A story on Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, a Black man as the face of the NFL and Kansas City
Patrick Mahomes took a seat in a room inside the Chiefs’ practice facility, just him and a camera, his Super Bowl media day setup another reminder of a football season during a pandemic. Days before facing Tom Brady, the quarterback whose championship resume he might one day chase, Mahomes had prepared to answer an onslaught of questions about playing against a man 18 years his elder. And he did.
But nine times over three days — during a total of 90 minutes with reporters — the conversation would veer to another topic.
Patrick, I want to ask you about your decision to speak out on social justice and Black Lives Matter.
Mahomes will play for a second straight Super Bowl championship Sunday when the Chiefs face the Buccaneers in Tampa. He is already the NFL’s most valued commodity, its most marketable player and, perhaps once again, at the mountaintop of the league.
He’s just 25.
And he’s Black — getting paid half a billion to play a position many once said required too much intelligence for someone of his skin color.
Ask yourself: When is the last time the face of the NFL was a Black man?
Born to a white mother and Black father, Mahomes is carrying this flag now, after a willful decision to shove one of the league’s largest platforms into the conversation. One year ago, in his first Super Bowl appearance, Mahomes had been asked about his race once during a week’s worth of interviews. Once.
As he returns to close out a year that’s included engagement to his high school sweetheart, signing the richest contract in NFL history and, soon, the birth of his first child, the spotlight shifted to the topic of social justice once every 10 minutes.
“It was just time for some action,” he said. “Speaking for myself, it was time for me to say something.”
Last summer, Mahomes had received hundreds of messages about his decision to move to the forefront of the racial-equality fight, as well as his ensuing efforts to get more people registered to vote. One came from the Kansas City’s mayor’s office. It was succinct.
Thank you.
“People often say these things aren’t unifying, but I think it did actually bring us all together,” said Quinton Lucas, the city’s 36-year-old Black mayor, in reflection. “He got people to say this ain’t just people in the streets; this ain’t just the East side of Kansas City.
“In too many prior social debates and discussions, we have often said (that) we can’t do this or our city is fine or everybody gets along. We had folks that said, no, Kansas City, we’re not just entertainers; we’re here to speak, to be part of the community.”
Unique man, unique stage
Mahomes discovered the George Floyd video the same way many Americans did — scrolling through his phone one morning. He wanted to reply immediately in some fashion, but he didn’t want the response to come from anger.
Days passed, and New Orleans Saints wide receiver Michael Thomas reached out to him. Thomas was planning a video featuring a collection of NFL stars speaking out about social justice, and he knew that getting Mahomes on board would elevate its reach and impact.
Four years after San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick confronted police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, the league had kept his voice out of its stadiums.
Less than 24 hours after Mahomes stared into a camera and used his own voice — “Black Lives Matter,” he said on the player-driven video — NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent a public reply on behalf of the league.
“We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier,” Goodell said.
The footage of Floyd’s death had been impossible to ignore. And this time, so were the players’ voices.
Those close to Mahomes describe his actions last summer as calculated. He has not joined any protest marches this season, nor is he wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts or posting ongoing related social-media messages. In the past several months, he has been consistent, if not measured. During nearly half of his replies on the topics since the season started, he has used some form of “trying to make the world a better place” when asked what social justice means to him. He did so again this past week.
He knows the weight his words carry. And in the immediate aftermath of its publication, he acknowledged that his participation in the video would please some and anger others.
Anger some in this very city.
On the NFL’s opening night, a scattering of boos shot though the national broadcast as Mahomes and Houston’s Deshaun Watson, another young Black quarterback, locked arms with teammates before the national anthem in Kansas City, a symbol of unity amid racial reckoning.
A young man who had drawn standing ovations when walking into Kansas City restaurants now faced a realization: His walk on the path of social justice would have its detractors.
On Sundays in the fall, a predominantly white crowd at Arrowhead Stadium is flooded with Mahomes’ No. 15 jerseys. But he is a Black quarterback in a city with a history of systemic segregation. Some who wear his jersey might support him on game days while simultaneously tuning out his calls for social justice.
But a funny thing happened after that opening night.
The boos quieted. The critics kept to themselves.
The man most responsible for delivering Kansas City its first NFL championship in a half-century, it would appear, might actually be off-limits for ongoing criticism about his stance on race. The Chiefs fan base, by and large, either accepts the message or is willing to overlook it to support its chosen son.
It once did neither.
Three years ago, Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters sat during the national anthem, protesting the very police brutality and social injustice that prompted Mahomes to speak out last June. Fan criticism grew louder with each passing week, and the situation became untenable, to the point where Peters said, “I’m just getting tired.” Chiefs owner Clark Hunt had said he preferred Peters to stand for the anthem, “but at the end of the day, it’s (a player’s) decision.” The Chiefs traded Peters after the 2017 season.
