The Team That History Forgot: The 1960s Kansas City Chiefs
Autor Rick Gosselin Cuvânt înainte de Andy Reiden Limba Engleză Hardback – noi 2025
The Chiefs won their first AFL Championship in 1962, as the Dallas Texans, when owner Lamar Hunt decided the Dallas market couldn’t support two pro football teams—it could barely support one. After just three seasons, the Texans relocated to Kansas City, where they became the Chiefs. Under future Hall-of-Famers Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, and Johnny Robinson, they were the winningest AFL team and helped integrate pro football more than any other team in the 1960s.
In The Team That History Forgot, Rick Gosselin explores the team’s struggles and triumphs in its early years, the competition created by the AFL in player signing wars, the recruitment of athletes from historically Black colleges and universities, the loss of the franchise identity with the move from Texas to Kansas City, the first Super Bowl and the humiliating loss against the Packers, and the moves the Chiefs made to recover from that loss and win Super Bowl IV, the last game before the two rival leagues finally merged in 1970. The early Chiefs set a bar for excellence that the team continues to pursue today.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496243102
ISBN-10: 1496243102
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: 44 photographs, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496243102
Pagini: 256
Ilustrații: 44 photographs, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.53 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Rick Gosselin is a Pro Football Hall of Fame journalist who has covered the Detroit Lions, New York Giants, Kansas City Chiefs, and Dallas Cowboys. He became a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee in 1988 and has served on the board’s senior committee for more than twenty years. He is the author of Goodfellows: The Champions of St. Ambrose. Andy Reid is the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Extras
The AFL
Lamar Hunt’s childhood nickname was “Games.”
He played them. He loved them. He lived for his games. Hunt had a
special passion for sporting games. This was a man who honeymooned
with his wife Norma at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck,
Austria. A man who founded Major League Soccer (mls) and World
Championship Tennis (wct). A man who was an original investor in
the National Basketball Association (nba) Chicago Bulls in 1966.
But his roots were in football. Hunt walked onto the Southern Methodist
University (smu) football team in 1953 and spent three years with the
Mustangs, all as a reserve offensive end. Hunt didn’t catch many passes.
No one did back then—not even the guy ahead of Hunt on the smu depth
chart, Raymond Berry. Decades later Berry was voted to the National
Football League’s (NFL) Centennial Team in 2019 as one of the one hundred
greatest players in pro football history and one of its ten best pass
catchers. But there was no indication of what was to come at smu, where
Berry caught just thirty-three passes in three seasons. The game of football
was played on the ground then, not in the air.
Berry left smu for the NFL in 1954, becoming a 20th-round draft pick
of the Baltimore Colts. Another of Hunt’s college teammates, Forrest
Gregg, also was voted to the NFL Centennial Team as one of the game’s
one hundred greatest players and one of its seven best offensive tackles.
He left smu in 1956 for the Green Bay Packers, who drafted him with a
second-round pick.
Their departures were a continuation of a trend that struck a nerve
with Hunt. Texas was a large, fertile, and proud football state. Davey
O’Brien, Doak Walker, and John David Crow all won the Heisman Trophy
at Texas colleges. But O’Brien left the state to play professional football
in Philadelphia, and Walker left to continue his career in Detroit, as did
Crow in Chicago.
All-Americans and Texas legends Sammy Baugh, Bobby Layne, and
Kyle Rote also departed Texas to continue their football careers. Baugh
went to Washington to play for the Redskins, Layne went to Chicago to
play for the Bears, and Rote went to New York to play for the Giants. Rote
was the first overall selection of an NFL draft, Layne was a third overall
choice in his, and Baugh went sixth overall.
Like oil, football talent gushed in Texas. Ki Aldrich of Texas Christian
University (TCU) was the first overall pick of another NFL draft, Baylor
quarterback Adrian Burk was a second overall choice, Walker went third
overall, fellow smu halfback Paul Page went fourth overall, and Baylor
quarterbacks Cotton Davidson went fifth overall and Larry Isbell seventh.
Hunt pondered why all the great amateur players in his state had to
leave Texas and travel to the northeastern quadrant of the country to
continue their football careers. Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit,
Green Bay, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington dc
were the faraway beneficiaries of the abundance of Texas talent. Not that
Hunt had any aspirations of playing professionally himself—he would
earn his SMU degree in geology with a position in the family oil business
awaiting him upon graduation.
