Prologue

Hank Stram, for once, was quiet.

As the charter achieved cruising altitude, he sat in his customary seat, first row on the left, against the bulkhead. But on this evening, there was no animated banter with “the rats,” no high-pitched exclamations of delight, no voluble postmortem analysis of the plays that worked. He just stared into the middle distance.

Some habits remained. The subtle tics of personal grooming: running a hand over his hair and its companion, the toupee, checking his perfectly straight necktie, smoothing out his red vest.

But on this occasion, on this evening, the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs had no words.

Seasons end fast in pro football, and everyone on the plane knew the jarring termination of the 1968 season would leave a mark. The kaleidoscope of images would haunt the team for months: Raiders receivers beating the outgunned Kansas City secondary; the Chiefs’ potent multiple offense grounded without a touchdown for the first time in six years; and the galling, irrefutable truth of a 41–6 loss at the hands of their archrivals, the Oakland Raiders. “It was just an ass-whipping,” said Chiefs linebacker Jim Lynch. “Everything just caved in.”

Trips to Oakland Alameda County Coliseum were never pleasant, and the circumstances around the playoff for the 1968 AFL West Division title made this one even less so. After the final seconds of the season ticked away, Stram and his team exited the field down a corridor lined with Raiders fans, where they were greeted with a barrage of verbal abuse and profane heckles, including one fan who spat on Stram and called him a “fucking bum.” (Stram wouldn’t learn until later that his 13-year-old son, Dale, walking a few paces behind his father, punched the fan who screamed the epithet, then darted away to hide on the Chiefs’ bus, convinced the Oakland cops were coming to arrest him at any moment.)

For Stram and his players, there was the suffocating silence of the losers’ locker room, what equipment manager Bobby Yarborough would later call “the quietest packing and moving out job that there ever was.”

Now on the plane, as his team ate in subdued silence behind him, Stram’s normally voracious appetite was gone. He ignored the main course. He struggled to understand how, one day after confiding in another coach that “I’ve never seen a group more ready to play a football game and more up for a game in my life,” he had presided over the worst loss in team history.

During the three and a half hours that the plane crossed from northern California to Kansas City, Missouri, Stram would eat nothing but the sections of a single orange.

His star middle linebacker, Willie Lanier, once mused that “a season is almost like a lifetime, of things that can happen,” and in the hours following their comprehensive humiliation, the conclusion of the 1968 season felt like a mortal wound.

But in the wisdom of Lanier’s statement, there also resided another truth. As surely as the 1968 Kansas City Chiefs season had come to a bitter conclusion, the 1969 Kansas City Chiefs season had begun.