What Just Happened? Vol. 79
I was walking the dog one morning last week, thinking about Patrick Mahomes, as I do, and for some reason I remembered that during Marv Levy’s time coaching the Kansas City Chiefs, he wrote a fight song called “Give a Cheer for Kansas City.” It was perhaps the most old-fashioned thing an NFL coach could do, other than installing the Wing-T offense, which he also did. The song never caught on with fans, and when Levy was unfairly fired after the 1982 season, it went with him.
“Give a Cheer for Kansas City” had been stored in pristine condition on a shelf in the back of my mind. I can still repeat the first verse of that corny tune word-for-word.
“Give a cheer for Kansas City,
Loud and clear for Red and Gold,
As our Chiefs march on to victory,
Like our mighty teams of old.”
Then I challenged myself to name every Chiefs head coach, and I stumbled only in forgetting Tom Bettis’ interim tenure in 1977. Then I remembered Kevin Harlan often called wide receiver Stephone Paige “the angular Stephone Paige.” Then I remembered backup offensive tackle Joe Valerio caught four career passes and they were all touchdowns. Then I tried to suppress the memories the Scott Pioli era, but the image of a haggard Todd Haley wincing at a Tyler Palko interception kept surfacing. Then I realized that the proportion of my brain storage space devoted to the Kansas City Chiefs is way out of whack.
I mean, I could speak fluent Mandarin Chinese by now if I had practiced for three hours on 16 Sundays a year for more than four decades.
This website is devoted to Mizzou athletics, and I know some of you couldn’t care less about the Chiefs, but at the moment the Tigers aren’t up to anything momentous. So I hope you indulge me straying from the syllabus to ponder some big questions. Why do we pour so much time and emotion into something trivial that never ends well? And what would it mean if the team that can’t win the big one actually did?
I was born three months after the Kansas City Chiefs’ last appearance in the biggest game, so I was matriculating into the third trimester when Len Dawson was throwing spirals to Otis Taylor in Super Bowl IV. My story, as it intersects with the Chiefs, picks up after the party ended.
My older sisters say that when I was three years old, I would act out the radio broadcasts of games in our kitchen, singing the national anthem, then recreating the plays using a balloon as a ball. I will take their word for it, as they couldn’t invent a scene quite that nerdy, even at the expense of their younger brother.
One of the oldest experiences I actually can remember was Oct. 12, 1975, the fateful day when I piled into a car with my father and a family friend and headed to my first game at Arrowhead Stadium. We sat in the upper deck. Although the stadium was only three-quarters full, it still housed a crowd 10 times the size of my hometown of Trenton, which is the only world I knew at that point. Improbably — although Ken Stabler suffering from a crippling hangover was a potential explanation — the winless Chiefs crushed the undefeated Raiders 42-10.
“We couldn't beat the Chiefs, but we damn near killed their horse,” Oakland coach John Madden said afterward, referring to Warpaint, who circled the field after each KC touchdown.
Looking back, this was like a drug dealer offering the first hit for free.
A 5-year-old mind will latch on to one thing to the exclusion of all others, and Chiefs football became that thing. The next summer, on a day that was about 100 degrees with 100% humidity, we made the trip to Liberty for autograph day at training camp. I got a closeup look at these enormous men with their spectacular sideburns and afros whose names and numbers I had memorized. My strategy to get autographs from the players with the shortest lines resulted in signatures from a bunch of nobodies who would be cut within the week. Still, that sweat-stained sheet of scribbles was pinned in a place of honor on my Kansas City Chiefs bulletin board and went into heavy rotation on show-and-tell days at school.
For a school project, I constructed a crude how-to football manual, which I still have, with instructions such as “TACKLE LIKE THIS” scrawled over indecipherable drawings. It was the first sign I had a future writing opinions with absolutely no basis in reality. The book stops abruptly, with six blank pages at the end. Not the last time a deadline would get the better of me.
Around October, the Christmas catalogs arrived in the mail, and the choice was clear: red football pants. There is almost no scenario in which someone needs his own pair of football pants with hip, thigh and knee pads, but at least I was in no danger of suffering a deep thigh bruise if I collided with a corner of the kitchen table.