Since those opening-night boos, Kansas City’s Mahomes fandom has not wavered. Hunt has backed him publicly.
Mahomes led the Chiefs to a 14-2 regular-season record this season, best in the NFL. He’s likely to finish second in this year’s Most Valuable Player race.
For a city made to wait 50 years between Super Bowl championships, he’s one game shy of trimming the ensuing wait to 12 months.
“I think a lot of times it’s the messenger and not the message,” said Carrington Harrison, a Black man who grew up in Kansas City and is now a sports talk-radio host for 610 Sports. “No one wants to be on the side opposite of Patrick Mahomes right now. That’s why he was, in Kansas City, the perfect spokesperson. Like, nobody in Kansas City is telling Mahomes to shut up and dribble.”
Community unrest
In late May, protesters packed the streets of Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. At least one threw full water bottles in the direction of officers. Police returned with tear gas. Shops were looted. A police car was set on fire.
To protest Floyd’s death, they gathered near the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain, a structure then-named for the builder of thousands of Kansas City homes who, as The Star’s research recently framed it, “viewed the world through a white lens and saw segregation as a necessity for a cohesive, ordered society.”
The fountain, now awaiting a new name, is just a couple of miles from Mahomes’ home.
It’s a snapshot, though not the full panoramic, of the city’s racial undertones, long-held attitudes that prompted The Star to recently issue an apology for its skewed and sometimes altogether inaccurate depictions of Black Kansas Citians. Troost Avenue had become a 10-mile stretch of visible segregation: white people on the west side, Black people on the east.
In 1968, the city exploded in three days of riots in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Five Black men and one Black teenager were killed, at least four by police.
Fifty-two years later, protests sparked by the same underlying current — racial inequality — had returned.
“Our racial climate, it’s fractured still,” Lucas said. “I think that’s a different perspective still for whites compared to Blacks. I think those of us who are Black in Kansas City, we see how people respond to you sometimes. You see where you still feel like you are limited in some way. You see how things are, particularly on the corporate side at the executive levels. And that’s why I think there is a lot of work to do.”
The city’s most popular figure is now a 25-year-old Black man. As recently as last year, Mahomes’ friends were in town and wanted to experience the KC nightlife. Mahomes had to turn them down. You don’t understand, he said. He’d get mobbed at a bar.
Willie Lanier played 11 seasons for the Chiefs from 1967-77. He is a Pro Football Hall of Famer, a former linebacker whose name and number are forever etched into the Chiefs’ ring of honor at Arrowhead Stadium.
A few years into his tenure with the Chiefs, Lanier dared to cross the Troost Line.
“The manager said he would certainly like to rent to me but wanted me to understand that if he were to do that, he would lose his white clientele,” Lanier said.
Talking to The Star on a day late last month in which he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Lanier added, “There were other examples of challenges us Black players faced in the city. That’s the only one that I’m going to venture to share. But there were others.”
Shortly after the Chiefs relocated to Kansas City in 1963, Curtis McClinton, a Black halfback, tried to order a drink at a bar in Westport. The bartender denied him service until Mayor H. Roe Bartle intervened, according to Michael MacCambridge’s book, “‘69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season and the Birth of Modern Kansas City.”
That 1969 Chiefs team was pro football’s first to start more Black players than white ones. They delivered Kansas City its first Super Bowl, “but that didn’t mean it was going to be milk and honey,” Lanier said.
Half a century later, a Super Bowl team’s star player elected to speak out for the voices that had for so long gone unheard. For the same reasons many protested late in May.
The protesters were called criminals.
But Mahomes became immune to backlash, if you ask his teammates.
Granted, most of Mahomes’ public appearances have been on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic. His pregnant fiancée is due to deliver their first child soon. But teammates have taken inventory at home games, even with the stadium only 22% full because of coronavirus restrictions.
The loudest cheers during the Chiefs’ pre-game introductions still belong to the quarterback.
“I don’t think it’s changed anything,” Pro Bowl defensive lineman Chris Jones said of Mahomes’ popularity in Kansas City. “I think what he has done, he actually brought more awareness to what’s actually taking place with social injustice. I think by him speaking out ... it actually helped bring more awareness to what’s really going on.”
Mahomes’ determination
After the release of the Black Lives Matter video, Mahomes received a text message from a friend he has known for about 16 years.
“I stand behind you in whatever you push for, and I know that you’re going to do the right thing,” the friend, Ryan Cheatham, wrote. “I’m proud to call you my friend and for you to have an impact like this.”
On social media, some expressed surprise that Mahomes had taken such a public stand. Until then, he’d steered clear of anything that might cause a stir.
Back home in Tyler, Texas, however, they saw it coming.
