<table> </table> Ask yourself this: What would you write? Tuesday, in an odd scene, Chiefs former President/CEO/General Manager Carl Peterson stood behind a wooden lectern in the new team practice facility and for 40 minutes or so relived his time with the Chiefs, ripped the media, was overcome by emotion when talking about his wife, Lori, and Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt, was noticeably cool when talking about Herm Edwards and thanked every single person in his Rolodex.</p><p>What would you write now? Everyone in town has read a million words about the man who ran the Chiefs for two decades. What&#8217;s left to write? Everyone has read about how he brought football back in Kansas City. When he arrived in December 1988, the Chiefs had made the playoffs once in 18 years, and there were so few people in the stands that NFL Films guru Steve Sabol used to send his cameramen out with the order to &#8220;shoot low&#8221; in order to not show the empty upper deck.</p><p>Peterson hired Marty Schottenheimer to coach, and he put on stark black-and-white television commercials showing the Chiefs as a hard-working bunch, and he drafted Derrick Thomas, and he opened up the parking lot for tailgaters, and he moved the Chiefs broadcasts to the rockin&#8217; 101 the Fox to go after a younger demographic, and he put it into contracts that players had to be a part of the community. And the Chiefs went to the playoffs seven times in nine years, they played in front of some of the most raucous crowds in the NFL, they became the biggest thing in the heartland.</p><p>Well, that has been written many, many times, including a few weeks ago when we found out Peterson was leaving. So what now? Would you write about the last 11 years of the Peterson era? The Chiefs made the playoffs only twice in that span, lost both playoff games, were led by four different coaches and lost 12 more games than they won. Peterson had built a model of stability in the early 1990s, but in the 2000s there were bad drafts and dreadful free-agent signings and plainly bizarre decisions like hiring Gunther Cunningham to run the defense three years after he was fired as head coach and telling Tony Gonzalez they would try to trade him and then not trying very hard at all to trade him.</p><p>No, that has all been written, too. What would you write? What could you say about Carl Peterson &#8212; good, bad, diplomatic, insensitive &#8212; that has not been written a hundred times already? What could you say about Carl Peterson that would not infuriate or annoy a huge number of readers who made up their minds about the man a long time ago?</p><p>Few want to read anything cruel about him now &#8212; that would impolite. And yet few want to read anything nice about him either. Over the years I wrote a lot of nice things about Peterson, and every time people would write in enraged &#8212; they didn&#8217;t want to see him as a real person, refused to believe that he had good qualities. Then, over the last couple of years, I have written that Peterson needed to go, and many people were <em>still</em> enraged because I didn&#8217;t say it often enough or loud enough.</p><p>He had that ability to tick people off, and that was true even when the Chiefs were winning. Peterson has always been a hard man for fans to love. He never had much of a sense of humor or a light touch. I remember in 1997 asking readers to offer up a nickname for that great Chiefs defense, and I wanted Peterson to be one of the voters. He said, &#8220;I vote for Chiefs defense. I don&#8217;t like nicknames.&#8221;</p><p>He didn&#8217;t mean anything by it; that was Peterson &#8212; straitlaced, serious, organized, certain, wearing a dark leather jacket. And sensitive. That was his most enduring quality. On Tuesday, it made me sad to hear him tear into the media for the first 10 minutes of his farewell address &#8212; not because we in the media are undeserving but because it made Peterson look small. He never could let go of criticisms, though, or stories he felt were inaccurate or even truths that had come from unofficial sources. In that way, he went out as honestly as he could.