poisoned racial stew of Richmond, and his father drove him through Washington and on to Baltimore on the day that Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall in D.C.
By the time he finished his senior year of football at Morgan State, by winning the MVP of the Tangerine Bowl, Lanier was a self-possessed young man. One friend of Stram’s, who scouted East Coast teams, wrote Hank and told him that Lanier was the best college player he saw that season.
The 1967 NFL draft was held just weeks after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl loss, as Stram was focusing on rebuilding his defense. The Chiefs drafted Jim Lynch in the second round, with the forty-eighth overall pick, and fellow linebacker Lanier two selections later.
In a matter of days, Lloyd Wells arrived in Baltimore on behalf of the Chiefs, to present himself to Lanier, informing him he needed to sign a contract—$2,500 bonus, with three one-year contracts for $14,000, $15,000, and $16,000—and that if he didn’t sign, he could damn well go play football in Canada. The bluster and patter had worked well for Wells when he was dealing with the raw and sometimes guileless young men from black schools in the Deep South. But with Lanier, he confronted something else—a prideful man who was smart and connected enough to have found out, through calls made by his coach Earl Banks, exactly how much money had been offered to Lynch, selected just two picks before him. Armed with this knowledge, Lanier knew exactly how insulted he should be by Wells’s low-balling offer.
Lanier bowed his broad neck, looked deeply into the scout’s eyes, and told him, “Firstly, no one talks to me like that. I am a college student, and I’m about to get my degree in business administration. Secondly, you will not tell me that I have to take your offer or go to Canada. I will sue you for making that statement. I am done with you here.”
The next day, Lanier placed a call to Stram, expressing displeasure with the method of approach that Wells used. There was no direct apology from the scout, but a few days later Wells returned, much more conciliatory, and took Lanier out to a Washington, D.C. clothier, to buy him a new suit of clothes—Lanier remembered the bill came to $286—and more cordially welcome him to the Chiefs family. (It wasn’t until after the season, as Lanier was reviewing his 1099 form, that he noticed that the clothes that Wells had bought for him the previous year had been docked from his salary. This prompted another call to the Chiefs, and the matter was settled.)
When Lanier arrived for his first training camp in 1967, he was struck by the atmosphere around the team. “I didn’t see any true animosity from a racial standpoint,” he said, “which was pleasant and surprising, as it appeared to be a very even, open display of purity and the success of sport, which is a meritocracy. And if you show it and you can do it, you will be accepted for it. I heard about things in other places but it was not like that here. And that was very refreshing because obviously it led to my starting the fourth game of my rookie year. So the numbers spoke for themselves, and the attitudes and relationships of the players. You could have men from the South, men from Alabama, and you would have some from the West Coast, where Huey Newton was gaining prominence, and you had some of us from the East, who were perhaps a little more elitist. But you had all of that coming together, and people got along. People allowed whatever philosophical and political philosophies to be left at the door, and to become part of this thing called the Kansas City Chiefs, and the objective was to win and be better than anyone else and to get to this important step, which was the Super Bowl. I can’t really remember any racial strife at all. No error of somebody uttering something that, oops, they apologized for, I mean zero.”
What players like Lanier grew to understand, through the turbulent period of the late ’60s, was that the Chiefs were, to the extent possible at the time, a color-blind organization, and that started from the top.
“The thing about Lamar,” said Lanier, “and I understood this: This was not a social experiment. That was not the issue—that was not what he was trying to achieve. He would say that. It was one of trying to win. It was one of getting talent to be competitive to let you go forward on Sunday and have a chance to win games, which was a purely capitalist view, which was okay. But those who deemed themselves as capitalists but who still had hesitancy—they weren’t as fully there as they thought they were, because they had let all these other things get in the way of making those decisions.”
When he was moved to the starting lineup early in the ’67 season, Lanier became the first black starting middle linebacker in pro football history (a fact little noted at the time). By that time, he and Jim Lynch had also become the team’s first integrated pair of roommates on the road.
All of that wouldn’t have meant as much if the team itself hadn’t been willing to overcome long-held prejudices for the sake of a deeper sense of unity. By the late ’60s, most of the team spent their off-seasons in Kansas City, many playing on the Chiefs’ barnstorming basketball team. In 1968, when Martin Luther King’s assassination stirred race riots across the country, Curtis McClinton and Buck Buchanan drove to O.G.’s Lounge, one of the city’s black social redoubts, and urged their fellow citizens not to riot. The killing prompted a series of long talks between Lynch and Lanier, as well as other players. Even Jerry Mays—who said, “I’m from Texas, and I know I grew up prejudiced”—admitted the ongoing discussions among teammates helped him understand a problem he’d mostly ignored in the past.