But “Games” kept the football exodus from his state on the back burner
in his mind. He believed the passion for football in Texas could match
any such passion in New York, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. College football
games in Austin and Dallas were drawing crowds of sixty-thousand-
plus every Saturday—easily topping the twenty and thirty thousand that were
showing up in NFL stadiums on Sunday afternoons.
“When I was growing up, I participated in football but was always
interested in the business side of it—the number of people who attended
games,” Hunt said. “That was the first thing I read in the baseball box
scores. In the late 1940s, I was sixteen or seventeen and remember Doak
Walker becoming a big name at smu and the crowds they drew. That
business side really attracted me. Dallas had become sort of a mecca for
college football in the South. After I got out of smu, I thought it could be
a successful venture in Dallas, so I pursued it from that end.”
So, at twenty-six years of age, Hunt set out to buy an NFL franchise that
he could bring to Dallas. Calls to the NFL office in Philadelphia pointed
him in the direction of Chicago, where there were two football teams,
the Bears and Cardinals. George Halas owned and operated the Bears,
the NFL’s flagship franchise, and they weren’t leaving Chicago. So the
target became the Cardinals, who were owned by Violet (Bidwill) Wolfner
and her family.
“I talked to the NFL in both 1958 and 1959 about expansion, and each
time they directed me to the Wolfners,” Hunt said. “But the Wolfners
were not interested in moving the team. So at that point I thought, ‘Hey,
how about a new league? Why wouldn’t the American and National in
football make as much sense as the American and National in baseball?’”
His first call went downstate to fellow oilman Bud Adams in Houston.
“The game had been centered in the northern and eastern parts of
the country, except for the 49ers and the Rams,” Hunt said. “The other
ten teams were all up in the Northeast. The whole basis of the American
Football League (AFL) plan was to have teams in Dallas and Houston as
rivals, much like the NFL had the Rams and 49ers in California. A rivalry
with Houston, I thought, was a natural.”
Texas wasn’t the only market with a hunger for professional football.
The AFL would open the door to virgin markets in Boston, Buffalo, Denver,
and Minneapolis as well. The AFL needed a presence in major markets
to attract a national television contract, so teams were also placed
in New York City, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area.
And the “Foolish Club” was born—made up of the owners of the eight
original franchises: Barron Hilton, Ralph Wilson, Harry Wismer, Bud
Adams, Bob Howsam, Billy Sullivan, Max Winter, and Lamar Hunt.
They needed deep pockets to challenge a league the stature of the NFL
with four decades of history already in the books—and the AFL wore
those deep pockets. And those pockets were enriched by the league’s
unique television contract with ABC, which gave all teams, big market
and small, an equal share of the revenue—the first such TV sharing deal
by any American sports league.
“We were awfully lucky in the people we attracted to the ownership
aspect,” Hunt explained. “They were people really interested in staying
with it. Even after some twenty years, we still had six of the eight original
ownership groups represented.”
The new league got the attention of the NFL before a single football
was ever passed or punted. The NFL stole the Minneapolis market and
the Winter ownership group away from the AFL, promising an expansion
franchise for the 1961 season. TheNFL also went after the two biggest
fish in the AFL pond.
“The NFL wanted the Dallas and Houston markets and offered Bud
and myself the opportunity to come in and take the franchises,” Hunt
said. “But we really couldn’t do that, nor did we want to do that because
I had actively sought to commit people to a new league. I wasn’t in a
position to desert them.”
And the war was on. The NFL was the established league with the
credibility. The AFL was the upstart league with the money. The AFL
signed the first, third, sixth, and 10th overall picks of the 1960 NFL draft.
Hunt’s Dallas Texans claimed two of them, signing third overall choice
Johnny Robinson of Louisiana State University (lsu) away from the
Detroit Lions and sixth overall choice Jack Spikes of TCU away from the
Pittsburgh Steelers.
But the biggest blow was delivered by Adams. The Los Angeles Rams
drafted Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of lsu with the first overall
selection of the 1960 draft. But Adams lured him instead to the Houston
Oilers. The Los Angeles Chargers also scored in the spending war, signing
Southern Cal offensive tackle Ron Mix away from the Baltimore Colts,
who drafted him with the 10th overall choice of that draft.
