To know Smokey Stover was to know how it all started for the franchise known as the Kansas City Chiefs. Stover, who passed away recently at the age of 86 in Louisiana, was a story-teller with few equals when it came to regaling how Lamar Hunt's franchise got itself off the ground and made it all the way to the first Super Bowl.
Stover's professional football career was a testament to hard plugging, a tribute to football in a simpler time, where athletes were not homogenized, and cream rises.
On July 5, 1960, Stewart Stover, whose nickname, Smokey, came from an early comic strip, and 128 players reported to Dallas' Jesuit High School for the new Dallas Texans' first training camp.
He was an undersized but hard-hitting linebacker out of Northeast Louisiana College (now known as Louisiana-Monroe) who had expected to start a career in the oil business. He received a recommendation from his coach, Jack Rowen, and had been invited to attend the Texans' first tryout camp by Will Walls, a Texans' scout who had sent out feelers to various colleges looking for players for the new league.
Stover's story about that first tryout has become legend. After only an hour of calisthenics, players began dropping out – as many as 60 calling it quits that first day.
Through it all, Stover hung on, making sure to hide from his coaches the weight he was losing from the strenuous workouts, placing 10-pound weights under each arm for the final weigh-ins. He was to play linebacker, and even at a time players at that position were not the size they are today, his weight had dropped to just above 200 pounds. It was a stretch to say he would make it.
But when official play began for his new team in the new league, Stover found himself as the starting right linebacker. In his and the organization's first ever pre-season game against Oakland, he immediately excelled, and when the regular season began in Los Angeles, he was paired with Walt Corey and middle linebacker and future all-pro Sherrill Headrick. With the news, he called his wife and told her to pack their belongings and their young child and come to Dallas and find an apartment. He had made it.
Later, his stories about Headrick, known around the league as "Psycho," would make for hilarious conversations when he and his teammates gathered to talk about the old days.
While Stover was out of the starting lineup by 1962, he remained an important contributor to the team's success for four more years. He played on championship teams in 1962 and 1966 and in what is now known as Super Bowl I. Even after his departure from the Chiefs, he played one more year in Canada for the Grey Cup champion Hamilton Tiger Cats. He is the only NFL player to play in both the Super Bowl and Grey Cup championships in the same calendar year.
Along the way, he had earned his Master's degree in geology during the offseason when he played for Kansas City.
When the Chiefs' history department was established in 2010, Stover became the go-to guy for information on the club's early days with his photographic memory of players and events.
As the franchise's first historian, I counted heavily on him to fill in moments from those days and, at the same time, to identify long-gone players from aged photographs we had in the archives. He was especially helpful in aiding the Chiefs' campaign to have his fellow teammate and Louisianan, Johnny Robinson, recognized as an inductee to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was a perennial attendee at the Chiefs' legacy weekend in Kansas City.
Professional sports can be a melancholy business because an athlete's career compresses much of life into a short span. But Smokey Stover was never the melancholy sort. He continued to remember his days in Dallas and Kansas City with fondness, speaking to the many authors who penned stories on the American Football League and its history.
As his life and career would show, Smokey Stover was a warm-blooded man with strong feelings on the Kansas City Chiefs, his family, his faith, and the events that punctuated the early days of the American Football League.