Black players and white alike were united in their impatience with the vanity and excesses of Stram, whom they often referred to as “Little Caesar” or “The Little Man.” But they also, to a man, believed their coach to be utterly without prejudice. “There were some people who thought he put form over substance,” said one player, “but it was clear, when it came to race, he didn’t care about color, he only cared if you could play.”
All of which is to say that the Kansas City Chiefs team that reported to the first day of training camp on July 14, 1969, was one of the most cohesive in pro football. Over the ordeal of next five months, it would need to be.
Stram’s first directive of the new season was met with much grumbling but little outward opposition. In his initial speech to the team, he said, “Gentlemen, I want to set a few things straight before we get started. Just so there won’t be any misunderstanding regarding my policy on long hair and sideburns, I want to emphasize certain requirements, which I expect everyone to adhere to from this day on. There will be absolutely no mustaches, beards, goatees, or hair on the chin displayed by any member of this club. I also want to emphasize that no one will have sideburns longer than the ones I have. Is that understood?” If it wasn’t, Stram imposed a $500 fine for any violation of the code (Otis Taylor was fined once, then shaved his sideburns). The Chiefs players were purposeful and determined, still stung by their season-ending 41–6 playoff loss to Oakland at the end of the ’68 season.
Lamar rejoined the team down at Legion Field in Birmingham, as they officially began the preseason against the team that had so savagely ended the 1968 season, the detested Raiders. August was only two days old, the regular season was more than a month away, there were five more preseason games to follow and it would be another sixteen weeks before the two teams would meet for the first of two regular-season games. But the rivalry did not allow for complacency. The Chiefs took a 13–7 lead at the half, but fell behind when backup Jacky Lee had a pass returned for a touchdown. The Chiefs rallied to take a 23–17 lead, but when the Raiders rallied toward the winning score, Stram put his defensive starters back in the game to quell the rally. “We had the game won,” he explained later. “There was no need of letting it get away at that point.” Three weeks later, on August 22, they took an undefeated preseason record into the Los Angeles Coliseum for the third year in a row. In ’67 and ’68 they’d lost to the Rams, but this time around, they routed George Allen’s Rams, 42–14, and did it in front of Richard Nixon, believed to be the first president to attend a pro football game while in office. With wins the following two weeks, the Chiefs finished the preseason 6–0, with four wins over NFL teams. The newspaper Pro Football Weekly put the Chiefs on the cover of its preseason kickoff issue, under the headline, “KC Chiefs—Are They Number 1?” Elsewhere in the issue, PFW writer William Wallace predicted the Chiefs would win the Super Bowl over the Los Angeles Rams, though the consensus of the paper’s correspondents was that Baltimore would defeat the Jets in a Super Bowl III rematch.
The team certainly looked sharp. Stram had been the most fashion-conscious coach in the pros for years, and the Chiefs expressed his philosophy, not merely in the variety of formations they used but in countless details of their public appearance. When traveling for a road game, the Chiefs wore tailored black blazers and gray slacks, white shirts, and black ties, with the team’s logo on the breast of the jacket. In ’68, the Chiefs began wearing fire-engine red game pants on the road. The team’s offensive huddle formed in a choir alignment, with the five interior linemen standing in the back row, backs to the line of scrimmage, mirroring the positions they would take at the line, the three receivers and two running backs standing in the front row, bending at the waist, all facing the quarterback. In these, and numerous other ways, including the manner in which they lined up for the National Anthem (numerically, most notably in ’68 with 5-foot-5 Noland “Super Gnat” Smith, No. 1, in front and the mountainous 6-foot-7 Ernie Ladd, No. 99, in back), the Chiefs exuded a kind of crisp, self-conscious sense of style that was, in both its precision and its vanity, a perfect reflection of their head coach.
For all that, the most important changes were the ones taking place among the personnel, where the porous defense of the first Super Bowl season had been transformed, in the intervening years, into a younger, stronger, faster unit.
Lanier was a key: The even-tempered Virginian exuded a quiet confidence, and while he lacked the theatricality of Dick Butkus, many scouts felt he covered more ground and hit harder when he got there. So hard, in fact, that Lanier often blacked out after making tackles. His frequent concussions and ensuing headaches landed him at the Mayo Clinic in 1968 and prompted him to begin wearing a distinctive helmet with water pockets lining the inside of the shell and wide strip of foam padding bisecting the outside. By the ’69 season, Lanier had become a leader of a daunting defense, improved by the acquisition of tackle Curley Culp in a trade with Denver during the ’68 season, and first-round draft choice Jim Marsalis, a young master of bump-and-run technique, who stepped into a starting role at cornerback in ’69.
