It was in 1963, not long after Lamar announced that his team would be coming to Kansas City, when he first met the owner of the city’s other big-league sports franchise, the Chicago insurance mogul Charles O. Finley, who’d purchased the Kansas City Athletics baseball team in 1960 and, seemingly, had been trying to move them out of the city ever since.
“This is a horseshit town,” Finley told Lamar, by way of introduction, “and no one will ever do any good here.” Lamar remained steadfastly cordial, though a bit alarmed. In the months following, Finley subsequently tried to persuade Lamar to join him in moving both franchises to Louisville.
Though he politely rejected Finley’s offer, it was true that Kansas City had proved a somewhat tougher sell than he’d expected. After the initial burst of excitement and season-ticket orders, the city had been slow to fully embrace the Chiefs, in part because of the team’s disappointing records in 1963 and 1964, but also because Kansas Citians had grown weary and distrustful of Finley and the Athletics, who hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since their arrival in 1955.
For their part, the Chiefs had been maddeningly uneven, rather than consistently futile. In 1965, Kansas City fell early to the Raiders but earned a win and a tie in their season series against the division champion Chargers, finishing 7–5–2, in third place in the AFL West. It was a season of discontent, played amid rumors that the team might be considering moving again—the season-ticket rolls had dipped below 10,000—and many Chiefs fans were growing more vociferous in their criticism of Stram.
Some viewed the Chiefs’ supporters as overly demanding, but Lamar saw the larger truth: The fans of Kansas City were beginning to care passionately about the team. On the north side of the stadium, right behind the team’s benches, the section of stands became known as the “Wolfpack.” After a 52–21 win over the Oilers on November 29, the next day’s Kansas City Times included a story on the clamorous crowd, titled “Wolves Wail as Chiefs Prevail.” Two weeks later, on the morning of December 12 in Buffalo, Lamar approved an outline for the team’s new season-ticket drive. The Chiefs would embrace the growing involvement of the crowd, and the slogan for the new promotion was “Join the Wolfpack.”
That day in Buffalo, the Chiefs fell to the eventual repeat AFL champions, the Bills, and also saw their star running back, Mack Lee Hill, felled by a knee injury. One of the club’s early stars in Kansas City, Hill was recruited to the Chiefs in 1964 by the redoubtable scout Lloyd Wells, who signed him for a $300 bonus. In the game at Buffalo, Hill ruptured a knee ligament, and Lamar consoled him in the dank Buffalo locker room as news circulated that he’d likely need to have season-ending knee surgery back in Kansas City.
Hill was notoriously skittish about needles and surgery, but Stram and his teammates persuaded him to get the surgery done quickly, and he was admitted to Menorah Medical Center Monday evening. But Tuesday morning, during the routine procedure, Hill’s body reacted to the anesthesia and developed hyperthermia, rising to 108 degrees. Despite frantic efforts to save him, Hill died on the operating table. The call to Dallas with the tragic news—coming just two years after Stone Johnson’s death—left Lamar in tears. “I didn’t know until, late in the day, Lamar got a call in his office,” said Norma. “We just stood there in the kitchen and cried together.”
The gravity of Hill’s death transcended the fans’ complaints about the team’s sporadic performance, and changed the tone of the conversation about the Chiefs. Len Dawson’s eloquent eulogy at the funeral later in the week served as a testament to the love the team had for Hill, as well as underscoring Dawson’s status as the unquestioned team leader. “As terrible as that was, I think the tragedy established a bond between Kansas City and the Chiefs,” said Lamar. “Things really began to change soon after.”
The team faced another public relations crisis a few weeks later over comments from Don Klosterman, who while in San Francisco for the East-West Shrine Game (where the Chiefs were about to sign USC’s Heisman Trophy–winning running back Mike Garrett) breezily implied that the team might move to Los Angeles. Coming on the heels of another Klosterman quote comparing Kansas City to purgatory (“it’s not exactly heaven and it’s not exactly hell”), the publicity surrounding it exacerbated an already strained situation—prompting another round of rumors that the Chiefs were considering a move—and forced Klosterman’s resignation, at Steadman’s insistence.
But that was a lone bump in an otherwise remarkable offseason. After emphasizing his commitment following Klosterman’s resignation, Lamar worked with the newly formed Greater Kansas City Sports Commission to shore up the Chiefs’ season-ticket rolls, and also began talking about the need for a new world-class stadium for the city.
Earlier that December, Lamar had asked Norma if she would consider moving to Kansas City for a few months while the Chiefs worked on a dedicated season-ticket campaign. Subletting a condo overlooking the Country Club Plaza, the Hunts relocated for the winter and spring. Lamar drove to work at the offices in Swope Park, and he went to every Kiwanis Club gathering and Junior Chamber of Commerce meeting he could find, in essence putting the same effort into convincing Kansas City of his commitment as he had in Dallas in 1960.
