They're Playing My Game

Contents

Foreword by Len Dawson

A Tribute from Lamar Hunt

A Tribute from Dale Stram

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Mentor

1. Looking Back

2. Winning Is the Answer

3. Lombardi, Not Lombardo

4. Nobody Like Lamar

5. The AFL’s First Season

6. Reuniting with Len Dawson

7. From Dallas to Kansas City

8. The 1966 AFL Championship

9. The First Super Bowl

10. No Repeat in 1967

11. Falling Flat in Oakland

12. 1969 AFC Champions

13. Super Bowl IV Champions

14. The Spoils of Victory

15. Heartbreak on Christmas Day

16. More Heartbreak in 1974

17. From CBS to New Orleans and Back

18. Football Is about Change

Afterword: Reminiscences

Photo Gallery

Foreword by Len Dawson

I don’t know if there is ever anything new in football, but we were doing things in the ’60s that teams are doing now. Hank came up with so many new twists and doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He wasn’t afraid to try things. Back in those days, guys didn’t try anything. They pretty much stayed with what the Green Bay Packers or the New York Giants were doing. Well, Hank decided, let’s do some things differently. We were playing the West Coast offense before it was the West Coast offense.

Hank was a great salesman. As a coach you have to sell what your approach is, what your philosophy is, to the people you’re working with, and Hank was able to get that done. His influence on the development of Kansas City has to be remembered. Most people in America thought of Kansas City as a cow town until we started playing on national TV and making trips to the Super Bowl.

A lot of restaurants didn’t want Hank’s business because he was always drawing up plays on the tablecloths. He was always trying to think up new ways to create problems for the other teams. We were doing things then with motion and formations that are common today but weren’t then.

Hank was, in one word, an innovator. He wasn’t afraid to try anything new, something beyond convention. Like one time against the Los Angeles Rams in a preseason game, Hank figured out that when the center snapped for the punter, it took 1.3 seconds to snap the ball 15 yards. He told me that by the time the defensive lineman got by his offensive counterpart I’d have plenty of time to throw the ball. Besides, the defender would wear down later in the game.

First of all, to pull it off you have to come up to the line of scrimmage and not put your hands under the center because it’s illegal. You have to get up there making the defense think that you’re going to take the snap, then turn and move 15 yards back. Deacon Jones was the defensive end, and no one had a better pass rush. He was looking at what was transpiring, a term Henry liked to use, and saw that there was no tight end over him and me back there 15 yards. Instead of lining up over the defensive tackle, he went way out in a sprinter’s stance. When the ball was snapped, he damn near beat the ball back to me. I barely had time to get my hands on the ball and get rid of it. I told Henry that’s it, that experiment is not going to work, especially when you’re playing against Deacon Jones.

The team was family to Henry. He told all of us that he didn’t want to hear the words I or me, but us instead. That’s why we had good chemistry all those years and why we won so much. He believed that great teams don’t necessarily win championships, but teams with great chemistry do. He also believed that coaches don’t win games—players do. And, to that end, he was the first pro coach to scout the black colleges for players. He hired Lloyd Wells as a scout, and Wells came up with some great players for us. Hank liked to have a nickname for everyone, and he called Wells Outta Sight. One day I asked him how he came up with such a strange name, and he had an explanation. Lenny, every time Lloyd would get excited about a player he’d say, ‘Coach, you ought to see this guy. He’s out of sight,’ he explained. I never knew if he had a nickname for me. It was always Lenny.

I enjoyed a strong personal relationship with Henry. Heck, I’ve known him for 50 years, ever since he recruited me after I got to the NFL and rotted for five years on the bench in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. When he brought me to Dallas that first year of the American Football League in 1960, he worked with me daily to regain my skills, which had diminished from lack of playing. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have had a pro career and made it all the way to the Hall of Fame.

I was with great coaches, Buddy Parker and Paul Brown, but Henry was the best. I can’t explain why it took so long for him to get into the Hall of Fame. But I was so happy he finally made it, and I was honored that he chose me as his presenter.