The AFL signed veteran NFL quarterbacks George Blanda, Cotton
Davidson, Jack Kemp, Babe Parilli, and Frank Tripucka, providing some
recognizable names at the sport’s key position. The AFL landed another
recognizable name—Sid Gillman—as general manager and head coach of
the Chargers. He coached the Los Angeles Rams for five seasons, taking
them to one NFL title game, but was fired after a 2–10 finish in 1959. So
Gillman moved across town to coach the Chargers in 1960.
With teams in Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland,
the AFL was expanding pro football’s horizons, pushing the sport deep
into the South and well west of the Mississippi.
“Looking back, the timing was very right for there to be a second
league,” Hunt said. “The AFL helped popularize the game on a national
basis. We took football into a lot of new areas. The AFL made it a national
game and nurtured the rivalry that eventually led to the Super Bowl.”
After Hunt turned down the NFL and the chance to own a franchise in
the league he long wanted to join, the NFL declared war on Hunt. The NFL
awarded an expansion franchise in Dallas to Clint Murchison in 1960.
The Cowboys and Texans would share the same stadium and compete
for the same entertainment dollar.
The war was indeed on.
Lamar Hunt’s childhood nickname was “Games.”
He played them. He loved them. He lived for his games. Hunt had a
special passion for sporting games. This was a man who honeymooned
with his wife Norma at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck,
Austria. A man who founded Major League Soccer (mls) and World
Championship Tennis (wct). A man who was an original investor in
the National Basketball Association (nba) Chicago Bulls in 1966.
But his roots were in football. Hunt walked onto the Southern Methodist
University (smu) football team in 1953 and spent three years with the
Mustangs, all as a reserve offensive end. Hunt didn’t catch many passes.
No one did back then—not even the guy ahead of Hunt on the smu depth
chart, Raymond Berry. Decades later Berry was voted to the National
Football League’s (NFL) Centennial Team in 2019 as one of the one hundred
greatest players in pro football history and one of its ten best pass
catchers. But there was no indication of what was to come at smu, where
Berry caught just thirty-three passes in three seasons. The game of football
was played on the ground then, not in the air.
Berry left smu for the NFL in 1954, becoming a 20th-round draft pick
of the Baltimore Colts. Another of Hunt’s college teammates, Forrest
Gregg, also was voted to the NFL Centennial Team as one of the game’s
one hundred greatest players and one of its seven best offensive tackles.
He left smu in 1956 for the Green Bay Packers, who drafted him with a
second-round pick.
Their departures were a continuation of a trend that struck a nerve
with Hunt. Texas was a large, fertile, and proud football state. Davey
O’Brien, Doak Walker, and John David Crow all won the Heisman Trophy
at Texas colleges. But O’Brien left the state to play professional football
in Philadelphia, and Walker left to continue his career in Detroit, as did
Crow in Chicago.
All-Americans and Texas legends Sammy Baugh, Bobby Layne, and
Kyle Rote also departed Texas to continue their football careers. Baugh
went to Washington to play for the Redskins, Layne went to Chicago to
play for the Bears, and Rote went to New York to play for the Giants. Rote
was the first overall selection of an NFL draft, Layne was a third overall
choice in his, and Baugh went sixth overall.
Like oil, football talent gushed in Texas. Ki Aldrich of Texas Christian
University (TCU) was the first overall pick of another NFL draft, Baylor
quarterback Adrian Burk was a second overall choice, Walker went third
overall, fellow smu halfback Paul Page went fourth overall, and Baylor
quarterbacks Cotton Davidson went fifth overall and Larry Isbell seventh.
Hunt pondered why all the great amateur players in his state had to
leave Texas and travel to the northeastern quadrant of the country to
continue their football careers. Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit,
Green Bay, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington dc
were the faraway beneficiaries of the abundance of Texas talent. Not that
Hunt had any aspirations of playing professionally himself—he would
earn his SMU degree in geology with a position in the family oil business
awaiting him upon graduation.
But “Games” kept the football exodus from his state on the back burner
in his mind. He believed the passion for football in Texas could match
any such passion in New York, Ohio, or Pennsylvania. College football
games in Austin and Dallas were drawing crowds of sixty-thousand-
plus every Saturday—easily topping the twenty and thirty thousand that were
showing up in NFL stadiums on Sunday afternoons.
“When I was growing up, I participated in football but was always
interested in the business side of it—the number of people who attended
games,” Hunt said. “That was the first thing I read in the baseball box
scores. In the late 1940s, I was sixteen or seventeen and remember Doak
Walker becoming a big name at smu and the crowds they drew. That
business side really attracted me. Dallas had become sort of a mecca for
college football in the South. After I got out of smu, I thought it could be
a successful venture in Dallas, so I pursued it from that end.”