And to rally support closer to home, he turned the season-ticket drive itself into a form of competition. “We were using some of Margaret and Al Hill’s old furniture in our home on Armstrong,” said Norma. “The family room was totally full of their old furniture. And he said, ‘You know something? If we can sell 20,000 season tickets, we’re gonna get new furniture for the family room.’ So, I was . . . ‘Yes! How fast can we get there?! Work hard!’ He knew I was going to think it was wonderful to get new furniture, but that was a goal for him. He had to set that goal, and then he had to reach it. That was what he told himself.”
The agency Valentine Radford had pushed for an opportunity to get the Chiefs account, and to launch the campaign, the graphic artist John Martin came up with a stylized cartoon figure of a wolf with long, serrated ears. The pitch was note-perfect, and the execution of the campaign was assured. Offering fans the opportunity to pay for their season tickets with an installment plan at several local banks was crucial, and throughout the off-season months, fans signed up.
By day, Norma strolled along Brush Creek with baby Clark, and in the evenings she accompanied Lamar to many of the events, growing more comfortable with the city and the Country Club Plaza. As he’d done before, Lamar showed an aptitude for convincing people he met of his sincerity. The drive lifted season-ticket rolls from 9,550 in 1965 to more than 21,000 by April 1966. In so doing, the Chiefs finally proved they were in Kansas City to stay. Also, Norma got her new living-room set.
•
On April 4, 1966, in the Chiefs offices on 63rd Street in Swope Park, Lamar was working on the wording of a newspaper advertisement when he received a phone call from the Cowboys’ president and GM Tex Schramm. The smart, combustible Schramm had never cared for Lamar, always viewing him as obstructing the Cowboys’ growth in Dallas. But on this day, he seemed unusually polite, and asked if Lamar “might be able to come to Dallas to discuss a matter of mutual importance.”
Lamar was returning to Texas two days later anyway, on his way to an AFL owners meeting in Houston. He adjusted his schedule to book a lengthy layover in Dallas before continuing to Houston. On the evening of Wednesday, April 6, he got off his plane at Love Field in Dallas and walked to the statue of the Texas Ranger in the terminal’s lobby. There, waiting adjacent to the statue, reading a paper, was Schramm. They shook hands and quietly moved to the door, walking into the vast Love Field parking lot, where they sat in Schramm’s Oldsmobile in the twilight, and spoke for about 45 minutes.
Once inside, Schramm delivered his message. “I think the time has come,” he said, “to talk about a merger, if you’d be interested in that.”
“Fine,” said Lamar, evenly. “I’m interested.”
Schramm made a few things clear: The NFL would want Pete Rozelle to be the commissioner of a merged league; further discussions would have to be confidential, but that the NFL was finally willing to consider a merger in which all existing AFL franchises would be accepted into the NFL. After their discussion, Schramm said he would call Lamar later in the month to talk more specifically about a framework for a deal. Much of the college signing frenzy had died down by April, and it seemed a good time for truce talks.
Lamar continued his trip, heading down to Houston, for the owners meeting. He didn’t tell any of his colleagues (“I wouldn’t have at that point—there had been negotiations before, and it had all come to nothing, so there was no reason to bring it up at that point”) and, in the event, there were more pressing issues.
On April 8, at the AFL owners meeting in Houston, Commissioner Joe Foss resigned (when it became clear that he would be fired by the AFL owners if he didn’t). Criticism of Foss had grown steadily over the years, and the success of the NFL’s babysitting program, along with the older league’s eleventh-hour landing of Atlanta as an expansion franchise (after the AFL had announced it would move to that city), only weakened his position.
For its new commissioner the league elected Al Davis. This was an alarming choice for leaders in both leagues. For starters, Davis was hardly beloved within the AFL. Writing a year earlier in Sports Illustrated, Bud Shrake noted that outside of Oakland, “it is not certain where Al Davis would finish in a popularity contest among sharks, the mumps, the income tax, and himself. If the voters were the other American Football League coaches, Davis probably would be third, edging out income tax in a thriller.” But still chastened over the results of the ’66 draft, the majority of AFL owners decided Davis would be the perfect man to run the league in the event that the war escalated. “There was a feeling that we needed a fighter,” said one AFL owner. “Someone who was willing to go eye-for-eye with the NFL.” That would happen soon enough. In the short term, Davis began to ramp up the league’s own babysitting program, to reach out to college seniors and fight the NFL on its own terms.
On May 3, Schramm visited Lamar at his home on Armstrong Parkway. They sat down together and Schramm outlined a more detailed framework of a deal. The NFL would ask for $18 million indemnity from the AFL but would take all eight teams from the AFL, and would consent to let all the teams remain in their present markets. Later that week, at a meeting in Sonny Werblin’s apartment, Lamar first mentioned the proposal to his fellow owners. The group pointedly didn’t include Davis on the information. “Al was just starting to put together his own staff at the AFL offices,” Lamar said, “and we all knew it could fall through at any moment. If it didn’t fall through, well, we were going to be putting him out of a job.”
