Cowboy hats, chaps, horses on Broadway: the story of Kansas City’s first NFL team

Long before the still-unfurling Magical Mystery Tour of Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes and Co. … decades prior to Hank Stram’s “Wild West Variety Show,” as John Facenda and NFL Films called the Chiefs of the late 1960s … Kansas City’s first NFL team was a traveling circus in its own right.

Born a century ago for a $500 entrance fee as the Kansas City Blues and promptly re-branded as the Cowboys, the nomadic franchise that lasted only three seasons emphatically embraced the revised nickname.

When they traveled to Hartford, Connecticut to play on Halloween in 1926, the Cowboys arrived with what the Pro Football Hall of Fame called “costumes” — and what the Hartford Courant newspaper called “a carload of ten gallon hats and high-heeled, gorgeously decorated boots” in which they “paraded” around town.

The same paper a year before referred to the team as “one of the most picturesque combinations that has ever stepped onto a gridiron. Wherever the team goes it dresses in the fashion made famous by our Tom Mixes and Bill Harts of the (silent-movie) screen.

“Each player dresses in approved Western frontier style, although it is not known whether or not they carry six shooters. “

Then there was New York in 1925, when several players wore cowboy hats and chaps and rode horses down Broadway.

“Right through the heart of New York,” Joe Guyon, one of two Pro Football Hall of Famers on those Kansas City teams, told The Atlanta Constitution years later.

Added Steve Owen, who went on to be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a coach: “The horse I rode got a good workout. I should have been carrying him; I weighed 230 pounds.”

A team made up largely of Midwesterners, and labeled as having “the real spirit of the sagebrush country,” as one New York paper surmised, played along with the stereotyping at about every turn — exaggerated as the depictions might have been.

A New York Daily News photo captured the players “taking a squint at our skyscrapers.” The Brooklyn Daily Times noted they had an “ardent supporter” that Sunday, in entertainer Will Rogers — who as a former cowboy would present “the Kansas City eleven with a silver football.”

A wire-service report of the Cowboys’ 9-3 loss noted that their “brilliant entrance” into the Polo Grounds included manager Leroy Andrews “whirling a lariat.”

“Their exit was not so spectacular,” the report read. “They crept out quietly in the dusk so that nobody would notice them.”

Much like, alas, the franchise itself.

‘Sensations wherever they played’

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Blues-Cowboys played just six home games in three seasons and once played 17 straight games — including the entire 1925 season — on the road.

After losing their first three games in 1924, on Oct. 26 they won their home debut 23-7 against Jim Thorpe and the Rock Island Independents.

In the wake of mustering a 4-12-1 record in those first two campaigns, though, the Cowboys were 8-3 in 1926 and finished fourth in a then-22-team NFL. And the team apparently had enormous appeal around the country.

More than 35,000 people attended that 1925 game at the Polo Grounds. The Star wrote that a Philadelphia expert believed the Cowboys had become so “nationally prominent that the most appetizing game possible that year, if it could have been arranged, would have been between the Cowboys and Knute Rockne’s Four Horsemen unit at Notre Dame.”

“They were sensations,” The Star wrote, “wherever they played.”

Everywhere, that is, but Kansas City.

Seldom, if ever, did more than a few thousand fans show up at 16,000-seat Muehlebach Field (which later grew into Municipal Stadium, the first home of the Chiefs).

The team did what it could to generate interest, with ample advertising in local newspapers, tickets just over $1, pre-game events (such as soccer competitions), the addition of a football-specific scoreboard to display downs and score, and a new frontier of entertainment for the times.

When the Cowboys played host to the Los Angeles Buccaneers in 1926, billed through ads as “The Football Classic of the Middle-West!” the Associated Press article in newspapers around the country was more focused on the spectacle than details of the home team’s 7-3 win.

“The game was given a collegiate atmosphere when two cheer leaders, formerly of the University of Missouri, tainted their amateur standing by leading 3,000 frenzied fans in organized cheering, believed to be an innovation in ‘pro’ football games,” the AP wrote. “The crowd yelled their cheers from printed formulae on the programs, and by the second half gave a good imitation of a college bleacher in action.”

Despite The Star noting there was “real pleading” that day in the 3,000 voices often shouting “hold that line,” the reporter was more struck by the smallish crowd, again, and “the total absence of that wild, rabid, expectant spirit of a partisan crowd.”

At home again a week later, on Dec. 12, 1926, the Cowboys beat the Duluth Eskimos 12-7 in what proved to be their last game — the embryonic NFL would soon winnow down the product to 12 teams.

According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, then-commissioner Joe Carr “decided to secure the NFL’s future by eliminating the financially weaker teams and consolidating the quality players onto a limited number of more successful teams … The center of gravity of the league left the Midwest, where the NFL had started, and began to emerge in the large cities of the East.”

The Star reported that team president and co-owner Maurice R. Smith sold the KC players to the New York Giants and the franchise to the re-forming Cleveland Bulldogs. Years later, Smith said he still had a copy of a letter from Carr that said the Cleveland team could be moved back to Kansas City any time local owners wanted to do so.

But the Bulldogs went defunct after 1927.

“That assurance no longer has any legal value,” The Star wrote in 1959. “But (Smith) has kept it, and he believes that if someone were to become interested in an (NFL franchise) here it might carry some weight.

“At least it would prove the city has had its bid on file for the longest time.”

Four years later, Lamar Hunt moved his Dallas Texans of the AFL to Kansas City. With Hunt as a vital cog in the process, the AFL-NFL merger culminated in 1970 to give KC its first presence in the league since 1926 ... and a franchise that is an enormous part of the city’s very identity.

‘A menace to football’

Given the immense popularity of the Chiefs today and their ambitions to be known not merely as America’s Team but the World’s Team, it seems unfathomable that the city didn’t then support an NFL team enough to sustain it.

But there also were infinite reasons why it was a radically different scene then, including the cost and logistical limitations of travel to a rather remote location and, at the time, the popularity of the college game vs. “pro” football as a cultural crudity.

Weeks before the Blues played their first game in 1924, The Star (without a byline) wrote “in this writer’s opinion, there is no call for professional football anywhere. … Away from high schools and colleges, the game loses all its attraction and all its fine spirit. …

“Professional football makes a home for the tramp athlete, the alibi athlete and the disgruntled or flunking high school and college athlete.”

The “pro” version, the writer concluded, was nothing less than “a menace to football.”

Such thinking seems quaint now. But it wasn’t uncommon at the time.

Out of that flux over a period of generations, though, the game would surpass baseball as America’s game — also the title of my friend Michael MacCambridge’s fantastic book about the rise of the sport.

And with four Super Bowl berths in five seasons, three championships in that span and a 5-0 record going into this weekend’s game against the San Francisco 49ers, no team today is capturing the imagination of the public like the Chiefs — on a scale that would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.

In the context of the times, though, our dear, departed first NFL team was a worthy predecessor.

Even if more so about anywhere but here.