Shortly before kickoff at what became known as the first , Bobby Bell and Buck Buchanan of the Chiefs gazed into the stands at the Los Angeles Coliseum and were struck by ... the empty spaces.
Despite a local TV blackout, more than 30,000 seats in the then-94,000-seat stadium went unsold for the game billed at the time as the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.
At $12 a ticket, Bell marveled on Sunday at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. The ticket price was only $3 more, he recalled correctly, when the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV here in New Orleans.
Now the face value ranges from $7,500 to $950 a ticket … if you’re lucky enough to get access to buying those. And good luck finding a hotel room at much less per night this weekend here when the Chiefs play Philadelphia seeking an unprecedented Super Bowl three-peat.
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TV commentator Jim Nantz and NFL Hall of Famer Bobby Bell speak after the AFC Championship Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tennessee Titans at Arrowhead Stadium on Jan. 19, 2020, in Kansas City, Missouri.
From the distant past in which no one quite knew what to make of the game to the present where no one can get enough of it, one thing has stayed a constant:
Bell, the Pro Football Hall of Famer and Kansas City treasure, has been to every one of them.
“I’m still around,†he said, smiling. “I’m 84 years old. I’m still walking. I’m still going to all the Super Bowls.â€
It’s an increasingly exclusive club, alas.
Lamar Hunt’s widow, Norma, had gone to every one of the games before her death in June 2023. , the so-called “Sodfather,†had a perfect attendance record until last season.
But photojournalist John Biever has worked the first 58 and expressed a goal to cover 60, and friends Don Crisman, Gregory Eaton and Tom Henschel are planning to be back for this one, too.
Flanker Otis Taylor, left, running back Mike Garrett, center, and fullback Curtis McClinton of the Kansas City Chiefs, pose during a workout in Los Angeles, Calif., Jan. 11, 1967.
Maybe there’s others?
And then there’s Bell, who was drafted by the Chiefs in 1963.
He got his streak started by playing in two of the first four and going to the second and third to support brethren of the upstart and supposedly lesser league founded by Lamar Hunt.
When the AFL’s Jets upset Baltimore in Miami in Super Bowl III, Bell has said he was among numerous AFL players who went in their locker room to congratulate them.
Bell’s pride in the league, though, never was higher than when the 13-point underdog Chiefs clobbered Minnesota 23-7 in New Orleans in 1970 in the last dance of the old AFL before the merger.
If not for Hunt starting the AFL, which was years ahead of the NFL in terms of integration, Bell said “football would not be where it is today, because it gave the opportunity for a lot of Blacks to play.â€
Which brings us to another reason Bell is in New Orleans.
In addition to his role with the Hall of Fame and as a Chiefs Ambassador and generally just engaging anybody who looks his way and even some who don’t, Bell on Monday afternoon had this on his schedule: a Tulane University forum called “Moving the Chains: A conversation about football’s impact on the civil rights movement.â€
Bell could speak to that from any number of angles.
Like his history back home in Shelby, North Carolina, where he grew up in the throes of segregation before he went to the University of Minnesota (and earned his degree in 2015 at 74).
And the discrimination he encountered trying to find a home in a nice Kansas City neighborhood in 1963, when he began a process of going through what he often has said was seeing some 250 houses before he was allowed to buy one.
But the program was to largely revolve around the appalling situation in New Orleans 60 years ago this past January. Virtually as soon as Black players arrived in town for the 1965 AFL All-Star Game, they were stunned by the overt racism:
At the very airport Bell landed at on Sunday, white cab drivers ignored arriving Black players. It was hours before Bell and others got rides. When he finally arrived at the Roosevelt Hotel and went to eat, he and other players were refused service and called despicable names, as Abner Haynes once told me.
“It was really bad,†Bell recalled Sunday.
Experiencing hostility all over the city, Bell and nearly two dozen Black players soon convened in a hotel room.
“We all got together and said, ‘Hey, we don’t need this stuff,’ †he said.
With the support of a number of white players, including Ron Mix, another Hall of Famer who was to participate in the Tulane program, the players voted to boycott the game if it were held in New Orleans.
AFL commissioner Joe Foss responded promptly, and the game was moved to Houston.
As the Pro Football Hall of Fame puts it on its website:
“The stand the AFL and its players took against the city of New Orleans was unprecedented. It ultimately brought about change that was necessary in order for the city to get (an) NFL franchise†two years later.
Or as Tulane describes it: “The boycott … had lasting implications for the civil rights movement within sports.â€
Yet another way that Bell has had a lasting impact — that he somehow keeps adding to.
