When Lamar Hunt and an entourage of his Dallas Texans staff and players arrived at Municipal Airport on April 15, 1963, to spark a ticket drive to assure their proposed move to Kansas City, the small group that greeted them included Shawnee Mission East students holding a banner that read, “Welcome Home, K.C. Somethings.”
The move became a reality weeks later, and so it was time for a more specific name. And for all the genius and vision that defined owner Hunt and coach Hank Stram, their first instinct was myopic.
“Lamar and Hank, they wanted to call it the Kansas City Texans,” longtime Chiefs executive Jack Steadman said in a 2013 interview, laughing and adding, “So finally I convinced Lamar that it wasn’t going to work, and we decided to have a naming contest.”
Thus emerged the “Rename the Dallas Texans Contest,” co-sponsored by The Star. It prompted 4,866 responses and 1,020 different nicknames from 21 states. “Mules” led the way with 272 votes, and “Royals” was second with 269 submissions.
There were 42 entries of “Chiefs,” including the Plymouth Valiant-winning draw of Everett L. Diemler, who perhaps benefited from some behind-the-scenes machinations.
With an internal memo on May 16, 1963, among numerous items provided for that 2013 story by Chiefs historian Bob Moore, Steadman solicited staff input on 10 ideas: Chiefs, Drovers, Mokans, Mules, Pioneers, Plainsmen, Royals, Stars, Stockers and Texans.
But one had the inside track.
“I told Lamar, ‘We’ve got to name this thing after Roe Bartle,’” said Steadman, noting the moniker of the Kansas City mayor who was instrumental in the team’s move north. “‘We’ve got to name it ‘Chiefs.’”
Bartle’s nickname stemmed from his involvement with the Boy Scouts of America and founding of the Tribe of Mic-O-Say, a story in itself but nonetheless part of what led to a fundamental issue that was more accepted in that bygone era.
(Perhaps that was particularly more acceptable when it came to a franchise that paradoxically otherwise stood against racial injustice by accelerating the integration of pro football.)
Soon after the name became official on May 26, 1963, the Chiefs went all-in with imagery and branding appropriated from Native Americans. That included an early logo caricaturing a Native American, depicted bare-chested in a headdress and clad in a loin cloth (with KC on it) while raising a tomahawk with his right hand and carrying a football under his left arm.
And that cultural co-opting and mockery of indigenous people upon whom genocide was practiced, in a country that embedded the notion of “merciless Indian Savages” in its Declaration of Independence, persists in various forms painful to many Native Americans.
Problematic as the Chiefs name itself might be and obviously inflammatory as associated iconography and behaviors from the tomahawk chop to cartoonish dress-ups long have been, they’ve also been buffered by the presence in the NFL of the Washington team that embraces an ethnic slur that longstanding Star policy precludes us from directly citing.
So the crux of the challenge for the franchise (and the community) going forward will be to honestly assess to what degree the name is inherently divisive and, accordingly, if it feasibly can be uncoupled from the behavior it evokes.
(As I considered even that question anew, it struck me that I found myself thinking, “Can the Chiefs still get away with the name?” Which seems like a conversation point in itself.)
