‘It’s mattered for 50 years.’ Chiefs fans bring memories, traditions to Arrowhead
For some Kansas City Chiefs fans Sunday, the game wasn’t just about winning or losing, about going to the Super Bowl, or casting off the demons of 50 years of close calls that came up short.
For Blake Parrish, of Liberty, it meant memories with his father, who now sits in a nursing home. The elder Parrish’s short-term memory is not what it once was, but who for nearly all of his 87 years Leroy Parrish has been a die-hard Chiefs fan and a believer.
“Four generations,” Blake Parrish said Sunday as the Chiefs prepared for an AFC Championship game against the Tennessee Titans. Parrish spoke from a spot in Arrowhead Stadium’s parking lot that his family, like so many others, had laid claim to years ago. For them, it was lot G-25.
Four generations is how deep their Chiefs fandom goes.
No matter when Parrish visits his dad, he said, after a bit of chit-chat, Leroy Parrish will bring up the subject: “Do you think the Chiefs are going to be good this year?”
Of course, his son nods.
On this Sunday, in this season, it’s been as true as it ever has been in the last half-century. Leroy Parrish was an original Red Coater. Blake’s sister, Rhonda, was a Chiefette. Blake Parrish was 8 years old when he joined his dad, who ran a car dealership, on his first outing to a Chiefs practice. Now Blake’s own grandson, Mason, is also 8.
That’s how deep the red runs.
On the subject of Patrick Mahomes: “He can throw with either hand!,” Leroy Parrish shared with his boy.
For so many fans swarming Arrowhead Sunday, this season is one where they have felt that the red was on fire.
That was the feeling across the tailgating landscape Sunday. Last weekend’s historic second-quarter comeback against the Houston Texans, beating them 51-31 after being down 24-0, was proof of some kind of manifest destiny that Kansas Citians haven’t felt since the Kansas City Royals went to the World Series in 2015.
Laura Wohlhuter of Blue Springs, thought so. “It’s been a long-time coming. This is our time,” she said.
Wohlhuter repeated it. “This is our time. It feels like it’s our year.”
She and her parents, Deb and Bruce Harvey of Marshall, Missouri, went through all sorts of wrangling so that she and her husband, Jordan, and her parents and her brother, Garrett and his buddy, Blane, could all sit together.
Last week’s first quarter: “It was awful,” Wohlhuter said.
“Deflating,” her mother said.
Last night, Deb Harvey said she tried to go to bed at midnight. But nerves and anticipation ran through her so thoroughly, she never quite got to sleep. Finally, they were up at 6 a.m. and on their way.
They were in Arrowhead last year when the Chiefs lost in the last minutes to the New England Patriots. This year, Wohlhuter said, is about something else. “Redemption,” she said.
“It feels like Christmas,” Deb Harvey said.
Before he died way too young of cancer in 1996, 43-year-old John Robinson, a one-time boxer, turned his daughter into a Chiefs fan.
On Sunday, she came to Arrowhead with her father never far from her thoughts.
“He would have loved to have been here,” Kay French, 41, of Kansas City, Kansas, said. She was standing in the cold with her husband, Darrell, 34, who worked to stoke the coals on their grill.
The Chiefs, she said, had what she called “the comeback of a lifetime,” last week.
No one is kidding themselves how much the game counts.
“As I told my grandson before we left” Parrish said, “no matter what, we’ve had a great season.”
Still, he added, “It’ll matter. It’s mattered for 50 years.”
This story was originally published January 19, 2020 at 2:17 PM.
