‘I almost roasted’: See film of Kansas City Chiefs’, Broncos’ hot 1964 Fort Worth game
Only one pro football team has ever played a home game in Fort Worth.
And it’s not the Dallas Cowboys.
The Kansas City Chiefs are the team: They defeated the Denver Broncos, 14-10, in a 1964 exhibition game on a steamy August night in Farrington Field.
Two seasons before he coached the Chiefs to the first Super Bowl, Hank Stram paced the sidelines of the local high school stadium as the Chiefs — previously the Dallas Texans — played a homecoming game of sorts for 19,400 fans.
“It was hot — I almost roasted,” remembered Tom Hedrick, then the Chiefs’ play-by-play announcer on KCMO radio and later a KDFW/Channel 4 anchor.
“It was not a thing of beauty.”
Farrington’s concrete press box and radio booth were like an oven.
“It was so hot, I took my trousers off,” Hedrick said. “We got by but it wasn’t much of a ballgame.”
I’ve written before about the game, which was, by descriptions, 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.”
It was a spectacle sponsored by Falstaff beer — ad slogan: “For Man Size Pleasure” — and promoted by Fort Worth businessman Tommy Mercer, along with a second Chiefs game in Miami before that city landed a team.
End zone tickets in Farrington sold for $1.50.
Programs now sell on eBay.com for $395.
But here’s what’s new: TV highlights from the game are now viewable in the Portal to Texas History at texashistory.unt.edu, along with other newsfilm archives of the old WBAP-TV (now KXAS/Channel 5).
The highlights include two notable scenes of Stram, then a babyfaced former SMU assistant coach who took the job coaching the Texans and Chiefs for Dallas-based owner Lamar Hunt in 1960.
Stram wound up as a Super Bowl champion with a 20-year career as a TV and radio color analyst.
Fans are shown in several newsfilm scenes along with cheerleaders and band members, all lined up by Mercer to help the game draw a large crowd. Mercer and Hunt were friends and partners in the local minor-league baseball team.
(Disclosure: I worked for Mercer in high school and his later regional minor-league football team, the Fort Worth Braves.)
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.
The Broncos’ Jack Faulkner didn’t know it, but he was in his last weeks as the Denver coach.
It was the last of three American Football League games — now the AFC — at Farrington.
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.
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.)
That year, 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, Mingo remembered that night in Fort Worth.
“It was in a big concrete stadium with wooden bleacher seats, right? Big place for high schools.”
In 1964, the Falstaff beer ads promoted buying tickets to “Fort Worth’s only pro football game.”
It was our last.
