When the Kansas City Chiefs played a home game in Fort Worth: Tickets were $1.50
Back in 1964, the Kansas City Chiefs played a home pro football game here.
The site: Farrington Field.
Instead of 80,000, the crowd was 19,400.
Two years after they moved to Kansas City from Dallas and two seasons before they played in the first Super Bowl, the Chiefs came back to their former home state for a preseason game.
Coach Hank Stram, a future Super Bowl champion, paced the sidelines of a high school stadium here as the Chiefs played a homecoming game of sorts.
The Chiefs beat the Denver Broncos 14-10 in a game that by newspaper descriptions was every bit as lazy as a 1960s summer night.
The Dallas Morning News’ Sam Blair wrote: “The game actually lasted two and a half hours. It seemed like two and a half days.”
You could stand in a Farrington Field end zone for $1.50.
Sports promoter Tommy Mercer had hoped to draw more fans. He and Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt were partners in a minor league baseball team.
With star quarterback Len Dawson and running back Curtis McClinton sidelined, fullback Mack Lee Hill’s rushing set up two Chiefs touchdowns by backup quarterback Eddie Wilson.
TV highlights from the game are now included in the WBAP-TV (now KXAS/Channel 5) collection donated to the Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas library.
The highlights include two scenes of Stram, then a babyfaced former SMU assistant coach who took the job coaching the Texans and Chiefs and wound up as a Super Bowl champion with a 20-year career as a TV and radio color analyst.
It was the last of three American Football League games — now the AFC — in Farrington Field.
In 1961 and 1962, when the Chiefs were still playing in the Cotton Bowl as the Dallas Texans, they played preseason games against the Broncos in Fort Worth.
In 1961, the Texans won 29-27 before a crowd of 21,700. In 1962, the Broncos won 27-24 before 18,000 fans in 1962.
That’s not the stadium record: 26,000 fans saw Paschal and North Side high schools in 1946.
(And those weren’t even the first pro football games in Fort Worth. Today’s Arizona Cardinals, then playing in Chicago, visited LaGrave Field in north Fort Worth in 1930 and defeated a host “Southwest All-Stars” college team, 20-0.)
The 1962 game in Fort Worth even has a little paragraph in pro football history.
The Broncos’ victory was the very first regularly scheduled game decided by sudden-death overtime. (The AFL was testing it that year after both leagues had used it for playoff games.)
The Broncos’ Gene Mingo, who never played college football, caught a fourth-quarter touchdown pass, kicked the tying extra point and then kicked the winning 17-yard field goal 6:23 into overtime, helping Denver overcome two touchdown passes by Texans quarterback Len Dawson.
In a 1998 interview, he remembered that night in Fort Worth.
”The overtime game?” he asked. “Sure I remember. None of us had ever played an overtime before. . . . It was in a big concrete stadium with wooden bleacher seats, right? Big place for high schools.”
Programs from Fort Worth’s pro games now sell on eBay for $395.
In all, three pro football teams have played at least one game in Fort Worth.
The Dallas Cowboys are not among them.
Civic leaders knew even then where the future lay. Star-Telegram Publisher Amon G. Carter Jr. and others were dealing to build a $9.5 million domed stadium in Arlington for football and baseball.
It only took 45 years.
