KANSAS CITY, Mo. — They are hungry here. And that is a good thing, because there is more barbecue piled up on the outskirts of the Arrowhead Stadium parking lots than in most butcher shops. Kickoff of the Chiefs-Steelers game is less than an hour away. Jeff Freeman has some eating to do.
“You’ve heard about our barbecue, right?” Freeman asks. “Here. Try some.”
No, thank you. Once I start, I won’t stop. Can’t stop. This city was home for me for a year, and it doesn’t take long to fall back into the rhythms of the locals, so fiercely proud of the things that make this city so unique. The food. The passion for music, especially jazz. And the way they absolutely invest themselves, utterly and completely, in their sports teams.
They are not cursed. They are not tortured. They just care. A lot. Beyond the point of reason. Which is, of course, wonderful.
You will see a lot of NFL jerseys at just about any NFL game you attend on Sunday. Plenty of blue and plenty of green spatter the grounds at MetLife Stadium every week. Here, wearing red isn’t just a suggestion, it’s more than just a requirement, it’s very much a part of the legal code.
The Chiefs have toyed with the locals for years. When Marty Schottenheimer was the coach, they won so many regular-season games, won a bunch of AFC West titles, and every year they ran into something — either a cold field-goal kicker (don’t utter the name Lin Elliott around here) or a hot quarterback (John Elway was a particularly villainous guest). Dick Vermeil led them to a 13-3 record one year, and he ran into Peyton Manning’s Colts, who didn’t punt once all day.
The Chiefs played in the very first Super Bowl, and they won the fourth one, and for that there will forever be a bond between town and gown but the search for the second Lombardi Trophy has been adventurous.
The Royals’ ascent … well, that’s been something else.
“If you don’t compete once every couple of years in the NFL,” Freeman says, “you ought to be doing something else. But in baseball, it’s so much harder. What the Royals have done for this city is allowed us to believe again. When I was a kid, in the ‘70s, this was a baseball town, and I thought those days were lost forever.”
Baseball may never have come close to dying in Kansas City, but for years it was in a bad, bad way. Starting in 1995 — a decade after they won their only title, the city’s second — the Royals had losing seasons in 18 out of 19 years. They lost 100 games or more four times, and lost 97 three other times. At a time when it seemed small-market teams had been marginalized off the baseball map, the Royals were the poster team for that imbalance.
Twenty-three straight seasons the Royals drew less than 2 million fans. That may not sound terrible, given Kansas City’s population (about 460,000 in the latest census), but the Royals were always a regional team, bringing in fans from all over the Midwest during their glory years, which stretched from 1976 through 1991 and included seven division titles, two pennants, one title. In those years, 11 times they drew more than 2 million.
And then, wilderness.
There was a night during that barren stretch when I sat with George Brett, the greatest Royal of all, now a long-time team executive, the forever face of this franchise no matter what Eric Hosmer or Lorenzo Cain or Sal Perez may do across the next week and a half. There were maybe 11,000 people inside Kauffman Stadium that night; nobody was going to violate any noise ordinances.
I asked Brett, “Why are you still here? You could live anywhere. There are 20 teams who would hire you in some capacity, and those cities don’t get as cold as this one does. Why here?”
“That’s not me,” he said. “I was here when this was the greatest place in the world to play baseball. And I’m going to be here when that happens again. Because it will happen again. I’m telling you that. I’ll sign my name to it. Mark my words.”
And here they are. All these years later, Kansas City and New York City resume what was occasionally a complicated, and often an intense relationship. The Chiefs and Jets were bitter rivals in the old AFL. The Yankees used to have a farm team in Kansas City; Lou Gehrig played his final game at old Ruppert Stadium, an exhibition on his way to the Mayo Clinic. And, of course, there were the four ALCS the Royals and Yankees played from 1976-80, and an infamous swatch of pine tar.
“Those were baseball games that felt like football games,” Brett said. “All the time.”
Maybe there will be no such animosity attached to the World Series when it begins Tuesday. The denizens of Arrowhead’s tailgating city finally went inside to watch the Chiefs dispatch the Steelers; as they walked you could hear another chant: “LET’S GO ROYALS!”
Yes, even after crushing an entire army of shredded beef and burnt ends, there was a lot of hunger here, inside the Truman Sports Complex. The baseball half lay still and quiet. Not for long. Not by a long shot.