From 1972 to 1989, the Chiefs made one playoff appearance, a one-and-done in 1986 that didn’t prevent John Mackovic from being fired right after the season because the players hated him. This was the franchise’s prolonged dark age, but it was the only version of the Chiefs I knew, so it was just normal. I also followed the Missouri Tigers and Chicago Cubs, so I accepted that postseasons were like oceans and mountains — things for people in other places to enjoy.
It’s not the bad years that kill you. Nobody ever dies of tedium. What kills you are the years the team captures not just your attention but also your emotions. When you think about the possibilities while walking your dog, that’s when you’re vulnerable.
Marty Schottenheimer arrived on the scene in 1989 and immediately turned the Chiefs into a winner. I was in college at Mizzou at this point, and suddenly watching the games wasn’t a private, frustrating Sunday ritual. Chiefs fans sprouted everywhere. Arrowhead became a pork-scented madhouse. Derrick Thomas and Neil Smith tormented quarterbacks, and Christian Okoye and Barry Word bulldozed defenders.
On Jan. 16, 1994, I joined a Sedalia bar full of day-drinking degenerates who came together with voices sweet as a choir when Keith Cash caught a touchdown pass from Joe Montana and fired the ball into the banner that bore the face of hated Oilers coach Buddy Ryan. The next season, I made such a ruckus when Montana threw the winning touchdown pass to Willie Davis to beat the Denver Broncos on Monday Night Football, my elderly downstairs neighbor woke up from her slumber and called to make sure an assault wasn’t being committed.
It was so much fun, we had no natural defenses for the annual inexplicable end. It became a 25-year tradition that dogged Schottenheimer and his successors. Trying to rank these would be like choosing my least-favorite hemorrhoid, but if I had to choose just one, it would be the Dee Ford debacle last season. I couldn’t kick a football any better than Lin Elliott or coordinate a defense any more effectively than Greg Robinson or Bob Sutton — although I did author that first-grade book with its tackling tutorial — but I sure as hell could line up on the right side of the ball and mind my own business while a teammate snagged a game-winning interception.
That history has created a pool of dread magma bubbling just beneath the surface that threatens to erupt come playoff time.
The Chiefs had ample opportunity to choke this postseason. They appeared to be doing just that when they spotted the Houston Texans and Tennessee Titans leads of 24-0 and 10-0. But this time they have the best quarterback in the league and a solid defense. They finally inflicted deep psychic wounds on the fans in other cities.
Sorry, good people of Houston and Nashville, but better you than me.
We, as sports fans, tend to get chesty when our team is winning and dramatic about our suffering when our team is losing. We’re watching others perform athletic feats, but it’s really about us. Our stories about amazing games usually get around to where we were and who we were with when the big moment happened.
The coaches and players change, but we keep watching, filling our brains ever fuller with minutiae and nostalgia. I never learned Mandarin Chinese, but I could sit down with a complete stranger anywhere from Columbia to Wichita and start a conversation with, “Still can’t believe he started Grbac over Gannon,” and there is a decent chance that stranger would nod and then insult the manhood of Steve Bono. So, you tell me, which is the more valuable means of communication?
On one hand, this obsession with a team is stupid, but on the other hand, it gives us the excuse to do what we ought to do more, which is to gather with friends and family and make memories. As cliché as it is, the journey has been rewarding regardless of whether the Chiefs ever reached the destination.
With that disclaimer out of the way, it’s about damn time. Winning is way better than losing, and watching Mahomes play quarterback is one of the highlights of my week. If I’m being honest, I ask the groomer to keep her clippers away from the fluffy locks on my poodle’s head for one reason: I want my dog to be like Patrick Mahomes.
Is that weird?
On our morning walks this week, my mind has drifted to how I might feel if the Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. I have an idea, since I experienced the Cubs winning the World Series in 2016 after a 108-year drought. Some Old Styles paid the ultimate price in the Walljasper household on that wonderful night. In the years since, when somebody strikes out with the bases loaded, I have that memory to draw upon.
I’m sure the first Chiefs championship of my life would be just as rewarding. The game is far enough away that the pessimistic texts from friends have yet to accumulate, so I’m confident in the outcome. In the words of good ol’ Marv Levy — like Andy Reid, a great coach who never won the big one — our Chiefs will march on to victory like our mighty teams of old.
And if not, there’s always next year.