'69 Chiefs: A Team, a Season, and the Birth of Modern Kansas City

E.J. Holub is introduced before the game against the Raiders in Municipal Stadium, November 23, 1969.

Hank Stram congratulates Willie Lanier after his forty-four-yard interception return against the Jets in Shea Stadium, November 23.

Running back Paul Lowe (26), Hank Stram, assistant coach Bill Walsh, and Stram’s son, Stu, celebrate after Warren McVea’s game-clinching eighty-yard touchdown run against the Bengals at home, October 19.

Chiefs walking down the ramp prior to the home game against the Broncos, November 27, from front to back, Jan Stenerud, Robert Holmes, Mo Moorman, Frank Pitts, George Daney, Chuck Hurston, and Curtis McClinton.

For Reggie Givens

Front cover: Hank Stram takes a victory ride, escorted by Otis Taylor (89), Lloyd Wells (not pictured), Dave Hill (73), and Warren McVea (6), after the Chiefs 17–7 win over the Raiders in Oakland, in the 1969 AFL Championship Game, January 4, 1970.

’69 Chiefs copyright © 2019 by 24/7 Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

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ISBN: 978-1-5248-5843-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939471

Editor: Jean Z. Lucas

Designer: Spencer Williams

Production Manager: Carol Coe

Production Editor: Dave Shaw

Ebook Developer: Kristen Minter

Cover design by Spencer Williams

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: DECEMBER 22, 1968

THE CITY

THE COACH

THE TEAM

TRAINING CAMP & PRESEASON

GAME 1: KANSAS CITY AT SAN DIEGO

GAME 2: KANSAS CITY AT BOSTON

GAME 3: KANSAS CITY AT CINCINNATI

GAME 4: KANSAS CITY AT DENVER

THE STADIUM

GAME 5: HOUSTON AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 6: MIAMI AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 7: CINCINNATI AT KANSAS CITY

BLACK AND WHITE

GAME 8: KANSAS CITY AT BUFFALO

GAME 9: SAN DIEGO AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 10: KANSAS CITY AT NEW YORK

THE OFFENSE

GAME 11: OAKLAND AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 12: DENVER AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 13: BUFFALO AT KANSAS CITY

GAME 14: KANSAS CITY AT OAKLAND

THE DEFENSE

GAME 15: KANSAS CITY AT NEW YORK

GAME 16: KANSAS CITY AT OAKLAND

SUPER BOWL WEEK

GAME 17: SUPER BOWL IV

THE AFTERMATH

EPILOGUE: JANUARY 13, 2019

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY, AUTHOR INTERVIEWS, PHOTO CREDITS

PROLOGUE

DECEMBER 22, 1968

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.

As the Kansas City Times reported, the Chiefs’ promising 1968 season came to a crushing end in Oakland.

THE CITY

On Friday, June 21, 1963, the staff of the Dallas Texans loaded up moving vans and headed north to become the Kansas City Chiefs. They were a championship team seeking a home.

American Football League founder and Texans president (he carefully avoided the term owner) Lamar Hunt had been casting about for options during the team’s AFL title season in 1962, while absorbing another year of discouraging financial losses and fighting with the NFL’s Cowboys for the loyalties of Dallas football fans.

The move to the Heart of America had been orchestrated by Kansas City Mayor H. Roe The Chief Bartle, who’d heard that Hunt was searching for a new city and reached out to invite him to visit.

Bartle was a true believer in the promise and potential of Kansas City, and also an excellent salesman. He explained why the city would be an ideal place to operate a professional football team. During Hunt’s visit, Bartle offered to help start a season ticket campaign, to provide the team a favorable lease at Kansas City Municipal Stadium, and to build a facility to house the club’s offices and practice field.

Hunt was a hopeless romantic in many ways—a fan of sports, held in their thrall—but also a clear-eyed pragmatist in other respects. He had realized during the fall of 1962 that his dream of having a prosperous pro football team in his hometown of Dallas could never work because of the stalemate with the NFL’s Cowboys. The Texans had lost money even in their championship season.

Kansas City’s season-ticket drive had stalled at 15,000 that spring, but that was well above anything Hunt had accomplished in Dallas, so he agreed to the move. Hunt spent the next few weeks arguing internally that the team should keep its nickname, until his general manager, an oil-company accountant named Jack Steadman, prevailed upon him that it would be a disaster to try to launch a team called the Kansas City Texans. Hunt eventually relented and announced in May that the team would be known as the Kansas City Chiefs, in honor of both the area’s Native American heritage, and a nod to the nickname of the mayor who’d arranged the deal.

The team leader and star quarterback, Len Dawson, was back home with his wife, Jackie, in Pittsburgh, when he got the news about the move. I mentioned to some friends that the team was going to Kansas City, and they said, ‘Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri?’ I said, ‘You mean there’s two of them?’ So, I had no idea which one. The thought then, particularly back east, was, ‘Man, you’re going to a cow town. They have horses and cattle running in the middle of the main street in the city.’

