Gridiron Time line 1969 – The Battle for Respect: Super Bowl IV and the Legacy of the AFL

And then the phone rings.

NBC News anchor David Brinkley tells America what comes next.

A federal gambling investigation has swept through through Detroit.

The IRS has arrested a man named Donald Dawson, no relation to Len, in a hotel room confiscating gambling records and $450,000 in cash.

When the investigators pull the phone records, they find calls to a small group of NFL players.

One of the names on that list was Len Dawson.

The report falls on the chief's hotel quarters.

In the words of the Chicago Sun Times like a bottle of acid.

Len Dawson has six days to clear his name and six days to prepare for the Minnesota Vikings, a team that has lost exactly two games all season, a team led by the most feared defense in professional football and a team favored by 13 and a half points.

This is the story of Super Bowl 4, the last war between the two leagues and the coach who called his own highlights and the quarterback who played for his freedom.

Hello, everybody, this is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

There's eight teams and they were nicknamed the Foolish Club by the established NFL.

Now, for six years the two leagues had fought a bitter, expensive war.

They raided each other's rosters, they outbid each other for college stars.

And the NFL called the AFL a Mickey Mouse league.

The AFL called the NFL a monopoly.

The two leagues announced a merger and they would play a common draft.

The National Football Conference and the American Football Conference under a single banner of the NFL.

Now, the merger was supposed to be a formality, a recognition that the NFL was a superior league, generously absorbing its little brother.

Green Bay won the first two Super Bowls by a combined score of 68 to 24.

The narrative held still now.

Then came Super Bowl 3 3.

Joe Namath guaranteed victory and the New York jets beat The Baltimore Colts 16 7.

The AFL had won his first championship, but the NFL establishment called it a fluke.

Namath got lucky.

The Colts had a bad day, excuse after excuse.

The real test would come the next year when the Vikings, the best team in the NFL had produced in over a decade, would face whoever survived in the AFL.

12 Wins, two losses.

The longest single winning streak in the 35 years.

12 Straight they had led the NFL in points, scored 379, the fewest points, allowed just 133.

And they scored 50 or more points in three different games.

Now the defense was anchored by the line they called the Purple People Eaters.

Alan Page, Carl Eller, Jim Marshall and Gary Larson.

The second featured Paul Krause, the future all time interceptions leader, and Bobby Bryant, who had picked off eight passes just that season.

It was not just a good defense, it was a defense people were afraid to play against.

The quarterback was Joe Cap, and unlike anyone in the league, he didn't slide.

He lowered his shoulder.

And when he was voted the Vikings most valuable player, Cap said, There is no one most valuable Viking.

There are 40 most valuable Vikings now.

The Chiefs, by contrast, had limped into the playoffs.

Their quarterback had missed six games with a knee injury.

Their backup quarterback had broken his ankle in the very next week.

And the third string quarterback, a kid named Mike Livingston, won five of his next six starts to keep that season alive.

They finished 11 and three second in the AFL west behind the 121 and 1 Oakland Raiders.

The new playoff format expanded to four teams in its first and only year before the merger sent the Chiefs on the road.

They beat the defending champion Jeps in New York 13 6.

Then they went to Oakland to face a Raiders team that had beaten them seven of the last eight meetings.

In this contest, the Chiefs won 17 7.

They were the champions of the American Football League.

And for the last time.

As it turned out, the AFL championship game would never be played again.

And waiting for them in New Orleans, the Minnesota Vikings, 13 and a half point favorites, the best team in football, the NFL's chosen champion.

Now, to understand why Super Bowl 4 mattered the way it did, you have to understand.

And he arrived in the NFL as a first round talent with a first round arm.

And then he sat.

For three seasons, he sat behind Bobby Lane in Pittsburgh, throwing a total of 45 passes in three years.

There he sat Behind Milt Plum 2 more seasons, 17 more passes, 5 NFL seasons, 62 total passes.

A first round pick buried on the bench.

Do you still want to play football?

Well, Dawson immediately answered yes, and instantly became one of the best quarterbacks in professional football.

In his first season as a starter, he led the league in touchdown passes and yards per attempt.

He'd won three AFL championships and he'd been named AFL Player of the Year.

He was building a Hall of Fame resume, and he was doing it in a league that the NFL still refused to fully respect.

Dawson suffered a knee injury in the second game of the year, and he missed six weeks.

The backup, Jackie Lee, broke his ankle the very next Sunday.

And on November 15, the day before a crucial game against the defending champion Jets, Dawson's father died of a heart attack.

He threw for two touchdowns, and his teammates years later, said they couldn't believe that he even played at all.

Now this is a man preparing for Super Bowl 4.

A quarterback who had been discarded by the NFL.

A quarterback playing through grief.

A quarterback who had spent his entire career fighting.

The idea at the league he played in wasn't good enough.

And now, six days before the biggest game of his life, the national news had just told America his name was found in a federal gambling investigation.

This couldn't be good.

But the facts of the investigation were straightforward.

