Chiefs legend Bobby Bell is relentlessly looking out for his brethren during pandemic
Chiefs legend Bobby Bell always has been socially nimble, figures Willie Lanier, one of his teammates for life.
For one thing, how else could an African-American man have navigated his move from North Carolina to the University of Minnesota in 1960 and to Kansas City in 1963?
For another, he’s been that way ever since Lanier met him in 1967.
“I think Bobby has been the social glue of anywhere he has been in his entire journey,” Lanier said in a phone interview Friday, later adding, “His social skills allowed people around him to become very comfortable very quickly (and were) something he could bring to any engagement.”
Which brings us to this particular engagement: His role among former Chiefs and fellow Pro Football Hall of Famers amid the anguish of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
We should all be so lucky to have someone as caring as him in our sphere of influence, an example we might all consider applying in this time of isolation and dread:
Make that phone call now. You never know how it might help.
That’s one way the ever-animated, ever-engaged Bell is more of a light than ever.
In between mowing the lawn three times a week and observing neighbors he didn’t know had dogs being walked by their canine friends, the man Lanier figures has thousands of phone numbers (and considers his very own “telephone directory for the rest of the world”) has been making call after call after call.
“I always try to call people and wish them Happy Birthday and stuff like that; I’ve been doing that for years and years,” Bell, who will turn 80 in June, said Friday. “But lately I’ve had to double up on doing that.”
Because of a different sort of urgency given these times and the ages and potential vulnerabilities of his brethren — including Super Bowl IV champion teammates Gloster Richardson and Goldie Sellers and Hall of Famers Willie Davis and Bobby Mitchell dying in the last few weeks. Among a number of former NFL players.
Bell tried to reach Mitchell and Davis a few times recently, he said, only to get the awful news.
After he called former Missouri and Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Andy Russell three times the other day, he joked that he was about to call the police department before he finally got through on the next try.
“Joe Greene, Paul Krause, Paul Warfield, Emmitt Thomas, Curley Culp, you just name it,” said Bell, listing several other Hall of Famers and teammates and friends before adding, “I can just keep naming names.”
His message is always some variation of this: “ ‘Hey, man, I love you brother. Take care of yourself.’ ”
He added, “They know that I’m going to keep calling until they respond, either call back or text back and say, ‘I’m OK.’ ”
‘Beyond comprehension’
Bell is particularly conscious of the men he played with here in Kansas City. That’s why on Thursday he called Len Dawson three times and is determined to keep trying Dawson, who has been out of public view for months.
As Bell went down the list of that 1969 championship team the other day, he estimated 16-17 of those players had died over the years with the recent additions of Richardson and Sellers. (Based on available information, The Star counted 15).
“I mean, it’s crazy,” Bell said.
No one on that team is known to have been afflicted with the virus. All are affected in different ways, including several other Hall of Famers on the only previous Chiefs team to win a Super Bowl.
Johnny Robinson, who’s 81, and his wife, Wanda, are isolated in Monroe, Louisiana, unable to go to the Boys Home that Robinson has operated since 1980 and became his life’s passion.
While he’s wanted to come help, Robinson’s step-son Bob Thompson has prevailed on him that it’s paramount to stay away and healthy. So he’s spent most of his time helping clean the house from one end to the other or in his chair reading his Bible, Thompson said.
Here in the Kansas City area, Jan Stenerud, 77, has played some socially distant golf but otherwise tries to minimize going anywhere. He’s learned not to touch his face and to keep disinfectant in his car and has stayed cognizant of the fact so much remains unknown about this virus.
In Virginia, Lanier has been contending with the death of a high school teammate and longtime friend, Joseph Arrington, who died from COVID-19 days ago.
The pandemic, Lanier says, is “beyond comprehension.” He’s jarred by the notion that in the absence of the sports scores we’re so used to in our daily lives, the numbers we are inundated with now are the illness and death tolls from the virus.
Still, he’s continued to work on his numerous business endeavors from home. And he’s also appreciated a different understanding of his neighbors as peers while trying to walk several miles a day to get his body back to the shape it was in 50-plus years ago.
“And just enjoy each day of the journey,” said Lanier, who will turn 75 in August.
Part of that is remaining connected with former teammates on his frequent returns to Kansas City and through Jim Lynch, with whom he speaks often. And, of course, Bell, the catalyst for what Lanier considers a loop that expands out with one talking to another talking to another.
Lanier also considers the fortune in the contagion apparently not being a factor yet in Kansas City during the parade for the Super Bowl LIV winners in early February. And he ponders how the first reported cases in San Francisco were on Super Bowl Sunday and what further damage a parade there might have ignited had the 49ers won.
“This thing was about to cover the world,” Lanier said. “You think about being blessed.”
‘A purpose with this’
When Bell in 1983 became the first Chiefs player inducted in the Hall of Fame, he remembers Green Bay Packers great Ray Nitschke telling him they all are on one team now.
“‘We can’t be cut. We can’t be traded. They can’t kick you off,’” Bell recalled him saying.
Over the years, after Nitschke and the likes of Deacon Jones died, Bell assumed more of a role and more of a voice at the Hall of Fame.
Now he makes it a point annually to tell Hall of Famers to look around the room and think about the likelihood that “next year at this time we’re going to have somebody missing.”
Some have laughed when he says that. Some likely have thought it morbid. But Bell has a different point altogether when he says look at the guy across the table:
“You tell your guy you love him, man,” he’ll say. “Call him. Talk to him. You never know what God’s got intended for you for the next year or two years, man.”
So now he keeps calling, telling guys he loves them … whether by direct word or implied in the gesture.
And telling them that this disease doesn’t discriminate just because you played in the NFL and think you’re tough and can “make it through.”
He reiterated the point on a Hall of Fame conference call the other day, urging others to keep checking in with friends and see how they are and what they might need.
“Everybody knows a lot of these guys didn’t take care of themselves,” said Bell, who has been involved in numerous post-football endeavors and finished his degree at Minnesota in 2015. “And that stuff catches up with you.”
Meanwhile, Bell is trying to catch up with as many as he can, including local restaurateurs and those who work at other places he normally frequents.
It comes naturally, yes. But Minnesota businessman Donald Knutson once told the young Bell, “It doesn’t cost you anything to speak and be nice to people.”
It left an impression, just like his father’s words that he shouldn’t leave a room without others feeling his impact. Which he ultimately took to mean something like this: “Oh, that’s Bobby Bell. He was here.”
So here and now, the guy who might ask you if his face rings a Bell is as relentless at looking over his friends as he was on the field.
“He is a special man; he has compassion,” Stenerud said. “He has a purpose with this.”
This story was originally published April 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.