Being a fan of any sports team, much less a bad one like the Kansas City Chiefs were when I was a kid was a much different experience than it is today. There were very few ways to really follow a team in those days, especially one located out of town. Yes, some of us were actually forced to navigate life without the internet!
Game days were particularly frustrating for me—especially if the Chiefs game wasn’t being shown on TV here in St. Louis. Occasionally, I’d drain down the battery of my mother’s Ford Pinto, scanning the radio dial in hopes of picking up a distant broadcast of their game.
Even if I could find the game, more often than not, it was an exercise in futility listening through the crackly reception that was out-of-state AM radio.
This went on for years until one day, it occurred to me:
Why don’t I just call Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City during the game?
Surely someone at the stadium would pick up and give me the scoring update I so craved.
Seldom does a moment of clarity such as this come to a 12-year-old, so off I ventured to the county library to find a Kansas City phone book! (Yes, this is how we found information back in the day without the Internet).
There it was, Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City Missouri.
(816) 920-9300
Let me back up a bit here—you might be wondering why a kid who grew up in St. Louis, a city with it’s own football team, albeit the St. Louis football Cardinals, had become such a rabid fan of another NFL team located all the way across the state, in a city he’d never lived in or even been to.
I still wonder about that sometimes myself, actually
I think Jerry Seinfeld summed it up best:
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. You're actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt; they hate him now. Boo! Different shirt! Boo!”
Whatever it was—their uniforms or just the fact that they weren’t the home town “Big Red”, it consumed me every fall Sunday afternoon growing up. Given the details of what you’re about to read, one might even say it was... an obsession.
Back to the phone book---I hatched my plan. I’d wait until my mother was otherwise occupied in order to have some private time on my parents bedroom phone. If memory serves me, the Chiefs were at home, at Arrowhead on this particular Sunday afternoon.
They were playing the Detroit Lions in a meaningless (to most “fans”) matchup of two very mediocre teams. Still, as the once-in-every-blue-moon NFL update on the network TV “game of the week” indicated, the Chiefs game was tied at 21-21...and going into overtime!
It was time to make my move!
Dialing slowly, my fingers shaking with a combination of nervousness and excitement, I made the first, in what would become a series of game day phone calls to Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.
One ring....two rings....three rings...
Maybe I had miscalculated. maybe no one would pick up on a....
“Hello, Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Chiefs!”
“Ummm....hello," I said, my voice cracking.
“Yes, this is Arrowhead Stadium, may I help you?”
“Yes...I have a question about the game".
“Hold please for operations”.
"Operations”...now I was getting somewhere! I remember thinking they might actually be patching me down to the field! Who knows, maybe the next voice I hear might be the great Len Dawson himself!
“Operations...”
“Oh....hello. Ummm.....could you tell me what the score of the game is?
“What?”
“The score, I heard it’s in overtime”
“Hang on”
And hang on I did...for what seemed like an hour. Finally I heard the phone come back to life.
“Chiefs just won, 24-21 in overtime, Jan kicked the field goal”.
The great Jan Stenerud came through, this time. (1971 Chiefs-Dolphins reference).
“Thanks a lot! Oh, and can you tell me how they won it?”
And he did, in great detail.
“Thanks a lot! Hey, do you think I could call back sometime and get another update?”
“Yeah, that’s fine”
Click
I did call back too, several times, always (at least I think) talking to the same guy in “operations”.
This went on for several more weeks until one day I got home from school and I noticed my mother was home early from her job at a local college.
“Come in here to the kitchen, I want to talk to you”, she said with all the warmth of an overworked DMV clerk.
She wasn’t kidding around either. I knew this look and I knew better than to try stall or sweet talk my way out of whatever it was she was upset about. My mother was the disciplinarian in our house and she wasn’t someone you “played” in any way, shape or form. Whatever was wrong, I knew it wasn’t good.
When I entered the kitchen there she was, looking as though she were a federal prosecutor preparing to make her opening statement. Before her were groupings of neatly folded pieces of paper, so many actually, that they took up the entire kitchen table.
It seems that month’s phone bill had arrived.
“Do you have any idea how all of these calls to Kansas City, to the same number were made from this house, on all of these dates?”
There was no talking my way out of this one---the evidence in this case was, as they say, “overwhelming”.
“Yeah...ummm... those were the calls I made to find out the score of the Chiefs games, “ I said.
The look on her face at that moment spoke a thousand words, and none of them were kind or understanding.
“You did what,” she asked, shushing my older brother from the adjacent living room who had burst out laughing when he heard my “explanation”.
The interrogation went on for a while, even involving a phone call to my father at work, who I could tell was stifling a laugh as my mother handed me the phone.
“Hi Dad”, I said glumly.
“All this over the Chiefs game?” he said with a chuckle. “We could fly to Kansas City and sit behind the sideline at a game for what all this is going to cost me...I mean YOU!”
And cost me it did, in more ways than one. Suffice it to say, I never got another live scoring update from my buddy in “operations” at Arrowhead Stadium.
Such is the price a young boy pays for devotion to his team I suppose.
Let’s Go Chiefs!