“I think he would’ve been somebody trying to impact this regardless of his platform,” said Jake Parker, another childhood friend. “Even if he was just a regular guy and not a famous athlete, he’d still be trying to help as much as he can.
“But obviously, with his platform now, anything he says, the whole world hears.”
Mahomes had been unsure how his inclusion in the conversation would be received. Ultimately, he decided, it didn’t matter. “I’m going to stand behind my words, and I’m going to take whatever consequences come with it,” he said.
In June, 67% of Americans expressed some level of support for Black Lives Matter, according to a study conducted by Pew Research Center. One-third rejected the movement.
That support dipped in the ensuing months. But not in Kansas City.
“I haven’t really heard any (criticism of Mahomes) this year,” said Harrison, the radio host. “It goes back to what I said earlier: No one wants to go against him. I think if I say the same thing, it would be easy for people here to diminish it because I think it.
“Most of the country agrees with the message of that video. But I would say a large group of people disagree with the message. And living in Kansas City, you see the response here to that video was not proportionate at all.”
Harrison wonders whether another Chiefs player could have navigated the season without condemnation.
Mahomes has escaped criticism for most of his life, a childhood star athlete whose name preceded his talent. As the son of a Major League Baseball pitcher, people knew about Mahomes before they knew him.
Tyler, a town of about 100,000 people, is roughly 60% white and 25% Black. Parker and Cheatham are both white. During summers spent on the baseball field, Mahomes was one of the few Black athletes in most of the tournameants in which his teams played, Cheatham said. In the fall, Cheatham recalled, Mahomes played AAU basketball and “the gym would be 95% African American.”
“When you asked us about race that young, we wouldn’t have necessarily even noticed it,” Cheatham said. “In sports, we never gave it a second thought. Everybody was equal. Everybody was here to play the game. When Patrick stepped on the floor or the field or whatever it was, people recognized his talents way before they recognized anything else.”
Mahomes was the best player on most of those teams and therefore often served as their leader, too. Parker said this role required learning how to manage multiple personalities and situations.
Mahomes is still doing that.
As nationwide protests subsided, navigating the pandemic became the storyline of this NFL season. Behind the scenes, though, conversations about equality marched on in locker rooms. In Kansas City, that ongoing discussion has been led by two players —Mahomes and Chiefs safety Tyrann Mathieu.
“I think it was just open dialogue that we had within the team — people from different backgrounds showing their point of view, coming together and making us even closer,” Mahomes said. “That’s just a small sample of what we can do in this country in order to become more unified and better as we want to continue to move forward and make progress.”
Sports and activism
In 1867, two graduates from the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia sought to form a baseball league consisting entirely of Black players. As the story goes, Octavius Catto and Jacob White believed sports to be an avenue toward independence, and so they formed the Philadelphia Pythians.
The Pythians were the best Black baseball team in the Northeast. Catto played second base and shortstop. He became active in the civil rights movement of his time and figured sports could strengthen his voice.
On Election Day in 1871, Catto learned Black men were being attacked in the street as they tried to vote, and he ran to join them, according to a book authored by Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin.
A white man recognized Catto and shot and killed him in the street.
Catto had literally given his life to the cause.
The intertwining of sports and racial equality predates Mahomes by 150 years, the consequences of speaking up once costlier. Mahomes is not the first athlete to lend his voice to a movement, nor will he be the last.
Catto lost his life in 1871. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics. There was Joe Louis and then there was Muhammad Ali. Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier in baseball and then Curt Flood fought against the sport’s reserve clause. Football saw Jim Brown and then Kaepernick. More recently, LeBron James has continued to speak out, despite being instructed to “shut up and dribble.”
They all forged ahead, consequences be damned.
“It’s become very, very clear at any particular juncture that sports are going to be caught up in the maelstrom of whatever happens — I don’t care whether it’s the civil rights movement, if it’s desegregation and Jackie Robinson, if it’s segregation in the Negro Leagues, if it’s the Black power era and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, or if it’s the era of social media, where everybody has a camera phone and you’re catching stuff on it like George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks,” said Harry Edwards, a sociologist and University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus who has dedicated his career to studying athlete activism.
“Once I see something emerging in society, my first effort is to find how it’s going to be reflected and recapitulated in sport. And that (effort) has never failed.”
Within a month of Goodell’s appointment as the NFL’s commissioner in 2006, Edwards met with him in a suite at a San Francisco 49ers game. He offered Goodell a warning, of sorts: At some point soon, the league would need to address racism head-on, because in a sport where African Americans comprise 70% of the population, the players sure as hell would.
Sure enough, in the years that followed, players would wear hoodies over their heads to support Trayvon Martin; they would emerge from stadium tunnels with their hands held up to remember Michael Brown; and they would kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality, prompting the president of the United States to call them sons of bitches.
