Super Anniversary No. 40

It was on January 11, 1970 that the Kansas City Chiefs won the championship of professional football. In beating the Minnesota Vikings 23-7 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, the Chiefs won the fourth and final game between the champions of the American Football League and the National Football League.

Super Bowl IV MVP Len Dawson will be part of the trophy presentation at the Super Bowl at Dolphin Stadium in south Florida on February 7th. The game program will also feature a story I wrote about the Chiefs victory.

Here’s a sneak preview of some of that story as we celebrate the 40th birthday of the Super Chiefs.

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In pro football history, the Chiefs 23-7 victory over the Vikings on January 11, 1970 is the forgotten upset.

“Joe and the Jets were first so they got the attention and the headlines,” said Chiefs Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson, who was the MVP of Super Bowl IV. “I think we proved beyond a doubt that what happened with the Jets wasn’t a fluke, that we were the equal of the NFL. We weren’t the so-called other league anymore.”

Actually, there is certain symmetry to the story of Super Bowl IV. It was a beginning to many stories, and the end to others.

It was the final game played by the AFL, a league considered second class when it began in 1960. But six years later came a merger that brought the entire 10-team AFL group under the NFL umbrella. No longer fighting each other, the leagues combined their resources and energy and in a short period of time pro football replaced baseball as America’s favorite spectator sport.

The Super Bowl IV winner was the team owned and operated by Lamar Hunt, the founder of the AFL. He was forced to move his team from his hometown to Kansas City back in 1962 when the older league established the Cowboys in Dallas to go head to head with Hunt’s Texans. Neither team flourished until Hunt moved north.

It was a Super Bowl title for Hunt, so appropriate since he was the man who named the game, thanks to one of the toys his children were playing with, the Super Ball.

The Chiefs victory over the Vikings and that was particularly sweet since Minnesota was supposed to be an original member of the AFL. On the eve of the new league’s first player draft in November 1959, an event that was being held in a Minneapolis hotel ballroom, ownership interests in the Twin Cities jumped ship in favor of an NFL expansion franchise promised to them for the 1961 season.

Forty years later, the Chiefs 16-point victory seems a more stunning and definitive statement on the development of the other league than what happened a year before.

“When the Jets beat the Colts every person in the AFL celebrated,” said Chiefs Hall of Fame linebacker Bobby Bell. “But that was a close game and it was in doubt until the fourth quarter.

“That wasn’t the case with our game. We dominated them on offense, defense and special teams. How anybody could have made us a 13 or14-point underdog seemed silly after that game was over.”

Dawson chuckles at the memory of being under-estimated to the tune two touchdowns.

“There were a lot of people that thought the Jets victory was a fluke,” Dawson said. “They could not fathom that the AFL was an equal. But that ‘69 season we had three teams that I think would have beaten Minnesota: the Chiefs, the Raiders and the Jets.

“The Colts may have taken the Jets lightly. I don’t think that was the case with us and Minnesota”

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After the game, Dawson received a new car for being the game’s outstanding player, plus he took a phone call from then President Richard Nixon. And 40 years later, Dawson has never heard a word from Detroit authorities about a grand jury and he has no idea of what happened to Donald Dawson. “It’s like it never happened,” Dawson said. “But it did. It happened to me.

“Winning that game was a relief; relief for what happened that week, from losing the first one to the Packers, and for so much that happened with the AFL and NFL.”

So many thoughts ran through Bell’s mind as the final seconds of Super Bowl IV ticked off the Tulane Stadium clock. There were memories of four years earlier, losing the first game of what would become known as the Super Bowl. There was the controversy created when as a University of Minnesota All-America, Bell joined the AFL instead of the Minnesota Vikings. There were thoughts of family and friends, teammates and coaches.

But in the waning moments of the Chiefs victory, Bell thought of something that happened almost eight years earlier. Late in 1962, Bell met with Hunt and over several conversations they worked out the details of an AFL contract for Bell. The talks went down in Minneapolis and Hunt was there without a paper contract for Bell to sign, so the deal was sealed with a simple handshake.

“He was going to New York on business and I was going to New York as part of the Kodak All-America team; we were going to appear on the Johnny Carson Show,” Bell said. “So we get off the plane in New York and Lamar suggests we share a cab. So we are going into Manhattan in the cab and we come up on a toll. Lamar reaches in his pocket and he doesn’t have any money. He doesn’t even have the 15 cents for the toll.

“Then we get into the city and we stop first at his hotel. He jumps out and says ‘See you later’ and takes off. I’m sitting there having paid the toll and the cab fare and I’m suddenly not so sure about my decision to sign with the AFL. I figured this guy is broke.”

Bell would learn through the years that Hunt wasn’t broke; he just didn’t carry any money with him.

When Bell was celebrating his 60^th birthday a few years ago, he received a congratulatory card in the mail. It was from Lamar Hunt. Taped to the inside of the card was 15 cents.

The toll was repaid.

“I used to kid him about that, but he re-paid me many times over with what we were able to do with the Chiefs and the AFL,” said Bell. “Had I signed with the Vikings like everybody thought I would, I’d been walking off that field very disappointed.

“That day was the culmination of a lot of people’s dreams.”

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