He touched everybody. Even a priest in the Northeast. Here we were in Dallas, and he developed a friendship with Monsignor Mackey in Boston. Mackey enjoyed sitting on the bench, and Hank would fly him in for all the big games. There was the monsignor in a Chiefs jersey looking like a member of the team. One day I asked Henry if he was looking for an edge by having the monsignor at all the important games. After all, Henry was always looking for an edge, and I was thinking along the lines of divine intervention. But Henry, with a straight face, said no, it’s just that the monsignor enjoyed being around us.

Henry always approached football as only a game to enjoy and have fun with. And he was quite a prankster, too. John Brodie came to Kansas City to do one of our games, and he told me that he had a racquet ball game against Hank. I snickered and told him that he was going to hear the word hinder a lot. Henry recruited our trainer Wayne Rudy as an accomplice. Hank asked Rudy to watch the game through the window and, if he gave him a signal, to come in and say that Hank had an important phone call.

John was up something like 12–7 when Henry gave Rudy the signal. Excuse me, John, I’ve been working on a trade for two weeks and I have to take this call, but I’ll be back, said Hank. There wasn’t any call. Instead, Henry slipped into the sauna for about 20 minutes while poor Brodie cooled off. When they resumed, Henry was hot and Brodie was cold, and Henry had himself a good laugh afterward. He was so full of life and quite the jokester. He always liked to play tricks on people he liked, and he had a lot of friends.

There was no one like Henry.

—Len Dawson

Hall of Fame quarterback

A Tribute from Lamar Hunt

By willing it to succeed, hank was in so many ways the central focus of everything this franchise did. If I could find but one word that best exemplified Hank, it is resourceful. He wanted to win so badly, and he was so very good at it. He had a knack for taking the players that other teams didn’t want and molding them into fine players for the Chiefs.

Hank did not feel that coaching in the American Football League was a risk. One of the biggest reasons I hired him was because he really wanted the job. It turned out to be a very fortunate selection on our part. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten a chance anywhere else. He personified the brand-new American Football League because he was a salesman, he was an innovator, and he wasn’t afraid to try new things. I always thought he was one of the most imaginative, creative coaches the game has ever known.

Hank’s accomplishments as a coach are well documented and were highlighted with his induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2003, an honor that was so richly deserved. Whether it was his flashy wardrobe, his singularly unique vocabulary, or his on-field flamboyance, what I will remember most about Hank was that he was truly one of a kind. Call it charm, call it charisma, call it an aura, but the Mentor had a rare quality that is difficult to define.

He was the right man at the right time for our franchise and the American Football League. Our players embraced his personality and embodied his passion for the game when they took the field. There is no doubt in my mind that his passion was one of the primary reasons he was so successful.

In the early days in Dallas, Hank and I used to have an occasional friendly kicking-game contest out on the playing field long after the team had left the field. It was really just for exercise. We would each punt the ball back and forth. If you caught it on the fly, you got to advance the ball forward three steps, and so on. Only great modesty on my part keeps me from disclosing who generally won these games.

We used to have frequent late-night Ping-Pong games in Hank and Phyllis’s basement in Kansas City. In order to save money on hotel rooms, I often enjoyed the hospitality of the Strams with overnight stays at their home when I was in town. Inevitably, we would migrate to the basement, which had a flat ceiling above and concrete walls on either side of a standard Ping-Pong table.

There were all kinds of house rules in our games, with balls being banked off the walls or ceiling and then back on the table. Generally, Hank got the best of me in these friendly matches, but he had the home-court advantage. He indeed was a unique and distinguished gentleman.

—Lamar Hunt

Team owner/AFL founder

Member Pro Football Hall of Fame

A Tribute from Dale Stram

Recently, Abner Haynes and I were reminiscing. I’ve known Abner, an original member of the Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs team, since I was six years old. In my heart, Abner is my brother, as are each of Dad’s players.

We spoke about old times, about life and family. Primarily, we spoke of the bonds that we shared and lessons learned from my father and Abner’s coach, Hank Stram.

Abner was a pioneer, a young black man wanting to play profes- sional football for southern team owners during the height of the civil rights era.

Abner spoke vividly to me of the day in 1961 when members of the Dallas Texans team were assembled in the meeting room of the Texans’ office on Central Expressway. It was the day that the team’s roster would be, as required by the league, determined by the final selection of its members. It was not known then, but prior to the meeting, several players had been let go and their absence went unnoticed.