For Lamar, in many ways, the season was like so many others. He’d travel to each game and take separate trips up to Kansas City a few times a month. But from his office in Dallas, he’d send numerous suggestions to Steadman, none which trod on Stram’s football domain, each meant to rectify or slightly improve an identified problem.
Even while he was becoming immersed in the worlds of soccer and tennis, he still made time to be vigilant about the smallest details with the Chiefs. In ’67, he sent a note to the AFL league office, after he noticed that a fair catch by Noland Smith in the season opener at Houston was mistakenly counted as a zero-yard return. In ’68, he wrote Steadman to say, “Next year please have George [Toma] shrink the mid-field arrowhead to nine yards in length. As it is now (10 yards) the ends of it touch the two 45-yard lines and this is not artistically pleasing to the eye. I don’t want it done this year as it will look messy.”
A year later, Lamar was thinking of trumpets. He wrote band leader Tony DiPardo about featuring a heraldry of trumpets at games: “My idea is to have several (number ?) ‘Heralds’ who would be located on the ramp to signify the emergence of the Chiefs players from the locker room area. They might also ‘herald’ the start of the fourth period, etc. My idea stems from seeing ‘Heralds’ in the movies or on TV introducing combatants in various athletic and war contests. They add a note of the spectacular and, I feel, can be an intimidating factor for the opposition.” A week later, he wrote a follow-up memo to Steadman, pointing out that the heraldry of trumpets had been blown too soon, right at the end of the third quarter and before the TV timeout. To properly rally the crowd for the fourth quarter, Lamar explained, the heralds should wait until after the TV timeout, in the moments just before the start of the fourth quarter, to signal their charge. “That was typical,” said Steadman. “Nothing got past Lamar.”
After posting a 6–0 preseason record, Kansas City stormed into the season with two easy road wins, over the Chargers and Patriots. But in the second game Len Dawson went down with what was diagnosed as a tear in the anterior cruciate ligament. The recommended treatment, from the Chiefs team doctor and two outside specialists, was surgery that would end Dawson’s season. But Stram, knowing what Dawson meant to the team’s overall prospects, kept seeking out other opinions, finally finding the St. Louis Football Cardinals’ team doctor, Fred Reynolds, who said that there was a chance that, if Dawson immobilized the leg for four to six weeks, he could recover without surgery. Grasping at any possible hope by this point, Stram and Dawson opted for Reynolds’ suggestion.
In the meantime, backup Jacky Lee was a capable veteran, a ten-year pro who seemed likely to perform adequately in Dawson’s absence. But in the Chiefs’ next game, week three at Cincinnati, Lee broke his ankle in a 24–19 loss, leaving the Chiefs to rely on their third-string quarterback, untested second-year reserve Mike Livingston. The defense was superb in response, and Livingston exceeded expectations, piloting the team to four straight victories.
But they missed their leader. Dawson exuded a polished professionalism and outward cool that was the quintessence of quarterback leadership. When lineman Ed Budde was hospitalized after a bar fight in ’64, Dawson and his wife Jackie took care of Budde’s three children. When Arbanas lost the vision in one eye after being attacked on the street a year later, Dawson spent weeks doing additional passing drills so Arbanas could learn to catch with the use of just one eye. On the field, Dawson was the curt, level-headed commander, moving with unquestioned authority.
After six weeks of rest and rehabilitation, he returned to rally the Chiefs to a win over Buffalo November 2. Two weeks later, he led the club into Shea Stadium just two days after the death of his father and threw three touchdown passes to Otis Taylor in a 34–16 win, before flying to Ohio for the funeral. The Chiefs would lose twice in the last month to the Raiders but would benefit from the AFL’s expanded playoff format—which Lamar had been pushing for most of the league’s history—in which the second-place team from each division qualified to play the champion of the opposite division in an additional semi-final round of the league playoffs.
It was a week before Christmas when Kansas City headed to New York, for a rematch with the defending world champion Jets, winners of the AFL East. By the time Lamar and his friends walked on the field at Shea Stadium on the chilly, windy afternoon of Sunday, December 20, the green grass of the baseball season—traumatized by Mets fans celebrating their World Series win in October—had given way to a surface that was mostly dirt, some of which was painted. Kansas City held a scant 6–3 lead in the third quarter when a pass interference call gave the Jets the ball at first-and-goal on the Chiefs’ 1-yard-line. An impassioned Lanier, atypically vocal in the huddle, rallied the defense to the greatest goal-line stand in team history. On first- and second-down, the Chiefs stopped the Jets running backs cold. On third down, Joe Namath faked a handoff to running back Bill Mathis and rolled to his right, looking for Matt Snell out in the flat. But Bobby Bell hadn’t bought the fake and was out in the flat to cover Snell. Under pressure, Namath threw the ball away, and the Jets were forced to settle for a tying field goal.
