Chiefs’ resurgence adds a dimension, connection, between eras of Lamar and Clark Hunt
Soon after Andy Reid was named head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in January 1999, he attended the NFL owners’ meetings. Largely acquainted with only the Eagles’ entourage and, surely, members of the Packers’ franchise with which he had spent the previous seven seasons, he stood outside one session and thought to himself, “Man, I don’t really know a soul here.”
As if on cue, to hear Reid tell it now, then-Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt tapped him on the shoulder.
“He says, ‘Welcome to the National Football League. I‘ve heard good things about you. I think you’re going to be good for this league,’ ” Reid recalled on Wednesday as his Chiefs prepared to take on Tampa Bay in Super Bowl LV on Sunday in Tampa.
Gregarious as both men were, Reid said, “We went from there, and he found out that my brother was a geologist, and he was a geologist, Lamar was, so we talked a little bit about family and that.”
Between that time and Hunt’s death in 2006, they’d see each other in such settings or at, say, the 101 Awards in Kansas City annually recognizing the best of the NFL.
As a student of football history and admirer of Hunt’s pivotal role in the modern game, as well, over the years Reid came to feel he might like to work for Hunt or the Chiefs if circumstances ever led to that possibility.
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With Reid again not quite knowing where he was headed after being ousted by the Eagles following the 2012 season, a member of the Hunt family again tapped on his shoulder.
Figuratively, in this case, that was Clark Hunt, CEO of the Chiefs in the wake of his father’s death.
Presiding over a once-proud franchise in chaos and arguably at the lowest point in its history, Hunt in many ways staked his own legacy on a coach then widely believed to be the best never to win a Super Bowl … but also a coach skeptics reckoned might never change that, either.
Now here the Chiefs are, punctuating their first Super Bowl triumph in half a century with a chance to become just the ninth team in NFL history to repeat as Super Bowl champions.
And as Hunt ponders the thrill of the moment, he also appreciates the void and darkness in between.
“Part of what makes it so special is the long road it took us to get back there for the first time in 50 years last year,” he said earlier this week. “That’s far too long, and there were a lot of ups and downs on the roller coaster. And when you’re in those dips when things are really going poorly, you wonder if you’re ever going to be able to do it.”
Such a breakthrough is overwhelming in itself. But the joy and fulfillment of this moment runs deeper for Hunt and his family, including his mother and Lamar’s widow, Norma, who on Sunday is expected to attend her 55th Super Bowl.
Because the prologue between Andy Reid and Lamar Hunt is only a sliver of the way this all connects back to Lamar.
And the present reinvigorates the context of his impact on the game, including Clark Hunt’s spine-tingling highlight of again seizing the AFC Championship trophy named in honor of his father.
While Hunt reiterated that this week, he said it in a more elaborate way after the AFC Championship a year ago that now resonates all the more.
“In the run-up to that game. I thought about him,” Hunt said then. “During the game, I thought about him. Certainly, when they handed the trophy to us, I thought about him. When my mom kissed the trophy, I thought a whole lot about him. When I looked out at the fans in Arrowhead and saw them, I thought about him.
“And then this week, it’s really sort of shifted to his many ties to the Super Bowl. You know, we really wouldn’t have a Super Bowl, or something called a Super Bowl, without my dad.”
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That may sound exaggerated to those of a certain age, which is to say those who perhaps weren’t following the Chiefs as far back as their previous two Super Bowl appearances.
But Hunt has history on his side, including his father’s elemental role in founding the old AFL and the Dallas Texans (and moving them to Kansas City in 1963). And in revolutionizing the game, both on the field with innovative coach Hank Stram and routinely signing Black players well before the NFL was. And ultimately driving a merger that featured the Chiefs playing in two of the first Super Bowls.
