Fifty years ago, the last time the Kansas City Chiefs were in the Super Bowl, the day was chilly and damp with a wet breeze, so it was good that fans were allowed to bring their own Thermos bottles with hot chocolate.
I remember it well; I was there, as a not-yet-6-year-old, in old Tulane Stadium in New Orleans. Tickets were a lot cheaper back then, concessions were much simpler (and bans on outside supplies less stringent), and the hype was all focused on football, not on halftime extravaganzas and TV ads.
Also different back then was that there still was a big rivalry between, and debate about the relative strengths of, what still were two football leagues. Sure, the New York Jets the year before had defied conventional wisdom and made a case for the quality of play in the American Football League, but most people believed the Jets’ win had been a fluke. The NFL’s Minnesota Vikings entered the game as huge favorites over the AFL’s Chiefs. As an NFL partisan, I remember expecting the Vikes to stomp the Chiefs into the ground.
Five-year-olds choose sports loyalties on rather random, sometimes charming criteria. As a New Orleanian, I was of course a Saints fan, but I had also adopted the Vikings that year because their purple uniforms were my favorite color. I also thought their defensive nickname of the “Purple People Eaters” was funny and cool — and because they had played several games on snow-covered fields that seemed attractively exotic to a Gulf Coast kid who had never felt a single snowflake. Oh — and I also was a huge fan of their quarterback, “Injun Joe” Kapp, with his nickname right out of Tom Sawyer. (Please spare any politically correct objections: That was his nickname, so get over it.)
I went to Tulane Stadium looking forward to drinking the hot chocolate and to seeing Vikings defensive linemen Carl Eller, Alan Page, and Jim Marshall rip the Chiefs apart. The only Chief I liked was defensive back Johnny Robinson, a Louisianan who had played for LSU. For 5-year-olds, these allegiances seem to be of epic importance.
To see the Chiefs build a huge halftime lead was devastating. I didn’t understand, and it hurt. Worse, if I remember right, our Thermos was emptied by halftime. The damp cold and the score (the Vikes had not a single point yet) made that halftime, in memory, seem the longest I ever experienced and still among the most miserable.
The worst body blow, though, came after the Vikings looked like they were rolling in the second half. They had scored; surely, everything would return to normal, and they would begin to dominate. That’s when Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson threw a short pass toward the sideline to Otis Taylor. Taylor caught the ball at almost the exact yard line where our seats were. He slipped a tackle and ran down the sideline for a long touchdown. I remember yelling, yelling, yelling, for a Viking somehow to catch him — and then, making the wish father to the thought, insisting that Taylor must have stepped out of bounds somewhere.
I’ll never forget Taylor sprinting along that sideline. I’ll never forget how angry it made me.
And I don’t remember anything after that, except my father saying that “at least Johnny Robinson had a good game.” (Robinson had recovered a fumble and intercepted a pass.) That was no solace. I was convinced someone must have cheated. That’s how 5-year-olds think.
Injun Joe never played another snap for the Vikings. Tulane Stadium is no more. The AFL merged with the NFL after that game, so there never again would be a clash of leagues or, in a sense, of cultures. As the years have gone by, the games have actually gotten better, but the hype and glitz have gotten absurd. The stakes were clearer back then — and purer. Looking back, I have a sense of that game representing a sort of football innocence lost. The only “wardrobe malfunction” was that the Vikings wore white instead of purple.
Come to think of it, that’s probably why they lost. There must have been a reason. People-eating doesn’t work if you’re not wearing purple.