The game turned right there. Dawson hit Taylor on a 61-yard-pass play on the next play from scrimmage, and then threw a 19-yard touchdown pass to Gloster Richardson on the following play. The Kansas City defense repelled two more drives, concluding the last with a Jim Marsalis interception in the end zone.
The champions were vanquished; walking to the sidelines after the final interception, Namath threw his helmet to the ground in frustration, and the jubilant Chiefs began looking toward a third game with Oakland, two weeks hence, in what would be the final game ever between two American Football League teams.
That game would serve as a fitting end to the league’s self-contained history. The Raiders had the league’s most valuable player, Daryle Lamonica; coach of the year, the first-year firebrand John Madden; a sizable home-field advantage, and the knowledge that they’d beaten the Chiefs in seven of their eight previous meetings. A sense of dread pervaded Kansas City, where many of even the most loyal fans were predicting defeat. But the Chiefs players felt differently, as though they were being granted a reprieve.
The team stayed at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. Saturday was an exhausting day on its own: Bill Grigsby, the Chiefs radio announcer, was eating at the hotel lounge when NBC’s Curt Gowdy sat down with him and confided that the network was getting ready to break a story implicating Len Dawson, among other pro players, in connection to a Detroit gambler named Donald “Dice” Dawson. The usually mirthful Grigsby turned serious, imploring Gowdy to wait until after the AFL Championship Game. Gowdy said he’d see what he could do.
After Grigsby informed Stram, he and Lamar discussed it and decided not to tell Dawson on the eve of one of the biggest games in his life. The NFL commissioner Rozelle, notified of the upcoming report, considered telling Dawson himself. Rozelle phoned Dawson at the Mark Hopkins on the eve of the game but only chatted for a few moments, deciding during the call that it would be wrong to bring it up.
The morning of the AFL Championship Game, Lamar awoke to an unusually queasy stomach. He was normally nervous on gamedays and could be even jittery on the mornings of big ones—the AFL Championship Games, the first Super Bowl with the Packers—but this was something different. “I was scared,” he said, “more than I’ve been before a game.”
When he was most nervous on game days, he’d try to do something—calculate some statistics, handle a pile of correspondence, find a way to exercise. On this morning, he walked to the lobby with a huge cardboard placard, which carried an inspirational poem by a girl in suburban Kansas City. He’d received it the day before and now brought it to Stram, and asked him, “Want to show it to the team?” Stram agreed, and they gave it to equipment manager Bobby Yarborough, to put up in the dressing room.
It was an agonizing wait for kickoff. On the field during warm-ups, Lamar and Jack Steadman made small talk with Pete Rozelle and the Raiders’ Al Davis. Davis and Lamar were cordial, but there was too much at stake for either man to be relaxed. They shook hands and went their separate ways. Lamar had struggled with the platitudes of wishing other owners “good luck” before a game, resorting to a more honest greeting when exchanging a pre-game handshake with a counterpart. And so he shook Raiders’ owner Wayne Valley’s hand and said, “No injuries.”
That particular good wish was soon dashed. It would be the sort of game that many of the participants would describe later as “a war.” Johnny Robinson cracked two ribs on a play; Jim Marsalis left the game with a bruised kidney. Jim Lynch made one tackle with such force that he broke his belt. Lamonica tore tendons in his hand following through on a pass, his fingers caught in the facemask of the Chiefs’ onrushing Aaron Brown.
Oakland dominated the first half possession but could muster only one touchdown. Kansas City fought back to tie the game at 7 late in the second quarter. The Raiders spent much of the third quarter in Kansas City territory as well, but couldn’t convert. After Emmitt Thomas ran an end zone interception out to the 6, the Chiefs found themselves pinned back deep in their own territory again, facing third-and-14 at their own 2-yard line. In another game, Dawson might have gone with a safe run into the line and punted. But the Kansas City defense had been playing heroically with its back to the wall all day, and Dawson was determined to find a way to reward their effort. Avoiding the rush, he scrambled and threw a high floater from his end zone toward Otis Taylor, who made a spectacular over-the-shoulder catch while tight-roping along the sidelines against double coverage at the 35-yard-line. The Chiefs, emboldened, drove for a touchdown, to go up 14–7 with 3:24 left in the third quarter.
