A generation of fans poured their hearts into the Chiefs. They earned this payoff
It was January 2019, and Keith Smith, a lifetime Chiefs fan, had landed tickets to the first AFC Championship Game in Kansas City’s history.
He had spent the previous year documenting life with a journal, a therapist recommendation, and never did he find a more appropriate time to pen an entry. The essays typically had only one reader — himself — but he wrote that day with someone else in mind.
His father.
“I wish,” Smith, now 47, recalled writing, “you could be here.”
The most vivid childhood memories place Smith in the living room, his father decked out in Zubaz pants in the recliner alongside, their eyes fixated on a television that brought Chiefs games into their Moberly, Missouri home with a set of old-fashioned rabbit ears. They never missed a game, the axis around which their schedule revolved.
Even as Smith grew older and eventually moved out, a postgame phone call became the understood replacement. They would talk for an hour on some occasions, the Chiefs a launching point into a conversation about kids, work and life — because that’s what they had long considered the Chiefs.
The roots of a relationship that could sprouted in any direction.
In those days, the “Todd Haley years,” Smith reminds, the phone calls offered an opportunity for his father to complain that the Chiefs had never been able to draft and develop the sport’s most important position.
Hard to believe? Only if you’re new here.
As one recent survey deemed the Chiefs the most hated team in America, which football-to-English translation paraphrases to the team of the most envy, there is a contingent of longtime Kansas Citians screaming a collective reply: Come on. Don’t you get it — we were due for this.
The Chiefs sandwiched 27 quarterbacks between championships, 27 between Len Dawson and Patrick Mahomes, the guy who will lead them to their fourth Super Bowl appearance in five years Sunday, when they face the San Francisco 49ers here in Las Vegas.
They spanned 25 years between home playoff wins, back then an NFL franchise better known for heartbreak tales than their most prominent love stories.
In January 2018, a year before his AFC Championship Game trip from his home in Hays, Kansas, Smith was traveling to see his father to celebrate a birthday. It just so happened it would coincide with Mahomes’ first career start in a season finale at Denver.
But on the road trip, Smith’s phone rang. His father, in the midst of a battle with cancer, had been placed in a medically-induced coma. He would wake a day after Mahomes and the Chiefs beat the Broncos. With his father still drowsy and drugged up, as Smith described him, Smith leaned over.
“Dad,” he said, “this Mahomes guy might be it.”
“Well,” his father replied. “It’s about damn time.”
II.
Sarah Garrison, a 45-year-old in Kansas City, didn’t learn of her pregnancy until she was nearly 12 weeks along. It was a few days before her husband’s birthday, and realizing she didn’t have much in the way of a gift, she wrapped a black-and-white ultrasound photo in a shoe box and waited for the reaction.
She swears by her memory of the word-for-word response.
“No way! Another Chiefs fan!”
Garrison shares that story with a sense of endearment, you should know, as though trying to one-up another fan’s loyalty. But her reply then, in early 2013, represents a distinct era of Chiefs football.
“Are we sure we want to subject them to that?” she asked.
III.
That was a different time — a time when the feeling of inevitability watching Chiefs playoff games meant something entirely different than it does today. A time when Chiefs fans braced for the worst, even though it did nothing to lessen the pain, and then mustered enough courage to do it all over again next year. A time when they pointed to hope rather than results.
A time better known as Before Mahomes.
In their initial 55 years after moving to Kansas City, the Chiefs won eight playoff playoff games. In just six years with Mahomes as the starter, they’ve won 14, a chance to make it a fitting No. 15 on Sunday in Vegas.
Mahomes once said that after his first Super Bowl win, “It all happened so fast .... I thought that’s just kind of how it went.” And no comment could’ve better reflected his lack of time in Kansas City.
It was five years ago that Aaron Karst, a 33-year-old fan living Kansas City, told me his wife included in their wedding vows that she’d be there to console him after Chiefs losses — and that she meant it.
A Chiefs fan’s place atop NFL’s mountain is not the result of spoils, but rather the reward of patience.