Dad, who was usually very punctual, arrived five minutes late, just late enough to keep the adrenaline of all in the room pumping fast. During those five minutes, Abner told me, so many thoughts flowed through his mind. Would this meeting be his last with the team? If not, who would be cut? What does Coach want to tell us?

Dad entered the room, as always, dressed appropriately, wearing his monogrammed red Dallas Texans coaching shorts and white Texans T-shirt. Everyone in the room was silent as Coach began to speak: Gentlemen, please look around at the faces of the men in this room. After nearly a minute, he continued, saying, You in this room are the 1961 Dallas Texans family. You have been chosen to represent the great city of Dallas, the Hunt organization, and me and my family.

At that moment I felt proud to have earned this man’s trust, Abner said. I believed in this man’s message; I believe that he genuinely loved us and thought of us as his family. I wanted to win for this man, and at that moment, I knew I would. The room erupted with excitement. We all hugged our nearest teammate. No one cared what color I was. We were a team, and most importantly, we became a family.

Abner continued, Some 45 years have passed, and our leader has gone, but the bonds and love formed in our youth are still with each of us that were present in that room in Dallas. Our coach, friend, and mentor often said, ‘We will only be a team for a short time, but we will always be a family.’

When I think of the players that my dad coached, I become emo- tional, not only because of how important their friendships are to me, but because they are part of my core, my team, my family…a family that Dad so loved.

—Dale Stram

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Lamar Hunt, Len Dawson, Willie Lanier, Jim Lynch, Fred Arbanas, Jan Stenerud, Bob Moore, Bob Gill, Danny More, Jessica Paumier, Linc Wonham, Bob McNair for preserving the name of the Texans, and Tom Bast, who started the whole process.

Introduction: The Mentor

It was one of those defining moments when the rain stopped, the sun emerged through the sullen clouds, and a waterlogged crowd in Canton, Ohio, on the first humid Saturday in August oozed a collective sigh of relief that reverberated at the doorstep of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Fittingly, it had to be this way. The heavens opened up and gave Hank Stram his one more day in the sun, which would be the last of his football life.

And, for a gaunt and weak Stram, it brought a smile to his face. It was New Orleans and Super Bowl IV. It was the Mardi Gras and jubilation one more time, for one precious moment. There was no dark side, no pain, a sublimity that only he could experience, that the rain would stop and the football gods would give him one last time in the sun. And he deserved that moment of knowing that he would look down and once more hear the cheers of a crowd.

Yet it was also a surreal setting for the old ball coach. Stram, one of the most vibrant personalities that ever walked on a football field and beyond its boundaries, was a solitary figure in a wheelchair, muted by a debilitating illness that took away his voice and reduced his once rock-solid frame to 140 pounds. He never spoke, never had the strength to stand up and walk to the podium like so many before him and glibly address a crowd as only he could. And no one was better at it than Stram.

Instead, the diabetes that attacked his body for all those years made him a prisoner to a wheelchair, and all Stram could do was to look up at a giant screen with the rest of the gathering at a montage of video highlights as his prerecorded speech resonated though the public-address system. It was the first time in the Hall’s 40-year existence that an inducted member didn’t deliver his acceptance speech live. And that, too, had to pain Stram, who was a melodic Frank Sinatra with a microphone in his hands.

On a day replete with emotionally frothy speeches, uncharacteristically, Stram’s was the shortest, yet also the sweetest and most touching. Each one of the other four inductees that day, Marcus Allen, James Loften, Elvin Bethea, and Joe DeLamielleure, acknowledged it, even as Allen’s own speech reduced him to tears. For the players the day brought a seemingly nonstop stream of tears as they spoke. Yet for Stram it brought an endless smile that appeared impossible to wipe away.

There wasn’t a dry eye amongst one of us, disclosed former Chiefs running back Ed Podolak. Anybody who didn’t cry has something wrong with them. There was not one person that was more deserving of being here than him.

Len Dawson, the Chiefs’ quarterback extraordinaire, began it:

Chris [Berman], thank you very much. First of all, I would like to congratulate Marcus, Joe, Elvin, and James for being selected to a great class. You talk about class—not only great football players, but they’re also people with class. So, congratulations.