“The Chiefs would be open and flamboyant when they got ahead, but they tended to be a little conservative when the game was tighter and they were behind,” said John Madden, then in his first year as the Raiders’ head coach. “So that was a hell of a call, and a hell of a throw by Len Dawson. Because that could have turned the game around the other way. That’s a dangerous place to throw. Then Otis makes a heck of a catch on the sideline. If we knock that thing down, if we pick it off, we win the game.”
From there, the game assumed an aspect of savage desperation. Within a three-minute period in the fourth quarter, there were five turnovers. The Raiders drove down the field, only to be intercepted. The Chiefs, trying to eat some time off the clock, lost a fumble. The Raiders drove again and were intercepted. The Chiefs fumbled a second time, with Oakland recovering on the Kansas City 31. Taking the field again, Jerry Mays said to Buck Buchanan, “Well, maybe we can do it once more, but if they give it up again, they’re on their own.” Three plays later, Emmitt Thomas intercepted the pass of George Blanda (in for the injured Lamonica) and returned the ball 62 yards to the Oakland 18. Jan Stenerud’s 22-yard field goal three plays later gave Kansas City a 17–7 lead that they held until the end.
“That was the greatest defensive game I ever saw in my life,” said Chiefs’ lineman Ed Lothamar. “You’ll never see a greater demonstration of just plain toughness.” It was certainly one of the most physical, with Johnny Robinson’s broken ribs and Jim Marsalis’s bruised kidney leaving both doubtful for the Super Bowl seven days later.
In the locker room after the game, talking to Kansas City Star columnist Joe McGuff, Lamar was ebullient, able to rattle off by memory the implications of the big win.
“We have a lot to be proud of looking back over the years we’ve spent in the AFL,” he said. “We’ve won three league championships, which is more than any other team. Buffalo and Houston won two each, Oakland won one, San Diego and New York won one. That makes us the all-time AFL champion. Hank is the winningest AFL coach and no team won a series from us. Oakland had a one-game lead over us going into today’s game but we tied it at 11–11. We also had the best exhibition record and the best record against NFL teams. That’s quite an accomplishment.”
At the end, Raiders’ owner Wayne Valley came to the visitors’ locker room to congratulate Lamar, who was his usual deferential self. As the Chiefs team bus prepared to pull out of the parking lot, the players spied the sullen Raiders heading out of their locker room, each carrying the luggage he’d packed for the trip to New Orleans. “That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever seen,” said Dawson.
The trip back from Oakland was suffused with a joyous relief—the Chiefs had finally throttled the Raiders, and now would get a chance to redeem themselves from their Super Bowl I disappointment. Even on the flight back, Lamar was making a list of things he needed to do to prepare for the Super Bowl trip (unlike three years earlier, there would be only a one-week break between the league title games and the Super Bowl, not two). But he put the list down long enough to help serve a special victory dinner to the players on the charter back to Kansas City. There was even a special menu, whose cover depicted a tomahawk buried in a Raiders’ helmet.
After consecutive road wins over the defending world champions and the team with the best record in pro football, with a stifling defense that allowed just 13 points in those two games, Kansas City might have been regarded as a formidable contender. Instead, the Minnesota Vikings were installed as a 13-point favorite by Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder. One headline in Pro Football Weekly noted that, “If It’s a Battle of the QBs . . . Kapp Has It All Over Dawson.” Elsewhere in the paper, William Wallace, the same man who’d forecast a Chiefs Super Bowl win in the preseason, now backtracked and predicted a 31–7 Vikings win.
So the buildup to Super Bowl IV played out in eerie parallel to the previous year, with a seemingly invincible team from the NFL being put forth as a heavy favorite, the merits of the AFL entry largely ignored in the calculation. “They’re doing it again,” warned the Raiders’ George Blanda during the week. “They haven’t learned a thing since last year. They’re underestimating the AFL all over again.”
That Tuesday, on the Chiefs’ first full day in atypically frigid New Orleans, the news hit. On the NBC Evening News, David Brinkley read the explosive item: “A number of famous names in pro football will be asked to talk to a federal grand jury in Detroit and to tell whatever they know about gambling on sports. The pro football players asked to testify will include quarterback Len Dawson of the Kansas City Chiefs . . .” NBC broke the story linking Dawson and five other pro players to a Justice Department sting of a network of bookmakers, including the Detroit bookie Donald “Dice” Dawson (no relation to the quarterback), whose address book included Dawson’s phone number. There was nothing more than that—no evidence of any wrongdoing, no tangible assertion of anything more than a casual connection. But suddenly much of New Orleans, especially the 300 assembled writers and reporters who had descended on the city to cover the game, were buzzing about the implications of the investigation. The report ignited a media conflagration beyond anything seen the year before in Miami, when Joe Namath made his brazen, legendary guarantee that the Jets would win. Rozelle was on a boat in Bimini when the news hit, and he could do little but release a statement from the league office that evening noting that the NFL had “no evidence to even consider disciplinary action against any of those publicly named.” But hundreds of writers and reporters were already gathered in New Orleans, confronting a potentially major story with absolutely no answers.