Most pertinent in the moment, though, the game derives its very name from a Hunt family saga:
On Christmas 1965, legend has it, Norma Hunt bought bouncy Wham-0 Super Balls for each of their three children. Less than a year old at the time, Clark Hunt figured he was probably either crawling after the ball or just gumming it while his older brother and sister were bouncing it all over the house.
“And I think that stuck in my dad’s mind,” he said last year.
Indeed, for a man already known to apply the word “super” to anything he was enthusiastic about, it lodged in Lamar Hunt’s mind. Long enough, in fact, to sprout into an idea that “Super Bowl” might make for a nice name for the impending first championship game between the NFL and AFL at the end of the 1966 season.
He blurted the term out in a meeting in the summer of 1966 … to laughter in the room. In a letter dated July 26, 1966, he even suggested he had “kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.”
But even as leaders of the game sought another name, the tentative idea bore repetition as a place-holder of sorts. And the informal shorthand began to seep out and take hold despite its initially unofficial capacity.
Sure, the game tickets ranging in price from $12 to $8 for the Jan. 15, 1967, contest would refer to it as the “World Championship Game” between the AFL and NFL.
But The Atlantic reported that The New York Times used the term Super Bowl in the headline of its game day preview and the Los Angeles Times referred to it as such in its game story (which also panned the Chiefs for their 35-10 loss to the Packers, calling it a thrashing “like a stern parent chastising a mischievous child.”
Four days after the game, a letter on Wham-O Manufacturing Company stationery was sent to Lamar Hunt at the Chiefs’ then-headquarters in Swope Park, saying, “Here’s a new supply of Super Balls for your son.”
Along with that letter provided to The Star by Chiefs’ historian Mike Davidson is a note attached from Hunt, writing in 1985 that the Wham-O letter refers “to the fact that my children’s toy ‘Super Ball’ served as the phonetic inspiration for the Pro Football Championship Game after the 1966 merger between the AFL and NFL.”
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But Hunt had further sway on the very way we frame the game today. While some writers already were appending roman numerals to the games, in July 1970, a few months after the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV, Hunt wrote Pete Rozelle that “perhaps we should take a signal from this” and officially thus embellish future games and related materials.
“This would further establish the tie to the past and also, in my opinion, add a bit of ‘class’ to our ‘unclassy’ name,” he wrote.
Only a few months later, Hunt wrote Rozelle with another suggestion that would become ingrained. With the news of legendary Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi’s illness, Hunt was inspired by what he called “tragic news” to suggest a way to commemorate Lombardi in perpetuity.
“What I mean to suggest is that the highest honor in our sport — the Super Bowl Trophy — would be the most appropriate honor to perpetuate Vince’s name,” he wrote in a letter dated August 10, 1970, weeks before Lombardi died.
Later in the letter, he added, “My suggestion is that the game itself retain the name ‘Super Bowl,’ but that the trophy be re-designated the ‘Lombardi Trophy’ with perhaps an appropriate likeness of Vince being placed in the area which, in the past, has had the AFL and NFL emblems.
“Should you feel the idea has merit, your fine sense of public relations will, I’m sure, best dictate a method of handling this and from this point I will leave the matter in your hands.”
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So on Sunday in Super Bowl LV, the Chiefs will try to convert their second straight Lamar Hunt Trophy into another Lombardi Trophy … all imprints of the man who forged their own history.
Along the way to this resurgence, Clark Hunt believes the franchise has gone from a long period of being relevant only locally to now having “absolutely exploded” nationally and to a degree even internationally.
But this rebirth has created something else profound, too: a tangible sort of link back to a foundation so driven by his father.
Every year when the Super Bowl rolls around, Hunt said earlier this week, the family “obviously thinks about him so much because he had such a huge hand in making the Super Bowl what it is today.”
And yet …
“There was something missing,” he said. “And what was missing was the Chiefs participating in that game.”
But no more. And thanks in some way to the symbolic symmetry of father and son both tapping on the shoulder of Andy Reid, they are attached in a new way as the prosperous present reaffirms the rich past.