So, at twenty-six years of age, Hunt set out to buy an NFL franchise that
he could bring to Dallas. Calls to the NFL office in Philadelphia pointed
him in the direction of Chicago, where there were two football teams,
the Bears and Cardinals. George Halas owned and operated the Bears,
the NFL’s flagship franchise, and they weren’t leaving Chicago. So the
target became the Cardinals, who were owned by Violet (Bidwill) Wolfner
and her family.
“I talked to the NFL in both 1958 and 1959 about expansion, and each
time they directed me to the Wolfners,” Hunt said. “But the Wolfners
were not interested in moving the team. So at that point I thought, ‘Hey,
how about a new league? Why wouldn’t the American and National in
football make as much sense as the American and National in baseball?’”
His first call went downstate to fellow oilman Bud Adams in Houston.
“The game had been centered in the northern and eastern parts of
the country, except for the 49ers and the Rams,” Hunt said. “The other
ten teams were all up in the Northeast. The whole basis of the American
Football League (AFL) plan was to have teams in Dallas and Houston as
rivals, much like the NFL had the Rams and 49ers in California. A rivalry
with Houston, I thought, was a natural.”
Texas wasn’t the only market with a hunger for professional football.
The AFL would open the door to virgin markets in Boston, Buffalo, Denver,
and Minneapolis as well. The AFL needed a presence in major markets
to attract a national television contract, so teams were also placed
in New York City, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area.
And the “Foolish Club” was born—made up of the owners of the eight
original franchises: Barron Hilton, Ralph Wilson, Harry Wismer, Bud
Adams, Bob Howsam, Billy Sullivan, Max Winter, and Lamar Hunt.
They needed deep pockets to challenge a league the stature of the NFL
with four decades of history already in the books—and the AFL wore
those deep pockets. And those pockets were enriched by the league’s
unique television contract with ABC, which gave all teams, big market
and small, an equal share of the revenue—the first such TV sharing deal
by any American sports league.
“We were awfully lucky in the people we attracted to the ownership
aspect,” Hunt explained. “They were people really interested in staying
with it. Even after some twenty years, we still had six of the eight original
ownership groups represented.”
The new league got the attention of the NFL before a single football
was ever passed or punted. The NFL stole the Minneapolis market and
the Winter ownership group away from the AFL, promising an expansion
franchise for the 1961 season. TheNFL also went after the two biggest
fish in the AFL pond.
“The NFL wanted the Dallas and Houston markets and offered Bud
and myself the opportunity to come in and take the franchises,” Hunt
said. “But we really couldn’t do that, nor did we want to do that because
I had actively sought to commit people to a new league. I wasn’t in a
position to desert them.”
And the war was on. The NFL was the established league with the
credibility. The AFL was the upstart league with the money. The AFL
signed the first, third, sixth, and 10th overall picks of the 1960 NFL draft.
Hunt’s Dallas Texans claimed two of them, signing third overall choice
Johnny Robinson of Louisiana State University (lsu) away from the
Detroit Lions and sixth overall choice Jack Spikes of TCU away from the
Pittsburgh Steelers.
But the biggest blow was delivered by Adams. The Los Angeles Rams
drafted Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon of lsu with the first overall
selection of the 1960 draft. But Adams lured him instead to the Houston
Oilers. The Los Angeles Chargers also scored in the spending war, signing
Southern Cal offensive tackle Ron Mix away from the Baltimore Colts,
who drafted him with the 10th overall choice of that draft.
The AFL signed veteran NFL quarterbacks George Blanda, Cotton
Davidson, Jack Kemp, Babe Parilli, and Frank Tripucka, providing some
recognizable names at the sport’s key position. The AFL landed another
recognizable name—Sid Gillman—as general manager and head coach of
the Chargers. He coached the Los Angeles Rams for five seasons, taking
them to one NFL title game, but was fired after a 2–10 finish in 1959. So
Gillman moved across town to coach the Chargers in 1960.
With teams in Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland,
the AFL was expanding pro football’s horizons, pushing the sport deep
into the South and well west of the Mississippi.
“Looking back, the timing was very right for there to be a second
league,” Hunt said. “The AFL helped popularize the game on a national
basis. We took football into a lot of new areas. The AFL made it a national
game and nurtured the rivalry that eventually led to the Super Bowl.”