With the media still buzzing throughout the Fontainebleau Hotel, where the Chiefs were staying, it was left to Lamar, Stram, Dawson, and Chiefs’ publicist Jim Schaaf to work out a response. Late that evening, the team called a press conference so Dawson could make a statement. “I have known Mr. [Donald] Dawson for about ten years,” he said, “and I have talked to him on several occasions. My only conversations with him in recent years concerned my knee injury and the death of my father. On these occasions he called me to offer his sympathy. These calls were among the many I received. Gentlemen, this is all I have to say. I have told you everything I know.”
Ultimately, that’s all there was to the story. Neither Dawson nor the other players were ever subpoenaed, and all were cleared of any wrongdoing. Rozelle arrived in New Orleans on Wednesday and coolly conducted an hour-long press conference in which he defended Dawson’s honor as well as the league’s security investigation. But the furor didn’t immediately go away, and Dawson was left to face the biggest game of his life under a cloud of suspicion.
For Lamar, the stakes couldn’t have been any higher. In the final game before the full merger of the two leagues, he’d be facing off against the Minnesota Vikings, the same team that had abandoned the AFL in November 1959.
That Wednesday night in New Orleans, in the 1840 Room, the private dining room inside Antoine’s Restaurant in the French Quarter, Lamar sat with family and friends and spent a few minutes reflecting on what the game symbolized.
“Two things stand out in my mind,” he said. “One is the way New Orleans treated the American Football League. The other is the way some of the men who are now owners of the Vikings pulled out on us after committing themselves to an NFL franchise.”
Those who knew him best were surprised at his frankness, as he recounted the tale of the Minnesota group’s abdication, but they also saw some of the usual whimsy in his eyes as he paused for a moment, then evenly stated, “In looking back on these things, all I can think of tonight is . . .”—he peered to his right and his left, then banged a fist on the table, and said, “kill . . . kill . . . Kill . . . Kill . . . KILL! . . . KILL!”
And soon enough, the entire dining room was matching Lamar’s lead and chanting “Kill! Kill! Kill!”
There was a growing sense of confidence throughout the Chiefs’ camp. Defensive assistant Tom Bettis spent the week showing the team Minnesota’s offensive variations, all modifications on vanilla. The team had seen twenty sheets of offensive formations before their game with the Raiders; they got just four pages with the Vikings (and, as it turned out, they wouldn’t need three of those four). On the Wednesday before the game, Jerry Mays walked out of a meeting room and saw PR man Will Hamilton walking down the hall and told him, “If Jan-ski can make three field goals, we’re going to win the game. There is no way they’re going to score more than a touchdown.”
Johnny Robinson, not one for idle optimism, felt the Chiefs could shut Minnesota out. Dawson viewed Stram’s game plan as perfectly suited for the opposition. Later in the week, before going to dinner with Lamar, Buzz Kemble cornered Stram at one point and asked him pointedly, “Really—no bull—what do you think?” and when Stram answered confidently, Kemble decided to increase his wager on the Chiefs.
After Lamar and Norma, staying at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter, went to sleep to a steady rain, Sunday morning dawned overcast and windy, with dire weather in the forecast. Lamar spent part of the morning at an NFL brunch, with the Tonight Show co-host Ed McMahon, whose remarks ran long; Lamar was too gracious to leave during the presentation, but he bolted out as soon as McMahon concluded and headed back to the Royal Sonesta, to pick up Norma.
They collected their things and headed downstairs. Lamar, decked out in the Chiefs traveling blazer, put his hotel room key in his pocket and pressed the elevator button on the fourth floor. After a moment, the door opened, and Lamar and Norma were presented with a pair of tense, alarmed faces, those of Vikings owner Max Winter and his wife Helen. In the spaces between the curt, nervous hellos by all, the two couples rode down the remaining floors in uncomfortable silence. There was no mention of the game, or of the shared history a decade earlier when Winter had abandoned the AFL for the senior league. With a frozen rictus of a smile on his face, Max Winter stared searchingly at the floor indicator as it made its slow descent downward.
