Why was a Kansas City Chiefs player running in the parade with this fan’s skeleton?
Make no bones about it, this is the weirdest thing that happened at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade Wednesday.
A skeleton went missing and lots of people saw who took it: wide receiver Ihmir Smith-Marsette.
Mallory Mong would like her cadaverous friend back, please. But she’s willing to barter. (Turns out it actually wasn’t hers, but we’ll get to that in a second.)
Mong, a University of Kansas student, comes from an Overland Park family of longtime Chiefs fans. She was at the parade with friends and family, including her father, Grant Mong, and younger brother, Dillon, who’s going to play football for KU next year.
Mong’s father and his buddies purposefully made a spectacle of themselves in costumes and hats — one was on stilts — to amp up the crowd and get the players’ attention as they passed by — riding atop double-decker buses or hopping off to walk and greet fans.
Mong’s group waited in the crush of people at 19th Street and Grand Boulevard, right in front of Reactor Design Studio owned by family friend Clifton Alexander.
The missing skeleton belonged to him.
“He had it at the studio and so the night before, my dad grabbed it and knew it would be a part of our parade shenanigans!” Mong told The Star Thursday.
“The players LOVED the skeleton. We told them it was the skeleton of all the quarterbacks Mahomes ‘buried’ on the way to the Super Bowl.”
Smith-Marsette, allured like his teammates by the weird sight of a skeleton in the crowd, walked over to see it. But he didn’t just look.
“Ihmir told us he’d bring it back but never got the chance to,” she said.
She tweeted a video of the exchange that ensued.
“You’ll bring it back?” she asked him.
“Yeah we’ll bring it back!” he said.
Smith-Marsette jogged away, holding the skeleton in the air like it was the Lombardi Trophy.
“He did not bring it back,” Mong tweeted.
She tagged Smith-Marsette and asked: “Where’s my skeleton??”
He tweeted back: “He still somewhere celebrating the parade he’s probably dead from all the partying.”
Alexander also enlisted the sleuths of Twitter. At first, he didn’t recognize the player who walked off with it, a common observation among fans Wednesday who didn’t recognize many Chiefs without their jerseys.
“Hey Twitter, who is this @Chief? I need to reach out and see what happened to our skeleton. He borrowed the skeleton but forgot to bring him back,” Alexander tweeted.
“We ain’t mad, it was hilarious to see him running down the street with the skeleton. Just wondering what happened to him.”
Smith-Marsette retweeted a photo someone posted of him running down Grand with the skeleton. “Funniest pic I got today but I ain’t know I was kt but I’ll take it,” the Chiefs player wrote, suggesting the fan mistook him for teammate Kadarius Toney.
The skeleton wasn’t the only thing lost in the frenzy of the celebration, where fans pushed jerseys and footballs and other things at players to sign along the route.
After the parade, one mom launched a desperate search on social media for her 12-year-old son’s autographed Chiefs football. He wanted it signed, but some of the players tossed it around instead and the ball disappeared into the crowd, never to be seen again.
The skeleton must have had a good time on its adventure.
Mong has seen a video of wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster “really wanting the skeleton on the bus, and there have been a lot of videos of players with the skeleton on the buses,” she said.
By Thursday afternoon, Mong’s video of the playful heist had been viewed nearly 17,000 times. It solved the mystery for one Chiefs fan: “Oh my god I was wondering where the skeleton came from/why they had it,” the person wrote.
Someone else tweeted at the Chiefs on her behalf, writing: “I think a fan has a bone to pick.”
Make that a funny bone. The Star met Mong and her spirited father at the 2020 Super Bowl parade, bundled up in weather much colder than Wednesday, happily cheering on their team.
On Thursday, Mong tried to make Smith-Marsette a deal, tweeting: “I’ll take the Prada glasses or a chiefs jersey and we call it even.”
She also set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise $100, somewhat in jest, calling it “Missing Chiefs Skeleton.” One person quickly donated her entire $100 goal, so she raised it to $200.
“Our Chief’s parade skeleton was taken from us suddenly, he was promised to be brought back yet is still missing,” she wrote. “Help us raise funds for his memorial service or to get a new one, though he is irreplaceable.
“Anything helps, if you cannot donate reach out to @_ihmirr_ on Twitter and see what he can do as he is the person in the photo who promised the safe return of our dear skeleton.”
The Star’s skeleton crew will be watching for updates.
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This story was originally published February 16, 2023 at 12:18 PM.
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