Werblin and Wayne Valley—who would be sharing markets in New York and the Bay Area with established NFL franchises—were both very chilly to the idea, but Lamar succeeded that day in changing the AFL bylaws so a merger could be approved with a two-thirds majority rather than a unanimous vote.
The next news Lamar heard, on May 16, was less encouraging. “Something’s happened,” Schramm explained over the phone. “The Giants just signed Pete Gogolak.” For nearly seven years, the two leagues abided by an unwritten agreement that, while they would compete for incoming rookies through their respective drafts, they would not attempt to sign the other league’s veterans. That policy came to an abrupt end when the Giants signed the Buffalo Bills’ soccer-style placekicker Gogolak, who had been the second leading scorer in the AFL during the Bills title seasons of 1964 and 1965. In 1965, Gogolak kicked a pro record 28 field goals while playing out the option year of his contract. The Giants’ Wellington Mara heard from Gogolak’s agent that the kicker was willing to jump leagues and hastily signed him to a three-year, $96,000 contract, the largest ever for a placekicker. It was, arguably, the single most provocative act of the decade in the war between the leagues.
Anticipating the reaction, Schramm had called Lamar before the news broke to inform him of the signing, and to reassure him that, despite appearances to the contrary, the NFL owners were nearing an understanding, and the senior league was acting in good faith. When the news broke the next day, Al Davis had all the provocation he needed. But since the merger negotiations were going on without Davis’s knowledge, there was little that Lamar could do to stop Davis from his own plan of attack. Davis returned that night to the Plaza Hotel in New York and, in a cryptic interview, told the New York Times’ Arthur Daley, “This is something I’ve been aware of, and I anticipated the probability. But you don’t make threats at a time like this. Our answer will be in action. This is not the time to speak.”
“There was no coordinated plan of response,” said Lamar, “because there was no plan to begin with. We couldn’t tell Al about the negotiations, and he wasn’t going to tell us about what he was doing. You’d just hear things. What Al was doing, he was doing on his own.”
On one side, Schramm and Lamar were engaged in their negotiations to bring about the terms for a peace. On the other side, Davis, unaware of the truce talks, was waging his response to the Gogolak signing, a guerilla war of retribution on behalf of the AFL that at times threatened to make any peace impossible.
Davis’s tactics bore fruit quickly. On May 23, the AFL had its first response. In Oakland, the Rams’ young quarterback, Roman Gabriel, met the Raiders coach John Rauch at the Oakland Airport and received a bonus check for $100,000, then signed a contract for four years at $75,000 per year, for a package of $400,000. The deal, announced by the Raiders on May 26, quickly brought a retort from the Rams stating they had just signed Gabriel to a contract renewal.
Schramm and his close friend Pete Rozelle realized a deal would need to be struck quickly or Davis’s counterattack could further escalate the hostilities. While Schramm and Rozelle secretly convened at Schramm’s house in Dallas, Lamar went ahead with his plans and headed with Norma and a group of friends to Indianapolis over Memorial Day weekend, to watch the Indianapolis 500. Buddy Rupe was in Indianapolis with Lamar and found him, in this instance, unusually open. “You’re going to hear some things,” Lamar said to his old friend. “They’re all true, but keep your mouth shut.”
Unbeknownst to either Schramm or Lamar, Davis’s assistants were working that very weekend on the AFL’s next big signing. At Davis’s behest, Don Klosterman, by now the GM of the Houston Oilers, started recruiting John Brodie, the 49ers starting quarterback, whose contract was up for renewal. Klosterman had known Brodie for ten years, understood how fanatical the quarterback was about golfing (he’d played two years on the PGA tour), and believed he could be wooed. That Friday, May 28, Brodie headed to Houston, to meet with Klosterman and Bud Adams. After haggling for a bit, Adams wrote out the terms of a contract on a cocktail napkin: “The AFL agrees to pay John Brodie $250,000 a season for three seasons.”
Schramm and Rozelle were huddling on specific points of the proposed agreement when Schramm received a phone call from an apoplectic Lou Spadia, 49ers general manager, about the AFL’s offer to Brodie.
“And so here it is,” recalled Schramm, “we’ve worked this all out and now we’ve got the Brodie situation. And so we want to get a hold of Lamar, and he’s up in fucking Indianapolis at this race! Well, if you’ve ever tried to find anybody up there, it’s damn near impossible. We finally got him, and I told Lamar, ‘Look, I can’t hold these people together. They’re going to get mad and they’re going to do something, and if that happens, the merger is gone. You gotta stop this sonofabitch.’”
