New Orleans — Ahead of Super Bowl LIV, the Chiefs arrived this weekend to a city considerably transformed since their first trip in 1970 – the moment that marked Kansas City’s biggest sports accomplishment to date.
Back then, in Super Bowl IV, the Chiefs let the good times roll after defeating the Minnesota Vikings, 23-7. It would be 50 years until they won another.
During the Super Bowl in Las Vegas last year, Kansas City head coach Andy Reid paid homage to the Chiefs of that era, wearing a navy blue blazer similar in the look, perhaps not in size, to the one worn on the sidelines of Super Bowl IV by the late Hank Stram, a Pro Football Hall of Fame coach.
“I love the history of the game,” Reid said recently. “Obviously there’s a ton of history here (in Kansas City). I love that part of it.”
New Orleans holds a special place in both Chiefs and NFL history. This year’s Super Bowl will mark the 11th for the city, tying New Orleans with Miami for the most times as host.
The game on Feb. 9 will be played in the Superdome. More than 100,000 people are expected to come to town for the occasion.
But in 1970, Stram wore the blue blazer — with a Chiefs logo sewn on the breast pocket — at the since-razed Tulane Stadium.
The team’s victory in New Orleans vaulted both Kansas City and the American Football League to new levels of national recognition, and to higher-than-ever paychecks. Besides Stram and team founder Lamar Hunt, eight Chiefs players who participated in that 1970 win are now in the hall of fame.
The NFL merged with the AFL — finally seen as equivalent in talent — later that same year.
(And not for nothing: The 1970 Super Bowl also helped to bring down the Kansas City mob, but that's another story.)
On the sidelines of Super Bowl IV, the mic’d up and loquacious Stram was an instrument of the innovative Ed Sabol, the founder of NFL Films. Some of Stram’s phrases, such as “just keep matriculating the ball down the field boys,” are among the league’s most memorable recorded moments.
Although when Reid was asked last month about the possibility of being mic’d up on the sideline of Super Bowl LIX, he responded, “I’m not big on that.”
While Stram, who lived the final years of his life outside New Orleans until his passing in 2005, exhibited his vivacious personality, he deflected the credit toward those who really put on the show: the players.
“You never saw a coach run for a touchdown or never see a coach kick a field goal or any of those kinds of things,” said Stram from his home in 2003, the year he entered the hall of fame. “We had great players.”
Now the Chiefs have another all-time great player in quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who finally ended Kansas City’s Super Bowl drought in 2020 — and could make New Orleans where the NFL’s seemingly unachievable obstacle is finally conquered.
The Chiefs are bidding to make modern history as the first NFL team to win three straight Super Bowls.
(Although the Green Bay Packers did technically claim three national titles in a row, starting with the 1965 NFL championship before winning the first two Super Bowls.)
To do it in a city so important to Chiefs franchise history would make it all the more memorable.