After the eternity it took to reach the lobby, the two couples exchanged goodbyes and went their separate ways, with Lamar and Norma heading out to the car driven by an off-duty police officer Steadman had hired to get them to the stadium. As they moved away from the elevators, Lamar’s walk grew more relaxed and he cast a brief sidelong glance at Norma. With the barest hint of a smile, he said quietly, “We’re going to win today.”
She looked questioningly back at him and asked, “How do you know?”
“They’re even scareder than we are.”
In the locker room prior, the Chiefs were confident and keyed up, but not, in E. J. Holub’s description, the “blithering idiots” they were prior to Super Bowl I. Dawson ate a candy bar while looking once more at the game plan in front of his locker. The pre-game buzz among the team revolved around a small addition that Lamar had ordered for the Chiefs uniform, an anniversary patch denoting the ten-year history of the AFL. (The NFL teams had worn patches on their jerseys all year, commemorating the league’s fiftieth anniversary, and now, at the behest of loyalist Ange Coniglio, the AFL was finally answering with a tribute to its own history.) “It was incredible to see the reaction of those great players,” said Hank Stram. “They were so proud to wear that patch because they cared about the league. They wanted to be first-class.”
When the game began, it quickly became clear that while the Vikings’ undersized 235-pound center Mick Tingelhoff may have been a worthy all-league selection in the NFL, where he was a quick-footed blocker free to operate in space, he was physically unequipped to deal with the head-on pressure and intimidation of 6-foot-7, 285-pound Buck Buchanan or 6-foot-1, 265-pound Curley Culp, who alternated lining up right on Tingelhoff’s nose in the Chiefs’ odd-man fronts, largely destroying the Vikings’ interior running game. Confused by the Chiefs’ triple stack and intimidated by Buchanan and Culp’s alternate mauling of the outmanned Tinglehoff, the Vikings were shut out in the first half. And after dealing with the complex offenses of the AFL, the Chiefs had precious little problem with the Vikings basic attack: They ran out of just two formations, and in sixty-two offensive plays from scrimmage, they didn’t once shift or start a play with a man in motion.
“Our whole influence was Bambi and the Chargers and the things Sid Gillman was doing, like the Raiders, and the Jets, when you got an arm like Namath; that was our culture,” said the Chiefs’ Jim Lynch. “The NFL was different. Their culture was the Green Bay Packers. Theirs was, ‘Look, we’re gonna line up and we’re gonna run the Green Bay sweep. And you’d better stop us, ‘cause here we come.’ ”
On offense, the Chiefs double-teamed the Vikings’ ends, to prevent them from batting down passes, and in so doing opened passing lanes for Dawson’s play-action fakes and short, crisp flares and out patterns. Kansas City drove consistently on the Vikings in the first half, building a 9–0 lead on three Stenerud field goals (the first one from 48 yards out). When the Vikings’ Charlie West fumbled Stenerud’s kickoff following the third field goal, the Chiefs’ Remi Prudhomme recovered on Minnesota’s 19, and three plays later, Mike Garrett scored from 5 yards out, and the Chiefs went to the half leading 16–0.
Two weeks earlier, in their first playoff game, the Vikings had trailed the Rams by 17 at the half and came back to win that playoff game. But during the interminable halftime, while the Tulane Stadium crowd was being treated to a reenactment of the Battle of New Orleans that further tore up the spongy field, Grant apparently did nothing to adjust to the Chiefs’ tactics, merely advising his team to play better. For a while they did, mounting their one sustained drive of the day, to slice the lead to 16–7.
On the next drive, the Chiefs moved the ball again, converting a long third-down with their third successful end-around of the day to Frank Pitts. On first and 10 at the Minnesota 46, Dawson sensed an all-out blitz and, after a short drop, flung the ball out into the flat just as he was being hit. The pass found Otis Taylor, running a quick hitch pattern, and Taylor did the rest. He broke the attempted tackle of cornerback Earsell Mackbee and sprinted down the sidelines in his long, prancing stride. Karl Kassulke had an angle on him at the 10, but Taylor’s juke move and stiff arm left Kassulke on the ground. As Taylor ran to the end zone, he could hear his mother, in the stands in the corner toward which he was running, shouting, “That’s my boy!” Suddenly, the Chiefs were up 23–7, and the game was all but over.
Kansas City intercepted three passes in the fourth quarter, and Aaron Brown’s tackle of the previously indomitable Joe Kapp sent the Vikings’ leader to the sideline, writhing in pain. Minutes later, as the chilled New Orleans twilight subsumed what little sunlight had peeked through the densely packed clouds, the red-clad Chiefs ran off the field, carrying Stram on their shoulders, champions of the world. In the frantic locker room at Tulane Stadium, a crush of reporters came to document the chaotic scene, along with dozens of AFL players and coaches.