Lamar had already called Adams and Klosterman, to try to dissuade them from going through with the signing. By now, Davis knew some negotiations were going on between the AFL and NFL owners, but he wasn’t aware of the particulars. He was angry at being left out of the loop and convinced that continuing his program would only increase the AFL’s bargaining power. Later that night, he called Lamar and explained that whatever was happening, Lamar’s bargaining position would be stronger with Brodie signed than it would be without his signature. In this, he was probably right. By now, San Francisco’s front office was shell-shocked and resigned to the inevitability of the merger. In the days ahead, 49ers GM Lou Spadia became adamant about retaining Brodie, above all else. “I just want my quarterback,” he repeated.
Lamar returned from Indianapolis late the night of May 30, agreeing that there was little choice but to forge ahead, and as quickly as possible. The next morning, he visited Schramm’s house. Speaking from five pages of notes he had compiled with Rozelle, Schramm outlined the plan. Writing on a legal pad, Lamar carefully transcribed the specifics. When he finished, Schramm said, “There it is. If you accept, this deal has been approved by every NFL club. If you have to alter it too much, it will blow up.”
Lamar flew to New York later that day, to meet with the AFL owners, many of whom balked at the figure of $18 million. “They should pay us,” insisted Werblin. But by now, Lamar knew a good deal when he saw one. “I was just beginning to understand the true value of money,” he said. With twenty years to pay off the total, the fee amounted to a cost of $2 million per team over the twenty years, with much of the money coming from accrued interest. This paled in comparison to the instantly increased value and revenues for each team in the league, as well as the reduced costs of a stabilized environment with a common draft.
Over the next few days, the negotiation progressed to the fine-grained details of the agreement. Lamar called Schramm back by phone and outlined the twenty-six points with which the AFL took issue, almost all of them involved the wording of the agreements between the two New York clubs and San Francisco and Oakland. By Sunday night, June 5, meeting back in Dallas at Schramm’s home, they ironed out almost all of the remaining sticking points. By this time, rumors were increasing in the press and reporters were staked outside both the NFL and AFL offices.
The NFL owners approved the terms of the merger in a telephone conference call on the morning of June 7. That evening, while Lamar was traveling to Washington for more secret meetings, the Patriots’ Billy Sullivan sat down with Al Davis and told him he was about to be out of a job. Davis was angry that he’d been left out of the loop on the negotiations, and angry about the terms of the agreement. “I wanted a merger,” Davis said. “But I didn’t like the terms of the merger. I thought it would be great because we can compete against those guys.”
Later that night, in the frantic final hours, Hunt, Schramm, Rozelle, and his aide Jim Kensil converged in Washington, D.C. At the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, in a suite registered under the fictitious name of Ralph Pittman, the five men spent much of the night banging out the wording for the press release the next day, finally finishing at 3 a.m. Throughout the evening and the next day, the NFL’s lead counsel, Hamilton Carothers of Covington & Burling, fielded phone calls from team lawyers, one who asked to vet a copy of the signed agreement. “There is no signed agreement,” said Carothers. “It’s all just notes, from Tex and Lamar.”
The press release came out that afternoon, Wednesday, June 8:
JOINT STATEMENT
NATIONAL AND AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUES
The NFL and AFL today announced plans to join in an expanded major professional football league. It will consist of 26 teams in 25 cities—with expectation of additional teams in the near future.
The main points of the plan include:
-Pete Rozelle will be the commissioner.
-A world championship game this season.
-All existing franchises retained.
-No franchises transferred from present locations.
-Two new franchises no later than 1968.
-Two more teams as soon thereafter as practical.
-Inter-league pre-season games in 1967.
-Single league schedule in 1970.
-A common draft next January.
-Continued two-network TV coverage.
The press conference that day at the Warwick Hotel in New York found Rozelle flanked by Lamar and Tex Schramm. Lamar chimed in when called upon, politely foiling a harangue from Howard Cosell about what might happen with the contracts that NFL players signed with AFL teams. He was humble and genial, but his smile was the most natural and relaxed of the three men. Not seven years after he sat in the back of a congressional meeting room in Washington, D.C, hearing Bert Bell invoke the possibility of a new football league, he and his seven partners would be merging with the National Football League. In doing so, Lamar knew, he had won.
That night, Lamar and Tex shared a plane ride back to Dallas. When they deplaned they again passed the statue of the Texas Ranger.
“I guess this time it’s okay for us to be seen together,” said Lamar with a smile.
“I suppose so,” said Schramm. The two men shook hands and parted.
The weeks ahead were marked by both satisfaction and optimism on the part of the AFL owners. There was also, unmistakably, a powerful sense of vindication for Lamar and all those who’d believed in “The Foolish Club.”
A week after the merger, Norma read with satisfaction Sports Illustrated’s account of the merger, written by the longtime AFL antagonist Tex Maule. “Would it be okay,” she proposed, “if I send a dead crow to Tex—and I’m going to tell him to eat it. Would you let me do that?”
