Michael MacCambridge - 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 Strams son, Stu, celebrate after Warren McVeas 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 177 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

a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

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

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: .

CONTENTS

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 416 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 wouldnt 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, Strams normally voracious appetite was gone. He ignored the main course. He struggled to understand how, one day after confiding in another coach that Ive 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 Laniers 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 teams AFL title season in 1962, while absorbing another year of discouraging financial losses and fighting with the NFLs 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, whod 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 Hunts 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 clubs offices and practice field.

Hunt was a hopeless romantic in many waysa fan of sports, held in their thrallbut 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 NFLs Cowboys. The Texans had lost money even in their championship season.