Pete Rozelle presented Lamar and Stram with the Super Bowl championship trophy, as the Chiefs’ scout Lloyd Wells sat grinning in a window well against the back wall—a spot that placed him in virtually every television shot of the championship podium. Redemption was all around the room. “I knew I went with the right team!” said Bell, who had chosen the Chiefs over the Vikings back in 1962. Taylor, who’d made the key offensive play in all three playoff games, spent the first 10 minutes after the game weeping tears of joy.
Dawson, vindicated both off and on the field, received the MVP award with the same outward calm he’d exhibited all week. Then came the summons to Dawson from Chiefs’ equipment man Bobby Yarborough.
“Hey, Lenny, come here,” said Yarborough. “The phone—it’s the president.”
“The president of what?” asked Dawson.
“The president,” exclaimed Yarborough. “Nixon!”
The short conversation that followed was a seminal moment in American sports and spawned numerous congratulatory calls and White House visits in the decades to follow. It wasn’t even the first time Nixon had called the Chiefs that day. He’d rung up Stram that morning at the Fontainebleau, to tell him that he knew Dawson hadn’t done anything wrong, and wished the team luck in its game that day. “I don’t know if it amounted to a presidential pardon,” said Stram. “But it sure made Leonard feel better.”
And so the original Super Bowl series, NFL versus AFL, ended in a 2–2 tie and in parity between the leagues that would come together the following season.
“People really thought that the Jets win in Super Bowl III was a fluke,” said Steve Sabol of NFL Films. “It didn’t really cause people to reassess things. You heard the same thing from everyone: If they played ten times, the Colts win eight or nine. But after Super Bowl IV, nobody was saying that. After that, there was no doubt anymore. You had to grant that the AFL had reached parity. At the least.”
Lamar was beaming when he received the Super Bowl trophy from Pete Rozelle in the Chiefs’ locker room. Asked by CBS’s Frank Gifford to sum up his feelings, Lamar said, “It’s pretty fantastic. It’s a beautiful trophy, and it really is a satisfying conclusion to the ten years of the American Football League. I want to say especially a thanks to the people of Kansas City. This trophy really belongs to them as well as the organization. This team is Kansas City’s.”
What he didn’t say, in the midst of it all, was how aware he was of the ultimate irony: On the afternoon of January 11, 1970, the American Football League had finally earned the lasting respect it deserved. And at that very same moment it ceased to exist.
That evening, Lamar and Norma joined the Chiefs in a raucous party at the Royal Sonesta, and then watched the replay of the entire game (the live telecast hadn’t been shown locally, due to NFL blackout rules). Lamar still wasn’t done. With Richey and Kemble and a few others, he walked down to Jackson Square, where Lamar had them help him up on the statue of Andrew Jackson and his horse. He wasn’t drunk, just giddy with triumph.
He neither boasted nor criticized, only reveled in the joy the same way that a million other Chiefs fans were that evening. That night, he received numerous telegrams, floral arrangements, and expressions of love and fellowship from his friends and family, as well as a telegram from his father, which read: “CONGRATULATIONS LAMAR ON YOUR PROUD SUCCESS AND TRIUMPH. BEST WISHES TO YOU AND THE TEAM HL HUNT”
The next day featured an astoundingly large parade in Kansas City. Schools let out, and the streets were lined with fans the last five miles into the city from the new airport, where the team plane had landed. More than 100,000 people congregated on the downtown parade path leading to the Liberty Memorial. It was that moment, finally, when Lamar realized what he had wrought. For the moment, Kansas City was on top of the sporting world. And as he looked out on the throng, and the blizzard of ticker tape, congratulating his coach and his players, he must have felt pride for being the person who had set all that in motion. At the end of a long, bitter decade both the city and the franchise had been greeted with a celebration that was as close as most crowds could ever come to harmonious, unified pandemonium.
After more than a decade of striving, and some moments of genuine, bone-deep doubt, Lamar had emerged in the new decade as the owner of the most successful franchise in football. The ten-year history of the American Football League had concluded in the most satisfying manner imaginable. The Chiefs were the champions of pro football, and they already had a waiting list of more than 10,000 for season tickets.
Lamar answered every congratulatory telegram and letter with notes of his own. He invited his father to the team’s new 101 Awards Banquet, sponsored by 101 civic leaders and voted on by 101 members of the national press. He helped design the team’s championship rings, awarded to the team that spring.
Then, as he moved forward, turning his attention to soccer and tennis, he must have thought that, perhaps, he might actually be able to do it all, and do it all well.