Lamar dipped his head, looked over at his wife, and said, “Nooo.” But he was smiling when he said it.
Shortly after the merger was announced, Pete Rozelle appointed a committee—consisting of himself and three owners from each league (the Cowboys’ Tex Schramm, the Colts’ Carroll Rosenbloom, and the Rams’ Dan Reeves from the NFL; Lamar, Ralph Wilson, and Boston’s Billy Sullivan of the AFL)—to meet and iron out the myriad details of the coming union. It would take eighteen full months for the merger agreement to be codified, but in the first six months, the group was preoccupied with discussions about the first game between the leagues, which would match the AFL and NFL champions in January 1967.
Plans for the new game had started almost immediately. Rozelle had brokered the compromise that would allow both networks—CBS and NBC—to broadcast the first playing of what was being referred to in the media of the day as “the World Series of football,” matching the NFL and AFL champs. As the seven men on the merger committee sat around a conference table in the summer of 1966, exchanging ideas about the schedule, Lamar asked about the timing of the game: “Should there be a one-week break or two before the championship game?”
“Wait,” said one of the other committee members, confused about whether he was talking about the league championship games or the new world championship. “Which game do you mean?”
“You know,” explained Lamar. “The last game . . . the final game. The Super Bowl.”
There were smiles all around, and some chuckles. The name had occurred to Lamar one day that summer. The previous Christmas, Norma had given each of the children one of the hot novelties of the day, the Wham-O company’s high-bouncing Super Ball, which Lamar, Jr., and Sharron loved bouncing on the driveway and over the house. (More than a decade later, Lamar’s recollection of this was quite clear: “My daughter Sharron was six years old then, and she had a ball called a Super Ball, which had incredible bounce. She could bounce it on concrete and it literally would go over the house. She and Lamar, Jr., always were talking about the Super Ball. I don’t remember consciously thinking, ‘Gee this is going to be a good name for the game.’”)
In the weeks ahead, as the group mapped out its plans in a series of meetings, it began informally distinguishing between league championship games and the finale by referring colloquially to the final game as “the Super Bowl.”
“But nobody ever said let’s make that the name of the game,” said Lamar. “Far from it, we all agreed it was far too corny to be the name of the new title game.”
In the midst of the committee’s deliberations, Lamar began dropping short notes to Rozelle, suggesting changes or innovations, such as a weekly poll of writers, modeled after the AP college football pool, to rank the top 10 teams in all of pro football. It was in one of those letters he sent to Rozelle, dated July 25, 1966, in which Lamar stressed the need to come up with a title game name. “If possible, I believe we should ‘coin a phrase’ for the Championship Game . . . I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”
Rozelle agreed there was room for improvement. He wasn’t merely unenthusiastic about the term; he actively disliked it. NFL publicity director Don Weiss recalled that Rozelle “just didn’t like the word ‘super.’ Pete was a pretty regular person, but he was a stickler on words and grammar, and ‘super’ was not his idea of a good word. He thought ‘super’ was a word like ‘neat’ or ‘gee-whiz.’ It had no sophistication.”
That may have been true, but “super” was a word that was in the air. The Superman comic was widely popular, and much had been made about the phenomenon of supersonic air travel; in towns around military bases in the ’60s, sonic booms were a fairly common occurrence. Lamar also loved expressive, cutting-edge language (during the opener against the Broncos in 1963, he described the 59–7 score to Dan Jenkins as “double unreal;” Sharron would delight later at hearing her father say that something had “freaked me out”), and one family friend remembered that both Lamar and Norma used the term “super” frequently during that era.
Unable to find a novel or catchy name that they were happy with, the committee announced—at Rozelle’s strong suggestion—that the game would be called “The AFL–NFL World Championship Game.” Even this involved diplomacy, as a few NFL owners resented the AFL being placed first in the order. Rozelle would have liked to call the game “The Pro Bowl,” but that title was already taken, since 1951, by the NFL’s postseason All-Star game. So the new game’s official name would be the AFL–NFL World Championship Game. And almost immediately, people around the country and inside of sports media ignored that and began referring to it as the Super Bowl instead.
The 1966 season began with a 42–20 road win over the two-time defending AFL champion Buffalo Bills, but even before that, the atmosphere felt different on Lamar’s trips to Kansas City. Maybe it was the way the city had rallied around the team following the death of Mack Lee Hill, or the definitive statement of Klosterman’s resignation, quashing all talk about a move to L.A., or the goodwill generated by the season-ticket drive. For whatever reason, by the home opener on October 2, when some members of the Wolfpack opened a red-and-gold-striped hospitality tent (called the Wolfden) behind the north stands, gameday Sundays had become a defining event in Kansas City. And the Wolfden was the place to be. Beneath banners and pennants, the six-piece “Wolfden Strollers” band serenaded the revelers.