After Hunt turned down the NFL and the chance to own a franchise in
the league he long wanted to join, the NFL declared war on Hunt. The NFL
awarded an expansion franchise in Dallas to Clint Murchison in 1960.
The Cowboys and Texans would share the same stadium and compete
for the same entertainment dollar.
The war was indeed on.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: The AFL
Chapter 2: The Dallas Texans
Chapter 3: Dallas
Chapter 4: Len Dawson
Chapter 5: Johnny Robinson
Chapter 6: Kansas City
Chapter 7: HBCU
Chapter 8: Bobby Bell
Chapter 9: The AFL West
Chapter 10: The Merger
Chapter 11: Mike Garrett
Chapter 12: The Buffalo Bills
Chapter 13: Hank Stram
Chapter 14: Western Dominance
Chapter 15: The Rockpile
Chapter 16: A Dallas Showdown?
Chapter 17: The Lombardi Packers
Chapter 18: A Fear of the Unknown
Chapter 19: The College All-Star Game
Chapter 20: Otis Taylor
Chapter 21: The Hammer
Chapter 22: The Interview
Chapter 23: Hope
Chapter 24: Adjustments
Chapter 25: The Interception
Chapter 26: The Sting of Defeat
Chapter 27: Jan Stenerud
Chapter 28: Willie Lanier
Chapter 29: The Chicago Bears
Chapter 30: The Long Road Back
Chapter 31: The Minnesota Vikings
Chapter 32: The Dallas Cowboys
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1: The AFL
Chapter 2: The Dallas Texans
Chapter 3: Dallas
Chapter 4: Len Dawson
Chapter 5: Johnny Robinson
Chapter 6: Kansas City
Chapter 7: HBCU
Chapter 8: Bobby Bell
Chapter 9: The AFL West
Chapter 10: The Merger
Chapter 11: Mike Garrett
Chapter 12: The Buffalo Bills
Chapter 13: Hank Stram
Chapter 14: Western Dominance
Chapter 15: The Rockpile
Chapter 16: A Dallas Showdown?
Chapter 17: The Lombardi Packers
Chapter 18: A Fear of the Unknown
Chapter 19: The College All-Star Game
Chapter 20: Otis Taylor
Chapter 21: The Hammer
Chapter 22: The Interview
Chapter 23: Hope
Chapter 24: Adjustments
Chapter 25: The Interception
Chapter 26: The Sting of Defeat
Chapter 27: Jan Stenerud
Chapter 28: Willie Lanier
Chapter 29: The Chicago Bears
Chapter 30: The Long Road Back
Chapter 31: The Minnesota Vikings
Chapter 32: The Dallas Cowboys
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Recenzii
“Gosselin's very satisfying work gives football fans a memorable taste of the first Chiefs dynasty.”—Bob D'Angelo, bobdangelobooks.weebly.com
“If I could pick one person to write a history book about any era of football, give me Rick Gosselin. His perspective on the Chiefs in The Team that History Forgot is perfect, vivid, needed, and important. From his first sentence (Lamar Hunt’s nickname as a kid) to his last chapter (how Bob Lilly nearly was a Chief), Gosselin makes the roots of a proud franchise come to life. The stories in here absolutely sing.”—Peter King, veteran football writer and three-time National Sportswriter of the Year
“Rick Gosselin is the best person to explain the history of the game, not because he has worked in the NFL for the past forty years, but because he has lived in the NFL studying the game, the players, the coaches and how champions are made. Gosselin educates us with vivid detail and storytelling on the best team no one seems to remember.”—Michael Lombardi, general manager for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels football team and author of Football Done Right: Setting the Record Straight on the Coaches, Players, and History of the NFL
“Rick Gosselin has captured a forgotten time in the overall history of professional football, and he selected the premier team from a talent standpoint not only in the American Football League but the NFL as well. This is a wonderful journey back in time to the birth of the AFL and the dedication and wisdom of Lamar Hunt in his endeavor to ‘own a football team.’ Canton, Ohio, is missing some exceptional players from those Chiefs’ teams. Otis Taylor, Jim Tyrer, and Ed Budde were elite players in any era at their respective positions.”—Ron Wolf, member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and former general manager of the Green Bay Packers
Descriere
The story of the Kansas City Chiefs in the American Football League era, following their move from Dallas to their appearance in the first Super Bowl in 1967 and subsequent return to the championship game in 1970.