KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Once upon a very different time, when Super Bowl tickets cost $15 and nearly every professional football player needed an offseason job to supplement his income and a fellow named Patrick Mahomes Sr. literally was in the embryonic stage of his life, the Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl IV.
Somehow, on the very day after that 23-7 smothering of Minnesota on Jan. 11, 1970 in New Orleans, Kansas City held a parade that its hometown newspaper described as “an ecstatic outpouring of pride and enthusiasm (attended by) more than 100,000 Kansas Citians.”
“With a look stamped on his face that smacked of disbelief at the size of the welcome, Hank Stram, the Chiefs coach, led his warriors in the parade like a Caesar returning to Rome or Alexander the Great to Greece,” The Star wrote, reflecting a certain parlance of the era.
That day, Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt would tell The Star years later, was his greatest thrill: “a show of human emotions such that I will never forget.”
Good thing it was so memorable. Because it stood on its own for half a century until Wednesday, when that distant past melded into an animated present with portents of — or at least highly stimulated predictions for — a bright future.
If you had to pick a theme, you could do worse than to call this a long time coming … and let’s do it again soon.
“Sometimes when the journey is hard,” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt said, “the destination is that much sweeter.”
Certainly, it made for a raucous sense of spontaneous combustion along the Grand Boulevard route and at Union Station, where the ceremony ended with Patrick Mahomes, Tyrann Mathieu, Travis Kelce and (unscheduled) Tyreek Hill stoking the crowd on this sub-freezing day.
On the 20th anniversary of that other parade, Chiefs quarterback and Super Bowl IV most valuable player Len Dawson told The Star that it was such an “unbelievable” scene, “I don’t think we’re going to recapture that.”
Safe to say this group did … and then some as it went off script to mix with crowds along the route.
Bouncing around and cradling the football awarded to the Super Bowl MVP winner like it was one of the balls he kept being tossed and throwing back along the route, the raspy Mahomes declared that his first goal when he took over as the Chiefs starter in the 2018 season was to bring the Lamar Hunt Trophy (that goes to the AFC champions) back to Kansas City.
(Never mind that it actually never had been here before, since Hunt’s name hadn’t been applied to the trophy until 1984 and the Chiefs had been AFL champions but never AFC champions since the 1970 merger).
His second goal, he added, was to seize the Lombardi Trophy that goes to the Super Bowl winner for “the greatest coach of all time — Andy Reid, baby!” Along the way, Mahomes’ engagement with fans was a sight to behold and revel in.
Kelce was a ranting, raving spectacle unto himself, declaring that he was “wearing about half the beers” he’d been trying to drink.
Then he screamed something about being in the Heart of America and referred to the “Clark” family instead of the Hunt family before later referencing Frank Clark to note that this season’s No. 55 didn’t line up offside as his predecessor in the jersey had the season before.
