50 years ago, AFL’s Chiefs stood tall
The Kansas City Chiefs have a worthy predecessor in Super Bowl lore. It’s been a full halfcentury since they made it this far, but for those who remember the 1970 Super Bowl, and the classic rivalry with the Oakland Raiders, those Chiefs stand out among the NFL’s most signficant teams.
Two seasons in a row, I had a chance to enter the Chiefs’ postgame locker room at the Coliseum as a collegiate stringer for the Associated Press. There was Otis Taylor, who I’ve always put alongside Jerry Rice as my alltime receivers. (Tough crowd, but Taylor’s combination of power, grace and clutch performance was mesmerizing.) Offensive tackle Jim Tyrer was built like a refrigerator; nose tackle Curley Culp looked to be about two lockers wide. Has there ever been a better allaround football player than Bobby Bell? Check his history, all the positions he played and eventually settling as an AllPro linebacker, and then make your call.
The Super Bowl against Minnesota revealed coach Hank Stram as a borderline lunatic. Fond of red vests and checked trousers, with the highpitched voice of a desperate salesman, Stram was mikedup for the game and delivered a constant, wildly upbeat chatter. But he was brilliant, innovative and a master of talent evaluation. More than any team, those Chiefs revolutionized the NFL’s attention to historically black colleges: Taylor (Prairie View A&M), defensive tackle Buck Buchanan (Grambling), linebacker Willie Lanier (Morgan State), cornerback Jim Marsalis (Tennessee State), cornerback Emmitt Thomas (Bishop State), running back Robert Holmes (Southern) and receiver Gloster Richardson ( Jackson State), among others.
After losing the first Super Bowl 3510 to the Green Bay Packers in January 1967, the Chiefs felt deeply slighted. “I think the Kansas City team is a real tough football team,” Packers coach Vince Lombardi said afterward, “that doesn’t compare with National Football League teams.”
The Chiefs never forgot that comment, and after dispatching the Vikings 237 in January 1970, Stram told Sports Illustrated, “On that long bus ride from Long Beach to Los Angeles for the first Super Bowl, the team was quiet and preoccupied. They were afraid of the game, of coming into the presence of greatness — the Green Bay Packers. Today they were relaxed and easy and laughing on the way to the stadium.”
Nobody had to remind Joe Kapp of the Chiefs’ greatness. He was the Vikings’ quarterback, and as he wrote in his book, “The Toughest Chicano,” the oddsmakers “had installed us as 13point favorites. Even after the Jets downed Baltimore (in Super Bowl III, behind Joe Namath), people still refused to believe that an AFL team could compete with an NFL team . ... It was silly pride more than reality.”
Kapp lives these days with Alzheimer’s, reportedly caused by the repeated concussions he suffered as one of the most rugged sportsmen who ever lived. With the help of his son, J.J., who orchestrated Kapp’s biography, the former Cal star told The Chronicle this week, “The AFL players had pride. The talent was equal.” As for the game, controlled by the Chiefs throughout, “I should have been more aggressive with my playcalling ... Yes, we were flat. At halftime, when the locker room was quiet, I spoke up, mainly to give the younger guys confidence that we could come back.”
In retrospect, only the Raiders of Daryle Lamonica, Warren Wells, Fred Biletnikoff, Gene Upshaw, Jim Otto, Willie Brown —so many others — were a match for Kansas City in those days. They routed the Chiefs 416 in a 1968 playoff game after the teams tied for the division title. In 1970, a midDecember loss to the Raiders was a factor in Kansas City narrowly missing the playoffs.
Even in 1969, when the Chiefs went the distance, they lost both regularseason meetings against the Raiders. But in a Coliseum thriller that would mark the lastever AFL Championship Game, my man Otis Taylor — praised by Hall of Fame Packers cornerback Herb Adderley as “the greatest receiver I ever played against” — pulled off a miracle. With the score tied and the Chiefs backed up to a 3rdand 16 at their 2yard line, quarterback Len Dawson floated a pass to Taylor, tightroping the right sideline as he caught it over his shoulder in double coverage for a first down — sustaining a touchdown drive that proved crucial in a 177 win.
John Madden, who coached the Raiders of that era, always said that play was the difference. And it was Taylor’s 46yard touchdown late in the third quarter of the Super Bowl — bouncing off a tackle from cornerback Earsell Mackbee, then losing safety Karl Kassulke with an inside fake — that left no doubt as to the outcome.
Not long after that Super Bowl, the longplanned merger became official and the AFL took its place in the record books. Like the sight of Marsalis covering Biletnikoff on the Coliseum’s dirt infield in autumn, it resides on film and in the mind as a treasure of history.
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