Lamar, Norma, and their friends often flew in on gameday mornings, but if the Hunts arrived on Saturday night, they’d routinely be joined for dinner by Jack and Martha Steadman at Putsch’s 210 on the Country Club Plaza. If it was a Sunday morning flight, they’d land at Municipal Airport just north of downtown and be at the stadium in less than 15 minutes. After games, they’d ride over to the Strams’ favorite restaurant, Casa de Montez, where the proprietor would skirt the Sunday blue laws by pouring spirits for Hank and Phyllis in coffee cups, while the dinner party monitored the late games on a TV set over the bar.
On November 6, 1966, the 5–2 Chiefs played host to the defending Western Division champion Chargers, their main competitor in the West during the first part of the ’60s. It was not merely a showdown between the two best teams in the division, and of the dueling martinets Stram and Sid Gillman, but also a special occasion for the league, marking the first AFL game ever attended by Rozelle. As he sat with Lamar and Norma in the open-air, modified catbird seat adjacent to the press box, Rozelle was highly complimentary of the gameday scene—of Bob Johnson riding bareback on the horse Warpaint after each Chiefs’ score, of Tony DiPardo and the Chiefs’ Zing Band rallying the fans throughout the afternoon, and, most lavishly, of the handiwork of Chiefs’ groundskeeper George Toma, who had elevated the routine painting of accents on the field to an art form. The Municipal Stadium field included a variety of unique flourishes, from the end zone markings on a sea of Chiefs gold, to the reproductions of the helmets of the Chiefs and their opponents flanking the 50-yard line, to the ornate yard-line markings themselves, not only colored but outlined as well, to the candy-striped red-and-gold goalposts. “Your groundskeeper is amazing,” said Rozelle, and in the days following the game, he would call Lamar again, and ask if Toma would be willing to work the first championship game between the two leagues the following January (Toma would supervise the field for the Super Bowl for the next four decades).
Like the game against the Chargers, a 24–14 win for the Chiefs, the season was taking on a charmed quality. Dawson, plagued by injuries in earlier seasons, had fought off a challenge from USC’s Pete Beathard and was back to his accurate self; second-year flanker Otis Taylor had become one of the league’s most explosive receivers; and rookie running back Mike Garrett added another dimension to the offense, which scored enough to at least disguise the deficiencies of a defense that was aging, undersized, and lacking in mobility.
The Chiefs found out they’d clinched the division title and a spot in the AFL Championship Game on the way back from a Thanksgiving weekend win over the Jets. It was another month before they would walk on the field at War Memorial Stadium against the Bills in the AFL Championship Game, for the right to play the NFL champions. At a booster-club meeting in late December, before a crowd of 1,200 at the Imperial Ballroom in the Hotel Muehlebach, Lamar announced that he was giving Stram a new five-year contract, after which he was unusually open about his own emotions.
“This has been such a great year I hate to see it end,” he said. “This has been the most rewarding year of my life. This year our team became successful, we finally became successful at the gate and we finally worked out the merger of the two leagues. It’s not often that so many good things happen in one year.”
There was a small but spirited assemblage of Chiefs fans who made their way to Buffalo for the AFL Championship Game, including charter season-ticket holder Corky Flynn, a brazen Red Coater in a handlebar moustache who upon the team’s arrival persuaded the hotel manager at the Holiday Inn in Buffalo where the Chiefs were staying to remove the “Go Bills” message from the hotel marquee. Flynn was among the few hundred red-clad away supporters that Sunday, blowing his bugle with fervor, rooting his favorite team to victory. With Lamar and Norma bundled nearby in the stands, the Chiefs went out and throttled Buffalo, 31–7, on a chilled, muddy field. Johnny Robinson’s key interception in the Chiefs’ end zone late in the first half snatched the momentum and sent the team to the first on-field encounter with the NFL.
The Kansas City Star’s Joe McGuff called the scene in the visitors’ locker room after the win “the wildest in Chiefs’ history.” Lamar had agreed to bring out bottles of champagne if the team won, knowing that it would incur a $2,000 fine from league president Milt Woodard, who had mandated that there be no alcoholic beverages in the winning locker room. Lamar even took part, sticking out his tongue to catch the drops of champagne dripping down his face, happily embracing the players, his tie askew, its end snipped off in part of the traditional postgame celebration. At one point he was scooped up in a big bear hug by the Chiefs’ mountainous Jim Tyrer, drenched in champagne and sweat, who asked, “Do you think Kansas City will be happy?!”
Later that afternoon the team gathered in a conference room back at the Holiday Inn and watched as the Packers edged the Cowboys, 34–27. Though there would have been an undeniable allure to facing their old Dallas rivals, most of the Chiefs’ squad was glad for the opportunity to face the NFL’s dominant team, Vince Lombardi’s Packers, which had won the NFL title four times in six seasons.