Or maybe it’s just the result of not realizing they had any other options. They equate their Chiefs fandom to religion — 37-year-old Dylan Channel recalls rushing home from church to catch the noon kickoff. It is ingrained in the city as much as the Union Station lights turning red this time of year.
It is passed from generation to generation, from mothers and fathers to sons and daughters. From friends and neighbors. From, well, the moment you set foot in Kansas City.
Karst’s grandparents were Chiefs season-ticket holders when they played at Municipal Stadium. Then his parents joined at Arrowhead Stadium before he began to tag along. His dad gave him permission to cuss during the the old touchdown song — we’re going to beat the hell out of you — so long as he didn’t tell Mom.
He now hosts a tailgate of upwards of 70 people, providing food and drinks in exchange for a charity donation. That donation surpassed $14,000 this season. Mahomes, Karst said, tends to draw a bigger crowd.
In the initial 25 years of his fandom, Chiefs playoff games, which he attended, got nicknames for their ineptitude. He witnessed the no-punt game, the forward-progress game, the six-field-goal game. All losses.
And, in retrospect...
“All worth it,” he said.
Karst, the man whose football team once put him through so much distress his wife felt it appropriate to bring up during their wedding ceremony, recently got a piece of advice from a childhood friend, a Patriots fan.
The topic? How to handle a dynasty.
(Embrace the hate, by the way.)
IV.
About seven years ago, Overland Park resident Devin Rudicel was rolling through a thrift store in Youngstown, Ohio, when he stumbled upon a Ricky Stanzi jersey. Stanzi, mind you, was a quarterback who never threw a pass after the Chiefs selected him in the fifth round of the 2011 NFL Draft.
That’s how these stories used to go.
Rudicel bought it anyway. And then a couple others. And then, well, it became an obsession. He has 119 of them now, logging that number in a spreadsheet, and part of his everyday routine is to check resale sites for another.
The most obscure, perhaps? A game-worn Tyler Palko jersey.
“I don’t think Tyler Palko even has a game-worn Tyler Palko jersey,” he quipped.
That collection started Before Mahomes.
After Mahomes? Rudicel and his father have increased their travel budget. They attend two or three road games per season, including last week’s AFC Championship Game in Baltimore.
“I think we realized this is our moment,” Rudicel said. “This is the greatest time to be a Chiefs fan.”
Oh, and there’s this: “We’re smart enough to know this doesn’t last forever.”
Rudicel and his father, Dave, have visited 13 road stadiums, and that includes the one in Miami Gardens, Florida, for Super Bowl LIV, the first Mahomes title. They cried when the clock hit zero. Stayed until every last piece of confetti had littered the field and every last player had left.
When they returned to their hotel, they flipped on ESPN to relive it all over again. And again. And again. They watched SportsCenter on loop, long after the live broadcast had become a replay.
After its last airing, they looked outside.
The sun had come up.
V.
Five years ago, this story focused on the playoff heartbreak. On why, after years of it, the fans kept coming back, season after season.
This subject line hit the inbox, formatted as a pitch for inclusion:
30-something Chiefs fan living with unrelenting dread.
A year before hitting send on that email, Eli Waterman had attended the Chiefs’ playoff loss to the Titans, the last game his father, who introduced him to this fandom, had seen. He passed from cancer shortly after.
The last Championship Sunday — the dates for the AFC and NFC title matchups — that didn’t include the Chiefs is the day his dad died.
Life has changed. Waterman has three kids. He and his wife have moved from Raytown into their forever home in Blue Springs.
But there’s still the Chiefs. That never changes. Waterman and his wife, Sarah, are the hosts for the football parties, which his kids adorably refer to as Chiefsday. They invite neighbor kids over. Friends. Cousins. It grows each year.
During most games, Waterman says eyes his will move away from the TV and scan the room. There’s a certain curative therapy to the exercise.
“I’m looking at my kids, my wife, everyone, and I know if my dad were here, he’d be proud of me on so many different levels,” Waterman said, adding, “As I watch the Chiefs, I want it to bring me closer to him.”