And in the wake of a Black man’s killing, captured on an iPhone, they would band together to produce their own video, listing the names of several other Black men and women who had been killed, many at the hands of police officers. They would ask the league’s soon-to-be highest-paid player to stare directly into the camera and demand that the NFL publicly acknowledge the obvious:
Black Lives Matter.
“You get one of the most high-profile athletes in all of sports touting the fact that Black Lives do matter — that the shameless killings of innocent Black folks at the hands of those who were there to protect and serve needs to stop — yeah, that resonated. And it still resonates,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. “It was refreshing to see him carrying on that legacy of other prominent athletes from yesteryear who dedicated themselves to causes larger than them.
“Sports have always been a prominent part of this story.”
Challenges remain
Just 20 years ago, 13 NFL franchises had still never started a Black quarterback.
Only four Black quarterbacks have won the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Just three have won one of the 54 Super Bowls. Doug Williams became the first in 1988. He was named the game’s MVP.
But the NFL set a record this season. In Week 1, 10 teams started Black men at quarterback.
“I mean, you’ve got to be standing up clapping,” said Williams, now an executive with the Washington Football Team, the club he guided to a championship. “But at the same time, you’re hoping we get a little better than where we are — and not just at quarterback.”
The NFL does not have a single Black majority owner. It has just three Black head coaches. Three of 32, in a league that employs 70% Black players.
In the NFL’s latest hiring cycle, two minorities filled seven vacancies, including one Black man. Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy was passed over again. And again. And again. Bieniemy has led offenses that have finished first, sixth and first in total yards gained during his three years as the Chiefs’ offensive coordinator.
And still he waits for that first head-coaching offer.
“There’s a different standard for the Black culture, I guess,” Williams said.
The league has created incentives for teams to hire and develop Black coaches, but its crisis remains. Troy Vincent, the NFL’s vice president of football operations, acknowledged as much during a recent conference call with reporters when he said of sports: “The facts are the facts. ... We’re not seeing true inclusion.”
Decades ago, players put their lives and careers on the line for the cause. Ali had his heavyweight title belt stripped. Flood was out of baseball after his challenge. Inside NFL locker rooms, Williams says, players “understood that if you said one word, you’d be gone tomorrow and blacklisted for the rest of your life, basically.”
In 2021, Edwards calls the NFL’s acknowledgment that Black lives matter “just another Band-Aid that they’re putting over a cancer.” It took league executives four years to admit they should have supported their players earlier, and Kaepernick remains unemployed. Edwards hopes the NFL will take further action to address the root of a societal plague.
Mahomes isn’t waiting on the NFL. He has vowed to donate up to $1 million through his charitable foundation to renovate Martin Luther King Jr. Square Park in Kansas City. It’s a project Lucas, the mayor, says “people decades from now will be able to say, ‘Wow, this is something special that happened.’” Mahomes also contributed to a six-figure price tag attached to placing voting machines inside Arrowhead Stadium in November — after he’d spent the summer encouraging his fellow citizens to register to vote.
“That’s what got me,” Kendrick said. “I tell people this all the time: I may not change your mind. I may not change your heart. But what I can effectively do is change the system that allows this to happen.”
Kendrick has guided Mahomes through the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. On opening night this season, Mahomes donned a Kansas City Monarchs Negro Leagues jersey.
This week, Mahomes said he wants to pay tribute to those who came before him. To those who had a tougher time playing the game they loved.
For a brief moment in September, as scattered boos interrupted a moment intended to unite, Mahomes saw a glimpse of their struggle. But he didn’t yield in response, saying he hoped anyone who supported him on the field could find a way to support him in this arena, too.
And that was that.
The season went on without interruption. Mahomes and the Chiefs kept on winning. A city listened to him in the summer and then watched him in the fall. On Sunday, he can become the first quarterback to deliver this city two Super Bowl titles. No Black quarterback, anywhere, has ever won two.
There is not a more recognizable face in Kansas City, nor one held in higher esteem. He is raging down a path to becoming its most revered athlete ever. He might be there already. Lucas believes, looking back, that Mahomes’ words changed a city’s thinking. Or at least forced its citizens to think.
Mahomes’ voice resonates here.
And that only amplifies its significance.
“I think it’s important that any athlete with a platform step up and participate, but particularly those who are emerging as the face of a league,” Edwards said. “I think it’s important Patrick does what he does. I think it’s important those athletes who are intelligent be prepared to deal with the consequences of making statements and sending messages that people don’t want to hear.
“Even if fans don’t go to the stadium — they might not even like football — they know who Patrick is, and when he says that, he gets the ear of people who otherwise won’t listen. They’re not going to listen to the janitor or the pastor or the representative in Washington, D.C., or the mayor. … But when they have investments in the athlete, they tend to pay attention — even if they don’t like the message.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2021 at 5:00 AM.