By then, Lamar’s pet term “Super Bowl” had grown in popularity. Headline writers, commentators, and players alike were using the term (the morning after the win over the Bills, the Kansas City Times headline read, “Super Chiefs Bound for Super Bowl”). In the weeks leading up to the first game, it was becoming clear that it didn’t matter what the league tried to call the game, because “Super Bowl” had already caught on. Networks had taken to referring to the day of the game as “Super Sunday.”
The Chiefs arrived in California on January 4, eleven days prior to kickoff. Green Bay arrived four days later, and then only at Rozelle’s insistence. (Lombardi had wanted to fly in January 14, the morning before the game, just as the Packers would for any other road contest.) The clear storyline heading into the game—the youthful Chiefs’ complex approach against the experienced Packers’ meat-and-potatoes attack—was largely hijacked by the boisterous antics of the Chiefs’ cornerback Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, who had presented the media with a braggadocio reminiscent of Muhammad Ali. Williamson disparaged the Packers’ receivers, predicted the demise of both Carroll Dale and Boyd Dowler, and boasted of his trademark “Hammer Tackle,” a swinging arm chop that he described as “a blow delivered with great velocity perpendicular to the earth’s latitudes.”
Meanwhile, Lamar spent the two weeks before the big game fretting over Williamson’s incendiary comments and trying to handle the ticket requests, which came from friends, relatives, politicians, show-business personalities, Chiefs season-ticket holders, and complete strangers. When he and Norma arrived in Los Angeles three days before the contest, they checked into the Beverly Hilton and geared up for the big event. Bunker and Herbert would be there, joined by Dr. Edward Teller at the big game; Hunt Oil landman Mack Rankin attended with television host Art Linkletter; and part of Lamar’s party visited actor Van Williams on the set of The Green Hornet (Williams had grown up in Fort Worth and was friends with Buzz Kemble).
As the first Super Sunday dawned, Lamar seemed particularly anxious to his friends, hoping for the best yet fearing the worst. That morning, Steadman was dealing with numerous logistical problems; due to smog, two charter planes full of Chiefs fans flying into Los Angeles for the game had to be diverted to a military airstrip outside the city, and the charter buses rushed to that location to get the fans back to the Coliseum on time. Tension was rife throughout both leagues—Frank Gifford, interviewing his old coach, Vince Lombardi, for CBS, found the Packers’ head coach “trembling like a leaf.” Lamar was concerned about the performance of his team, of course, but also the publicity fallout from all the unsold tickets. The game would be watched by more than 65 million people, the largest audience to ever watch a sporting event in America. Yet attendance was 63,036, leaving more than 32,000 empty seats; pro fans simply weren’t used to traveling to neutral sites.
By the 1 p.m. local kickoff, the setting was perfect—the Coliseum on a sunny January Sunday, the grass field all the more resplendent for Toma’s handiwork (including a $3,000 spray-painting it received on the eve of the game). There was, in short, all the grandeur befitting an epic American event: doves, balloons, marching bands, and men taking off from the field in jet packs, just a year after the technology was featured in the James Bond movie Thunderball.
After seven seasons of being disparaged by the older league, it was inevitable that the game would feel like a crusade to the Chiefs players. As they stood in the tunnel, waiting to take the field before the pre-game introductions, Buck Buchanan and Bobby Bell were so fired up, they had tears on their eyes.
For a half, fans were treated to a surprisingly competitive game. The Packers scored on their second possession, a six-play, 80-yard drive, but the Chiefs moved the ball as well, marching across midfield on all four of their first-half possessions, as Dawson completed eleven of fifteen passes, employing play-action fakes and Stram’s moving pocket to find open passing lanes.
The scene at halftime was tense in both locker rooms as well as in the press box, where the tight score had created a buzz of worry and excitement. NFL employee Buddy Young said out loud what others were thinking: “Old age and heat will get the Packers in the second half.” In the Kansas City dressing room, the Chiefs had the look of a team that had been hoping it was good enough and had found out that perhaps it was. “I honestly thought we would come back and win it,” said Stram. “We felt we were doing the things we had to do, and doing them well.”
In the stands, “Lamar was totally stoked,” remembered Buzz Kemble. The Chiefs had more first downs and more total yardage. He was happy but nervous, proud of his team but still worried.
His anxiety was prescient. On third-and-five of the Chiefs first possession of the second half, Dawson rolled back to pass. The Packers blitzed, a maneuver that Lombardi had often dismissed as the “weapon of weaklings.” It worked splendidly in this case, as Dawson’s hurried pass sailed short and was intercepted by Willie Wood, who returned it to the Chiefs 5. For those standing with Lamar, it was one of the only times they ever heard him curse—Richey recalled him emitting a short “Damn!” when Wood caught the ball. Green Bay scored on the next play, and again on their next possession, and the route was on.
