After an incredible and thrilling 2023 Super Bowl win by the Kansas City Chiefs, sportswriters Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd have joined forces to write a book about the team and their journey to success. Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin’ Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback is a deep dive into the relationship between race and football in Kansas City, from the Chiefs’ move to the city in the early 1960s to the activism and engagement of players like Mahomes in the Black Lives Matter era.
In their book, Dent and Dodd explore how the Chiefs’ owner and founder Lamar Hunt hired Black players from HBCU institutions when other teams weren’t doing that. Lamar Hunt was motivated by business, but if you talk to the players they say he was an enlightened man. The Chiefs were able to find market inefficiencies and tap into an untapped market of talented Black players who weren’t getting an opportunity to play in the NFL.
The Chiefs’ story is one of missed opportunities. For most of their history, they never had a franchise quarterback and found their quarterbacks in the backups of other teams. Meanwhile, teams that were defeating the Chiefs in the playoffs had franchise quarterbacks who had been drafted and grown into heroes of that city.
Check out video excerpts from our interviews with Dent and Dodd at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf. Be sure to also check out some other great reads on this topic, including America’s Game: The Epic Story Of How Pro Football Captured A Nation by Michael MacCambridge, Kansas City (as ‘K.C. Loving’) written by Leiber and Stoller, recorded by Little Willie Littlefield (1953), The history behind J.C. Nichols’ development, restrictive covenants in Kansas City, The King of Kings County by Whitney Terrell, and Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development by Kevin Fox Gotham.
