Voices of the Chiefs through the years are enjoying this long-awaited Super Bowl ride
The final seconds of the AFC Championship Game ticked away. The call Mitch Holthus had planned for days and thought about for years had arrived.
“Hail! Hail to the king of the Chiefs Kingdom forever, because today the team that Lamar Hunt founded has just won Lamar Hunt’s trophy in the stadium that was Lamar Hunt’s dream. Kan-sas City is the AFC champion! They are headed to Miami for Super Bowl LIV!”
As the voice of the Chiefs since 1994, Holthus holds a unique position in Kansas City. He’s more than a broadcaster. He is the franchise’s vocal conscience, conveying not only what’s just occurred on the field but what it means and how it feels.
He knew that his words that night, Sunday, January 19, had to hit home.
“I’m thinking, ‘You’ve got to get 50 years in four sentences,’” Holthus said.
Holthus is the 10th lead broadcaster in the Chiefs’ 60-year history. Two others are more historically associated with the team than any other, Kevin Harlan and Tom Hedrick, and they continue to feel a strong bond with the team playing in its first Super Bowl since the 1969 season, when Hedrick worked with Bill Grigsby in the booth.
“You bet I was watching,” Hedrick said.
And you can be sure he will watch this Super Bowl, too. So will Holthus and Harlan, working in their respective broadcast booths at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium.
Mitch Holthus
His AFC Championship Game’s victory call came from the heart. Holthus understands the history of the Heartland and the Chiefs’ place in it.
When Lamar Hunt brought the Chiefs to Kansas City from Dallas for the 1963 AFL season, KC was already major-league with baseball’s A’s. But that team wasn’t competitive. The Chiefs won an AFL championship during their fourth year in town.
“Lamar Hunt redefined Kansas City,” Holthus, 62, said. “He could have chosen (to relocate in) Miami. He could have chosen New Orleans. Instead, he comes to Kansas City, and to me it’s a redefinition of a city and region.”
Postgame duties don’t afford Holthus much time to take in a given moment. But he found an opportunity two Sundays ago when CBS’s Jim Nantz was making the trophy presentation on the field. Holthus soaked in the celebration not just on the field but in the stands, and thought about about his own childhood growing up on a farm in Smith Center, Kansas.
“I’d watch the first half of the AFL game at 3, then I would go outside and I knew on the farm where San Diego was, where Oakland was,” said Holthus, a Kansas State graduate. “I even had a place on the farm that looked like Municipal Stadium to me. In a matter of minutes, all of that came back to me.”
Holthus coined the term “Chiefs Kingdom,” and win or lose Sunday, he sees that territory expanding.
“The Kingdom is vast and now it’s becoming bigger,” Holthus said. “If the Chiefs win this game, they’ll advance everything we know and take it to another level.”
Kevin Harlan
Sunday marks Harlan’s 10th straight Super Bowl on the radio for Westwood One. He broadcast Chiefs games from 1985 to 1993, landing the gig at age 25 just three years after graduating from the University of Kansas.
He’s worked play-by-play for the NBA’s old Kansas City Kings (now in Sacramento) and Minnesota Timberwolves and is now just about everywhere on the remote and dial, calling NBA games for TNT and college basketball and NFL games for CBS. Perhaps no broadcaster is more well-traveled. Certainly no national broadcaster has a stronger connection to the Chiefs.
Harlan, 59, lives in Kansas City. He and his wife, Ann, were married in KC and three of their four children were born while Harlan called Chiefs games. He has photos of the young family with broadcast partner Len Dawson, the legendary Chiefs quarterback and Pro Football Hall of Famer, and many other Chiefs.
“It’s how they grew up,” Harlan said. “It wouldn’t be natural if I didn’t feel something for the team and the organization.”
Not only that, Harlan’s father, Bob, was president and CEO of the Green Bay Packers when Chiefs head coach Andy Reid was an assistant there, and the Reids and Harlans became family friends. No pre-game production meeting between the two concludes without Reid inquiring about Harlan’s parents.
Lest one think his history with the Chiefs is reflected in his broadcasts, he says that’s not the case.
“Professionally speaking, when the game starts the only thing I’m hoping for is a great broadcast from our crew,” Harlan said. “I’d like to think that anybody listening, if they didn’t know that we were Kansas Citians, would feel that I’m not favoring one team over the over, that I would stay as neutral and professional as possible.
“A great play is a great play. Whether it was by (Chiefs tight end) Travis Kelce or (49ers tight end) George Kittle ... I would have the same amount of emotion or passion with the call.”
Tom Hedrick
Harlan’s career got a huge from boost from Hedrick, then a University of Kansas professor. Harlan was considering attending Notre Dame or Wisconsin, but the night after hearing Hedrick call a Cotton Bowl on the radio, Harlan got in touch and Hedrick insisted on a campus visit.
Harlan was sold.
Hedrick had called games for the Cincinnati Reds, Texas Rangers, Kansas Jayhawks and Nebraska Cornhuskers among other teams. But his years with the Chiefs on KCMO landed Hedrick some plum assignments, including national radio duties for Super Bowl I and Super Bowl IV. Having the right friends helped Hedrick secure those gigs.
On the Monday before Super Bowl I, Hedrick found himself in Chiefs coach Hank Stram’s office and on the phone with Bill MacPhail, president of CBS Sports.
“’I have your announcer,’ Stram says: ‘Tommy Hedrick. I want you to put him someplace in the broadcast,’” Hedrick recalled.
Hedrick was a play-by-play specialist, but he worked color commentary that day. He learned he didn’t have to talk between every play and it would be handy to zero in on some statistics.
“It was a long way from Baldwin City, Kansas to the L.A. Coliseum,” said Hedrick, who last year retired from his final broadcasting job at Baker University.
Another duty: A one-on-one interview with Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi the day before the game.
“He didn’t want to do it,” Hedrick said. “But it was in his contract.”
Hedrick sat through the post-game news conference and approached Lombardi afterward, asking for a few minutes of his time.
“He gave me three or four minutes,” Hedrick said. “It was a little bit intimidating.”
With the death of Jack Whitaker in 2019, Hedrick, 85, is the only broadcaster alive who called Super Bowl I.
“They’re all in heaven,” Hedrick said. “I assume.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 4:00 AM.