“It was over then,” said Jim Tyrer. “They wouldn’t respect our run again. Our play fakes were useless. They knew we had to pass, and they just flew to the quarterback.” Kansas City never threatened, and by the fourth quarter, Williamson had been knocked out of the game, hammered into submission trying to tackle the Packers’ Donnie Anderson, whose pumping knee hit Williamson’s helmet. Standing over a prone Williamson, who also broke his arm in the pileup, the Packers’ Fuzzy Thurston hummed a few bars of “If I Had a Hammer.”
The Packers added another score in the fourth quarter to make the final score 35–10. After the game, Lombardi was peppered with questions about the quality of the Chiefs. Grasping the game ball presented to him by his team, he said, “The players gave it to me. It’s the NFL ball. It catches better and kicks a little better than the AFL ball.” When asked to assess the Chiefs, Lombardi said, “They’ve got great speed.” Pressed further, he added, “I don’t think they are as good as the top teams in the National Football League. They’re a good team with fine speed but I’d have to say NFL football is tougher. Dallas is a better team, and so are several others.” As silence surrounded him and writers scribbled furiously in their notebooks, a peeved Lombardi added, “That’s what you’ve wanted me to say—now I’ve said it. But I don’t want to get into that kind of comparison.”
It was typical of the mindset involved in the game that, afterward, two of Stram’s sons went to the Packers’ locker room to get Lombardi’s autograph. Lombardi patted Henry Stram, Jr., on the head and said, “Tell your dad his team played a good game.” Stram took the news from his sons with equanimity, especially after his eleven-year-old, Dale, added, “He said he hoped you wouldn’t whip us for going in there.” But when notified later of Lombardi’s comments to the press, Stram was taken aback. “Did Vince really say we weren’t that good?” he asked a group of NFL writers back at the pressroom in the Chiefs hotel. “That we couldn’t play at that level? Vince is a friend. Did he really say that?”
Lamar put forward a brave face after the game and was complimentary of the Packers, but said he was proud of his team. In the locker room, most of the Chiefs seemed subdued, almost chastened. The one exception was Buck Buchanan, who’d sacked Starr on the third play of the game and had fought the Packers’ all-pro guard Fuzzy Thurston to a draw. “I’m sorry, this team is not 35–10 better than us,” said Buchanan in the locker room. “I know it. I want to play them right now.”
Later on, when Tex Schramm ran into Norma, he said, “Now you see what we’ve been living with all these years.”
But the wave of enthusiasm for the team in Kansas City carried over into the offseason. In the Jackson County bond election in April 1967, the proposal for construction of a new sports complex passed with a 67.1 percent majority, approving Jackson County’s sale of $43 million of G.O. bonds for the construction of two stadiums and a moving roof.
Lamar was still stung by the Super Bowl loss, but as the summer of 1967 approached, there were plenty of other events to occupy his time. One of them was the stadium itself. Across the country, the building boom in stadiums had led to a spate of round, multi-purpose stadiums that could be used for both baseball and football. But in the early stages of the Kansas City push for a stadium, the Denver architect Charles Deaton had called Steadman with a different, revolutionary idea. Deaton argued that by combining many of the stadium service elements in a convertible underground tunnel, it was possible to build two stadiums—one exclusively built for football, the other just for baseball—for not much more than the price of one.
Lamar loved architecture, and stadium architecture best of all. He well understood the appeal of improved sight lines. He’d spent four years watching the Chiefs brusquely treated by the main tenants, the Kansas City Athletics baseball club, experiencing the inconvenience of starting nearly every season with two or three road games (as the A’s had priority on Municipal Stadium dates through much of September), as well as the corresponding spate of late-season, cold-weather games. The prospect of a stadium built just for football, with the Chiefs as the sole tenant, was irresistible. The project moved forward with Deaton’s design as the template and included a football stadium, a baseball stadium, a rolling roof that could move to cover either structure, and an observation tower that would offer a splendid view of the stadia below and the city to the west. But there was still much work to be done, such as going over specs and dealing with the contractors and city government. Lamar did what he usually did in situations such as this: He worked carefully on the blueprints and chimed in with suggestions and recommendations for the design elements. He left much of the politics and negotiations to Steadman.
Lamar was not yet thirty-five years old. Over the previous year he had solidified the agreement that would expand the universe of pro football. He had named its new signature game and seen his own team play in it. It wasn’t merely that pro football was, by 1967, the nation’s most popular sport. It also had the soundest economic structure, based on the full sharing of TV revenue among all clubs, a tenet of the early AFL that Lamar had proposed, and that the NFL had later copied. Within a few years, his team would be a full member of the National Football League, playing in the most modern football stadium in the world. Lamar Hunt had engineered his first revolution.
It wouldn’t be his last.