On Saturday, by surprise, I got some vintage shirts in the mail.
The shirts were mine, but I hadn’t thought about them in more than 25 years.
Mom sent them. She does this occasionally — gathers up from the back corner of some forgotten closet an armload of clothes from my adolescence and ships them out to me. Sometimes we keep them.
There’s always at least one Kansas City Chiefs shirt in the bunch. As people who have followed my writing for any period of time know — I’m a pro football obsessive, and I feel bad about it.
I wrote about that obsession and my ambivalence toward it several years ago in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in an essay I’m still proud of whose thesis, roughly, is “we tell ourselves that players ‘know the risks,’ but the terms of the deal (our understanding of those risks) have changed.”
A writer with the courage of his convictions might have given up the NFL. I am not that writer. My team has the world’s greatest quarterback and has been to two Super Bowls and four straight conference championships.
Look, I would probably continue to watch even we were still running Christian Okoye up the middle for three-and-a-half yards a play. But the presence of the league’s best player on my hometown team has made it easier to tuck the ethical concerns in the back corner of the closet my mother pulled those shirts from.
I mostly don’t sit down during the games. My son says “Dad, don’t yell this time.” I invariably do. I am a multiply-degreed college professor who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and watches his childhood team with a regrettable rabid intensity.
Now that I’ve postponed the question (until the Rapture, if not later) of the ethics of watching and thereby participating in America’s Unique and Brutal Spectacle, I can turn to a much easier one: what should the Kansas City Chiefs’ new name be?
It’s pretty clear a change will come — though maybe not as quickly as it should. Now that the Washington Commanders have rid themselves of a literal racial slur, and that Cleveland’s major-league baseball club switched to “Guardians,” eliminating its racist cartoon mascot, the Chiefs have no P.R. cover left.1
They began to make quiet moves in this direction last year, when they re-retired “Warpaint,” the horse who was ridden up and down the field after each Kansas City score. They also changed the name of the home field from “Arrowhead Stadium” to “GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.” Whatever the stadium is called, the organization has banned fans’ wearing Native American headdress to watch games there.
The team has even tried to encourage fans to alter the tomahawk chop (in which I have participated, enthusiastically, in the past) into the “Arrowhead Chop,” performing the chopping motion with a closed fist rather than an open hand.
This has not been widely adopted.
I know there will be plenty of carping from back home about the “wokeness” of even entertaining this suggestion and let’s just be clear: I’m not here to argue for the rightness of a name change. I take that as read.
“Chiefs” is simply not defensible. The argument that the name is one that “honors” Native American heritage and the fact that the organization has for a decade convened an “American Indian Working Group” to consult on treating Native imagery with respect, are belied by the existence of the aforementioned chop, and the pregame war drum, and this guy:
There is some history behind why the Chiefs are called the Chiefs, and it has nothing to do with the area’s history of having once been occupied Native tribes. The Osage were driven out in 1825, the Otoe-Missouria were gone by the 1850s, and “[t]here are no federally-recognized tribes in Missouri today.”
The “Chiefs” are called the “Chiefs” in honor of this guy:
That’s H. Roe Bartle, whom most know today as the namesake of Bartle Hall, the City’s downtown convention center. (This and other photos are taken from a 1956 Saturday Evening Post story that ran the year after he was sworn in as mayor, featuring a subhed that would probably not be published today:)
He was sworn in on Opening Day of the 1955 baseball season, the first for the Kansas City Athletics. As a man of influence in the community, Bartle — known around town as “Chief” — had been instrumental in bringing the A’s from Philadelphia.
When Lamar Hunt — founder of the American Football League’s Dallas Texans, eventual coiner of “Super Bowl,” and developer of Worlds of Fun, my childhood amusement park — moved his team to Kansas City and out from under the shadow of the Cowboys, he thought at first he might keep the name “Texans.” Once the folly of that approach was pointed out, he didn’t convene a focus group, he picked a name flattering to the man who had lured him to Kansas City: “Chief” Bartle.
Bartle was known as “Chief” because of his influence. This Post article calls him “the greatest oratorical money-snatcher in America.” But he was also called “Chief” because he liked to play dress-up:
Here he is in 1929, as “chief of the Mic-O-Says” a pulled-from-thin-air name for a local Boy Scout tribe. “Many Kansas Cityans [sic] think he is merely a big, windy Boy Scout,” the Post writer tells us, later adding that Bartle loved the annual Scout gatherings, at which he “paraded on horseback in silver spangles [and] war-danced as Chief Mic-O-Say in an Indian headdress six feet long.”
In this sense, the Kansas City Chiefs and their fans are honoring a heritage, in that their namesake was obsessed with a cartoon pastiche of Native American culture that had nothing at all to do with the original inhabitants of the land that made him rich.
An Earnest Proposal
The Chiefs can change their name to something that more accurately reflects — that has anything at all to do with — Kansas City. As a bonus they can continue to honor their original namesake.
Which brings me to a Snickers commercial from the era back when I wore those shirts that Mom sent me:
Who ARE the Chefs? Why not the mascot of the football team of a city known for its appetites?
This description of Bartle sounds like a lot of Chiefs fans I know:
“The mayor needs plenty of space. He weighs 300 pounds, stands six feet three, and speaks in a mating-moose voice audible for an eighth of a mile. He eats two-pound steaks and picked beets for breakfast…”
Heck, he sounds like Kansas City coach Andy Reid.
What’s the one thing every home game telecast includes is multiple shots of the tailgating scene in the stadium parking lot with its elaborate gameday preparations and prodigious meat plates.
Is it a little weird to take the team name from a commercial? No weirder than Ted Lasso becoming a successful TV series! At first I thought this was kind of a dumb idea, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes:
Beat those arrowheads into spatulas!
Keep the colors (BBQ sauce is red)!
This guy can still do his shtick: turn those arrows into BBQ forks!
Instead of the “Arrowhead Chop” we can do some sort of exaggerated eating motion (which most of us are doing during games anyway)!
Friends, it’s so simple, it can work.
Have another idea? Leave it here!
To be clear, “lack of PR cover is not why I think they should change the name. It’s the right thing to do.
This was a total HOOT! You have grandly exhibited your ability to amuse and enlighten those of us lacking the fine nuances of a football enlightenment.
Knowing some of the other things you like, how about the KC CASH or the KC BLUES or the KC RIBS?