Kansas Citians, as a rule, did not wear cowboy hats or own livestock, and they could be thin-skinned about the casual perception that they did. It was the largest city in the Great Plains, boasted the oldest shopping district in America—the Country Club Plaza—as well as a rich history in jazz and blues, with giants like Charlie Parker and Count Basie spending crucial years there. Then there was the barbecue, and the hospitality. Kansas Citians prided themselves on an authentic, earthy Midwestern friendliness that was far removed in tone from the somewhat stilted formality of St. Louis, just 250 miles to the east.

The civic pride in Kansas City had a particularly earnest quality. Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City was still played—without irony—around town. In the clubs and lounges, many of the rock ’n’ roll combos learned the words and music to the Leiber-and-Stoller penned Wilbert Harrison hit, Kansas City. It seemed part of the civic character that Kansas Citians were sensitive to slights, and eager for outsiders to see the community’s virtues.

•

On a trip to Kansas City in the spring, Hunt was introduced to his counterpart, Charles O. Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team.

This is a horseshit town, said Finley to Hunt, and no one will ever do any good here.

Kansas City’s feeling for Finley was mutual. The city came to loathe the baseball owner for his excessively bush-league antics, the string of losing seasons that continued under his ownership, and more than anything else, his temerity in suggesting that there might be a better place to own a sports team. Later in 1963, Finley tried to persuade Hunt to join him in moving both teams to Atlanta. The diffident Hunt politely declined; he was loathe to criticize anyone, but he did not know what to make of Charlie Finley.

Hunt was still trying to convince Stram and his players on the wisdom of the move. Many of the team’s players were from Texas, and were reluctant to relocate. Defensive end Jerry Mays had to be talked out of an early retirement. Then, on August 9, 1963, a crowd of only 5,721 showed up for the Kansas City Chiefs’ home debut, a preseason game against the Bills. We were shocked with the attendance of that first game, said Hunt. It was very depressing and disappointing to see so few fans.

Three weeks later, playing the Oilers in another exhibition, a title-game rematch held in Wichita, the Chiefs rookie running back Stone Johnson broke his neck while blocking on a kickoff return. Nine days later, he died in a Wichita hospital. Stram’s oldest son, Henry, Jr., had befriended Johnson during that first training camp in nearby Liberty, often walking into town with him for ice cream. Dad, how could this happen? Henry, Jr., demanded after Johnson’s death. I thought football was just a game!

Buck Buchanan, who’d also been Johnson’s teammate in college, had the heartbreaking duty of packing up Johnson’s belongings and sending them back to his family in Texas. Buchanan and eight more of Johnson’s teammates were there at Menger Avenue Baptist Church in Dallas on September 12, 1963, when they laid Johnson to rest. His death cast a pall over the team’s arrival in Kansas City; the defending AFL champions crashed to a 5-7-2 record and played the season in a kind of fugue state. Abner Haynes was never the same, said Stram of the team’s dynamic star running back.

The trouble didn’t end there. Kansas City in 1963 was a town sprinkled with mean little bars and dimly lit nightclubs, some of them still under Mafia control. Late in the ’63 season, tight end Fred Arbanas was jumped by two men at 33rd and Troost and wound up losing vision in one eye. Just months later, guard Ed Budde got in a fight in the vestibule of the Bagdad Lounge, on 37th and Broadway, and was clubbed repeatedly with an 18-inch piece of pipe. Bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth after his attackers fled, Budde somehow drove himself to the emergency room. Both injuries looked career-ending. Three surgeries could not return the sight to Arbanas’s eye and Budde needed to have a plastic plate put in his head. But there was a resolute toughness to these players that went beyond physical bravery on the football field. Against all odds, both Arbanas and Budde continued their careers and flourished.

The team had another disappointing season in 1964, going 7-7, while season ticket sales declined further.

The fans that were there were attentive and involved, but not always optimistic. Stram came in for more than his share of second-guessing, as did the team’s right tackle, Dave Hill, who was singled out for heckling after a few ill-timed holding penalties.

But by 1965, something was beginning to coalesce. The Chiefs were becoming a part of the city and vice versa. On November 30, 1965, the Kansas City Times ran an A-1 story titled Wolves Wail as Chiefs Prevail, on the clamorous crowd—dubbed the Wolfpack—sitting behind the benches in Municipal Stadium’s north grandstand. Members are known for their football fervor and the acidity of their displays, noted the story. Two weeks later, Hunt approved a marketing slogan for the upcoming season ticket campaign called Join the Wolfpack.

The 1965 season was a wildly uneven 7-5-2 exercise in inconsistency, enlivened by a rousing home win over the AFL West champion Chargers and another standout performance by fan favorite Mack Lee Hill, the second-year running back who gained 628 yards rushing before suffering a knee injury in the next-to-last