But I’m here to talk about a mentor. Yes, Henry, we’ll mention 65 loss power trap somewhere along the line here. You know, Hank and I go back a long way. Fifty years ago—five, oh—50 years ago as a senior at Alliance High School, which is on Route 62 around here. It’s about 15 to 20 miles east. Hank was an assistant coach at Purdue University, came to help recruit me to that school. And while at Purdue, he coached me for three years. Later on, professionally, he coached me for 13 years. So I think I’m qualified to know something about the makeup of this man and why he has been so successful.

And I will start with the word passion. Tremendous passion for the game of football. He has the same passion today as he had 50 years ago. And he loved to coach. It’s all he’s ever done really, besides broadcasting. The thing is, he has paid his dues as a coach. He spent 12 years as a collegiate assistant football coach, and then Lamar Hunt wisely selected him as head coach of the Dallas Texans of the American Football League. And what a choice that was. You’ve heard some of the things that he was able to accomplish—most victories in the 10-year history of the AFL. Coach of the Year, played in two of the first four Super Bowls between the AFL and the NFL, won the last game played between the AFL and the NFL.

And speaking of the AFL, those of us who were a part of it are quite proud of the fact that it was successful, because so many people thought that it would fail. One of the big reasons why it was successful—the Mentor, Hank Stram. And I’ll tell you why he was successful. First of all, we mentioned that he was a great innovator; he was. Henry was not afraid to try something that was different, but let me assure you there was always a good reason why he was going to make that decision to do it.

An example—the moving pocket. Basically, it helped two things. One, it helped save the quarterback’s neck. Secondly, the offensive line, it helped with the pass protection. So what had to happen—the defensive line had to see where the quarterback was going before he could go out and try to tear his head off.

Also talking about the tight I formation where we would cre- ate formations. That would keep the defense on the defensive. Defensively, that triple stack against Minnesota was a gem because it completely shut down the Vikings offense.

Hank was a tremendous teacher. Now, he wasn’t one of these coaches who would give a little spiel before practice and then go out, stand around, fold his arms, and twiddle his thumbs. Oh no, no. Henry was not that way. He was involved in every phase of the game because he knew the fundamentals and techniques of every position. And I know this for sure, that guy was the best quarterback coach I have ever seen. He knew the basic fundamentals of the quarterbacking position—ball handling, footwork, timing, passing—and he made sure that we worked on those things every day in practice to try to improve.

Well, he knows something about people. Hank has always said that you win with people. He has this unique ability, with all the different personalities and egos on a football team, to make each and every one of us feel like we were something very special.

And, I guess when you talk about who’s already enshrined in the Hall of Fame, he must have a pretty good eye for talent. Because you’ve met a couple of them—Jan Stenerud, we got Bobby Bell, Willie Lanier here. Buck Buchanan is in the Hall of Fame, and so am I.

And I’m going to tell you how good I think he [Stram] is. I wear a Super Bowl ring on this hand, Hall of Fame ring on this one. I know I wouldn’t have either one if it hadn’t been for this guy—Hank Stram.

This is tougher than when I was up here before. I’m a lucky son of a gun, because here I am getting the opportunity to introduce the man who’s responsible for me getting into the Hall of Fame.

Now, I said he was a great innovator. He was. He was the first coach to have minicamps, he was the first coach to hire a strength-and-conditioning coach year-round, I think he was the first coach to use Gatorade, too, and he was definitely the first coach to wear a microphone in a Super Bowl game. He isn’t finished, folks; he’s got one more for you today. He is going to be the first person to record his acceptance speech, and if you would direct your attention to the monitors that are around you and listen, I think you’ll find out what kind of guy he is.

At the conclusion of the video, Stram’s prerecorded speech completed his induction:

Thank you, Lenny, for your kind words, for your friendship, for your talent, and for your leadership. You are the greatest.

The honor I feel today being inducted into the Hall of Fame is beyond what words can describe. My thanks to the Hall of Fame committee, who saw fit to bestow the great honor upon me today.

And Lamar Hunt, what a great owner, what a dear friend. I’m here today because you, Lamar, provided me with the opportunity to be your head coach for 141/2 years. Throughout my coaching career I have been so fortunate to be surrounded by so many great players and coaches from Purdue