I was born in the summer of 1959, the same week that The Chiefs professional football team was born. It was conceived in Dallas by Lamar Hunt; the name on their birth certificate was Dallas Texans. The next year, when I was starting to crawl and walk and fall, they were playing their first season and winning. High achievers from the start, they made it into the playoffs of the American Football League by their third season. The next year, they moved to Kansas City at the invitation of Mayor H. Roe Bartle, who answered to the nickname “chief,” which inspired the team’s new name.
As they grew, they changed, and so did the league. The second half of the 1960s saw the AFL-NFL merger, the first Super Bowl (when the Chiefs lost to the Green Bay Packers), and Super Bowl IV in New Orleans where the Chiefs first became champions. It was followed by a fifty-year drought including the next 22 years when they only made it to five playoff games, losing four of them; and from 1994 to 2017, they played ten more, losing nine. Then came a seismic change. For the past seven years they played in consecutive league championship games, winning seventeen out of twenty playoff games. In summary: four playoff victories in the four seasons leading up to the first Super Bowl victory, only four over the next forty-eight years, and seventeen in the last seven seasons. The wait between IV and LIV was long, but the dominance between LIV and LIX is nothing short of amazing.
Lamar Hunt was a creative thinker who pursued dreams that others couldn’t imagine. He sought Tom Landry and Bud Wilkinson as his team’s first coach but, when they turned him down, he took a chance on an assistant University of Miami coach, Hank Stram. In the team’s first decade, with the likes of Curtis McClinton, Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, Ed Budde, Bobby Bell, Otis Taylor, and Willie Lanier matriculating down the field, fans had lots to cheer. As things shifted, Municipal Stadium to Arrowhead, Warpaint to KC Wolf, Monday and Thursday night as well as Sunday, there was a string of coaches, players, and front office personalities; some were famous and others infamous in trying to reach for the stars and shape the kingdom. But now, it is realized with other names that shine brightly: Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, Chris Jones, Xavier Worthy, George Karlaftis, Kareem Hunt, Nick Bolton, Harrison Butker, Brett Veach, Steve Spagnuolo, and many more. Chiefs’ kingdom has come as we celebrate fifty-nine.
Numerologists contend that 59 is a powerful number with significant spiritual meaning, a sign of growth, transformation, and service to community. “Fifty-nine” calls us to trust the process, embrace the experience, and achieve the dream that beckons us to a greater level of purpose or understanding. It suggests that we can soar even higher than eagles and land in a kingdom beyond what’s known, a place only imagined by most thinkers and dreamers. Some people in the United States see fifty-nine as a sign of completeness or wholeness since Alaska and Hawaii became our 49th and 50th states in 1959. The last Chiefs player to wear #59 for a season was named Joshua (Yeshua in Hebrew), the name of the biblical patriarch who led the chosen people into the promised land and of Jesus who leads us into glory.
If we consider the sixty-six years since 1959, minus the seven that the Chiefs played in Super Bowls, we’re left with fifty-nine years that we envied fans of the Packers, Steelers, Forty-niners, Cowboys, Broncos, and especially the Patriots, as we watched them win multiple and consecutive championships. This weekend it’s awfully fun to be where they were—and maybe even a step beyond. Though I admit that my ponderings here are a bit frenzied, the Super Bowl, as our hometown team stands on the brink of historical greatness, can cause fans to think in uncanny ways. I guess what I’m saying is: appreciate all that’s happened since 1959 and all that’s led up to SB-LIX. Enjoy fifty-nine!
