'69 Chiefs by Michael MacCambridge

Author:Michael MacCambridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2019-10-16T19:58:23+00:00

Yet for all his skills, there was a naiveté to Holmes. Johnny Robinson had criticized him for being out of shape after a game in 1968. “You’ve got all this talent,” Robinson said. “But you’re taking money off my table!” Holmes was not necessarily the player who broke curfew most frequently, but he was certainly the one who got caught most often. “I love Robert,” said one teammate. “But to a great extent, he had the mentality of a 13-year-old.”

Waiting in the wings was rookie Ed Podolak, who made the active roster after the kick-return terror Noland “Super Gnat” Smith was injured in the preseason and, later, claimed by the San Francisco 49ers. Podolak would become the team’s leading rusher in the years ahead, but in 1969 was limited to kick return duty.

There were only three wide receivers on the forty-man roster, and that didn’t change, even when Otis Taylor missed three games in the middle of the season. Frank Pitts was fast and deceptive, a whippet at 6’2”, just a shade under 200 pounds; Gloster Richardson was more compact and solidly built than Pitts.

But Taylor was the focal point, the one player on the offense who could be, in the coaches’ parlance, a “difference-maker.” His body and skills were like a message from the future. (Fifteen years later, when the venerable personnel man Don Klosterman saw Jerry Rice for the first time, he said the person he thought of was Otis Taylor.)

Lithe, well-built, and broad-shouldered, Taylor emanated a sense of potentiality. He even looked different. Rather than the standard double-bar facemask with the two vertical connectors, he stacked two single bars together, for a facemask that was unique in professional football. His gait was distinctive as well, less of a pumping run than a graceful, loping prance, a sprinter’s fluid movements with toes barely glancing on the turf, combined with a dollop of showmanship. It must have felt good to be able to run that fast.

Taylor also had his pregame superstitions. Before each contest, he’d take off his wedding ring, hand it to Bobby Yarborough, and watch the equipment manager tie it to a lace on his right shoe, where it would remain until the end of the game.

The Chiefs offensive line was the largest and most formidable in the AFL. Much of the credit went to their composed, precise position coach, Bill Walsh, known as “Fatback” or “Butter Bean” to his players. Though another man named Bill Walsh would later lead the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl titles, this Bill Walsh was a successful coach in his own right, intent on relating the precision of the fine movements in the physical ballet of line play.

“You always need to be gaining ground with your first step,” was one of Walsh’s mottoes. While linemen on other teams might use a jab-step technique, making their first step behind them to get more power when they fired off at their defender, Walsh’s key coaching point was that the extra velocity on the hit wasn’t worth surrendering the real estate.

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