The Moment It Turned

Jan 07, 2009, 10:35:06 AM by Bob Gretz - FAQ

On Tuesday at the Chiefs practice facility there was a good bye ceremony for Carl Peterson. It was a happy affair as members of the organization and other friends took a moment to celebrate Peterson’s twenty years in charge of the franchise.

As Peterson spoke, there were dozens of memories that came to mind about what has happened over the last two decades with Lamar Hunt’s baby. Peterson pumped life back into the Chiefs. The franchise was not just troubled, it was forgotten. Apathy had set in, and the only thing worse than an angry fan is one who no longer cares.

That’s where the Kansas City Chiefs were in December of 1988 when Hunt introduced the man from Philadelphia who was coming in to change the team’s direction. It didn’t take long for Peterson to make the Chiefs relevant again. He hired Marty Schottenheimer, they drafted Derrick Thomas and together that trio changed the culture of the organization and made the Chiefs No. 1 in the city, a position they still hold.

And there was one moment when the Chiefs and Kansas City announced they were back as a contender.

It happened on October 7, 1991. The site was Arrowhead Stadium and the Truman Sports Complex. The event was Monday night football. The opponent was the Buffalo Bills.

Anyone who was there that night will never forget the raw emotions that poured forth in front of a national television audience. It was the Chiefs Nation re-introducing itself to the rest of the football watching world. This was more than a game. It was a moment that would reverberate for many years. It was this night when Arrowhead became the most feared stadium in the NFL.

It started long before kickoff. This was the first Monday night game in Kansas City since 1983, and that game had been the first since 1977. The guys from ABC had forgotten Arrowhead and playing under the lights was something the Chiefs only did during the pre-season. The season before, the Chiefs had actually made the playoffs, losing in Miami when Nick Lowery missed a field goal that would have won the game against the Dolphins.

The Chiefs were 3-2 coming into the game, with a two-game winning streak. Their opponent came into the game 5-0, after winning their first games of the season by 14, 18, three, seven and 15 points. The Bills were coming off the first of four consecutive Super Bowl defeats; the Scott Norwood wide right kick that allowed the New York Giants to win Super Bowl XXV.

Buffalo was running its K-Gun offense with quarterback Jim Kelly in the shotgun, Thurman Thomas in the backfield and receivers like Andre Reed, Don Beebe and James Lofton spread all over the field. By the time that ‘91 season was over, the Bills averaged 391 offensive yards per game and scored 55 offensive touchdowns.

On this night, that offensive firepower did not matter a wit. Kelly was forced out of the K-Gun offense because of the noise inside Arrowhead Stadium. It began long before kickoff, reached several major crescendos before a tackle had been made. Once the game began, the noise did not stop. The 76,120 fans inside the stadium never sat down and they never shut up.

If you put audio into a computer program so that you can see the sound, generally it goes in an up and down pattern. At least the sound of a radio crew doing a football game does. As the announcers talk, there are peaks and there are valleys. On this night, the audio tape of Kevin Harlan and Len Dawson doing the game on the Chiefs Radio Network never had valleys. There was a hum, a buzz, a never ending drone that came from the crowd.

The ABC Monday night crew of Al Michaels, Frank Gifford and Dan Dierdorf were stunned by the crowd noise. They were overwhelmed by the tailgate fog that had crept over the lip of Arrowhead in the pre-game, with the sweet smell of Kansas City BBQ settling over the playing field.

The Bills were stunned and overwhelmed. The Chiefs and especially its defense, fed off that noise. They went after Kelly like dogs after a bone. One sack, two sacks, six sacks in all. They forced one fumble, two fumbles, five fumbles in all. The Bills had nine possessions. They ended this way: fumble, punt, field goal, field goal, punt, fumble, fumble and fumble.

A Buffalo team that averaged 28.6 points per game that season, finished with only a pair of Norwood field goals. For the Chiefs, Christian Okoye ran for 130 yards and a pair of touchdowns, and rookie Harvey Williams had 103 yards.

It will go down in my book as one of the two or three major highlights of the 1990s. The culture of the organization, heck the culture of the Kansas City sports fan had been changed. The Chiefs were now contenders and their fans answered with the type of passion that would make Arrowhead a feared venue for many years to come.

We can thank Carl Peterson for that.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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A former beat reporter who covered the Pittsburgh Steelers during their glory years, Gretz covered the Chiefs for the Kansas City Star for nine years. He is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame's Board of Selectors. He has been the senior columnist for the Chiefs web site since its inception.