VI.
Brad Boan, 37, has been a plus-one to his father’s season tickets for 34 years. Do the math on that. An Arrowhead Stadium regular since he was toddler.
As Sammy Watkins finished off a 60-yard touchdown in January 2020, the Chiefs’ first AFC Championship Game victory in a half-century, Boan wrapped his arms around his dad.
“It was just one of those moments where we’ve been to a lot of games where you just left numb,” Boan said. “Getting to finally hug him at the end instead, it was a surreal moment.”
The viewing experience has changed. What he described five years ago this way — “As soon as the first thing goes wrong, you start to feel like, ‘Here we go again’” — is now the feeling that it just might all work out in the end. And that if it doesn’t, there truly is always next year.
The Mahomes Effect, Boan calls it.
VII.
Another effect?
The next generation.
There are kids, some of them in grade school even, who have never known anything different than Patrick Mahomes. Who haven’t a clue about the torment their fathers — and their fathers’ fathers — experienced by claiming this team.
Before last weekend’s AFC Championship Game, four years after celebrating the first of his lifetime with his father, Boan had to explain to 6-year-old Willie that, you know what, “there’s a chance they don’t win this game and they’re not going to play next week.”
He’s not quite sure Willie understood.
Waterman keeps a photo of his oldest, 7-year-old Atticus, biting his nails during the last Super Bowl.
Jesse Bates, a fan in West Plains, Missouri, recalls asking friends that, wouldn’t it be something if they could just play in the Super Bowl once? His son, who just turned 6, jumped into his arms when the Chiefs beat Baltimore.
The 6-year-old will watch his fourth Super Bowl on Sunday.
VIII.
The last Chiefs game William Rice attended with his father was the playoff loss to the Titans, the final chapter in the Before Mahomes period.
The Chiefs, an 8.5-point favorite, led 21-3 at halftime, only to be outscored 19-0 in the second half and lose. Rice recalls the devastation he felt while walking out of the stadium.
His father passed unexpectedly the next December, three weeks after doctors discovered pancreatic cancer. That was late into Mahomes’ first year as a starter.
Rice has built the proverbial man cave into his home in San Antonio, Texas, and he has framed a photo of himself dressed in a Marcus Allen jersey when he was a baby. His parents always ensured their newborn had plenty of Chiefs outfits.
His dad got him started early. The elder Rice asked William’s future mom out on a first date at a 10-year high school reunion. Wanted her to join him at a Chiefs game.
The Chiefs are playing a child’s game in its truest sense, but it tightens lifetime bonds between friends and families, between parents and their kids. That’s part of the lasting draw. Heck, for so many, that is the lasting draw. It is what kept them coming back, week after week, long before the winning made it a bit more enjoyable.
It’s the connection to loved ones — both those here and those who have since passed. For Rice. For Waterman. And for Keith Smith, the man who led this story and who has journaled it all since his father slipped into a coma mere days before Mahomes took over.
Smith’s father died before watching No. 15 throwing a pass. Man, he wishes he could’ve seen this guy play.
A few years ago, Smith received a gift from his wife: Zubaz pants. Just like his father wore.
For Christmas, his daughter upped the ante: Zubaz overalls.
Smith has a new game-day outfit.
“Some of the ugliest darn things I’ve ever seen,” Smith said. “But I have to wear them.”
Rice, the San Antonio resident, recently visited Kansas City with his wife, who is 7 months pregnant. They took a tour of GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium over the holidays.
Back home, he hung the picture of he and his father at their last Chiefs game together — the heart-wrenching playoff loss to the Titans — in the same room where he now watches on Sundays.
“That game sucked,” he said, “but it’s now one of my fondest memories.”
Rice held a Super Bowl party four years ago, when Mahomes hoisted the Lombardi Trophy for the first time. After his friends left, his mom stayed behind.
They spent the next hour crying.
On the way out of Kansas City last Christmas, Rice and his wife made a stop at the team’s pro shop. They wanted to make sure they stocked up on a couple of items.
Chiefs baby outfits.