A Detroit restaurateur named Donald Dawson, nicknamed Dice, had been arrested by IRS agents in a hotel room.

They had found gambling records.

They found $450,000.

And then they pulled his telephone records.

And he found calls to several NFL players, all of whom had lived in Bloomfield, Michigan, at the various points.

Now, one of these players was Len Dawson.

The two men shared a last name, but no relation, and Dawson had known him as a casual acquaintance from his years in the Detroit area.

Now, the calls were social, brief, inconsequential.

But in the context of a federal gambling investigation, the week of the super bowl, the nuance didn't matter.

NBC ran with the story on evening news.

Every newspaper in the country picked it up.

Suddenly, the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs, the face of the AFL in its last stand, was was linked, however tenuously, to an organized gambling ring.

Now, the NFL had been there before.

The league's position was absolute.

Any association with gambling was existential threat to the integrity of the sport.

Now, the Chiefs participation in the super bowl was reportedly discussed at the highest levels in the league of office.

Dawson called a press conference.

Cameras crowded in.

Reporters shouted questions.

And Len Dawson, this man who had sat for five years in the NFL, who had rebuilt his career in a league the establishment mocked, who had buried his father two months earlier and played through it, was now six days from the Super Bowl.

With his reputation under siege, he stood at the microphone and faced them all.

He told the truth.

He did know Donald Dawson as a casual acquaintance, but he never discussed football with him in any appropriate way.

He had never bet on a game, never provided inside information, never done anything that compromised the sport he had given his life to.

He acknowledged that he had exercised poor judgment in even knowing a person like that.

But the NFL investigated, and days later, commissioner Pete Roselle issued a statement.

Lynn Dawson was fully cleared.

There was no evidence of any wrongdoing and he would play in Super Bowl 4.

But the damage, the human damage, was done.

Dawson later said those six days were among the worst of his life.

Had to be agonizing for the quarterback.

Now he was asked if he had ever been so angry that he couldn't sleep.

He paused.

And then he said, let's just say this.

I didn't sleep much that week.

Now, the man who would Start Super Bowl 4 was a man who had spent six days defending his own name and who would now spend 60 minutes minutes of football defending the league he had carried on his back.

The 42 million others watching.

On CBS, a 30 second commercial.

$78,000 And a national anthem by Doc Severinson with Pat O'.

Brien.

And halftime, the Southern University band reenacting the Battle of New Orleans.

Now the weather was wet, the field was slick, and from the opening kickoff, the Kansas City Chiefs played like a team that had something to prove in that game.

The Chiefs took the opening possession and drove, not explosively, but methodically, eight plays, 55 yards.

And they stalled inside the Minnesota 20 yard line.

And Hank Stream sent out the kicker.

Jan Stenroed, a Norwegian who had never seen a football game until he arrived in America on a ski jumping scholarship, drilled a 48 yard field goal, the longest in super bowl history at the time.

And there was three to nothing.

The Chiefs were up.

And that 48 yard field goal, by the way, would stand as a record in the Super bowl for 24 years.

Now Stenrood did it again.

A 32 yard field goal, six to nothing.

And then a 25 yard field goal, nine to nothing.

The AFL's underdogs were up nine points on the NFL's best team, and they hadn't even scored a touchdown yet.

They were moving the ball against these purple people eater defense, but they could not cross a goal line.

They held.

True did Minnesota when they got in the red zone.

Then late in the first half, Hank Stram made the call that would become legend.

NFL Films, for the first time in super bowl history, had placed a wireless microphone on the head coach.

And Hank Stram, flamboyant, brilliant, cocky, wore it on the sidelines with pride.

And then when he looked at the Minnesota defense and saw exactly what he wanted, he didn't just call a play into his headset, he narrated it.

65 Toss, power trap.

Stram said, calling the play just before it happened.

There it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Garrett took the handoff, followed his blockers and walked into the end zone, 16 to nothing.

Chiefs.

Stram grinned on the sidelines and said into the microphone the words that would define his legacy.

Quote, just keep articulating the ball down the field, boys.

Now that was one of the quotes that we always see legendary when the Sables play that on NFL films.

Now in the third quarter, the Vikings finally broke through.

Dave Osborne punched him from the four yards out.

Kansas City 16, Minnesota 7.

The NFL champions had some life.

And then the Chiefs came back.

They drove down the field, deep into Minnesota territory.

Dawson dropped back, he looked down field and he saw Otis Taylor, the wide receiver, running a quick slant.

And Dawson released the ball.

Taylor caught it at the 35 yard line.

Ursel Maccabee the Vikings defensive back lunged for the tackle and Taylor stiff armed him with a single arm, a violent shove that set Maccabee spinning to the turf.

And Taylor turned up field and ran and crossed the goal line.

A 46 yard touchdown.

Kansas City had the lead 23 to 7 and the Vikings had nothing left.

The defense of Purple People Eaters had been dissected.

Joe Cap threw two interceptions, the Chiefs recovered two fumbles and the Vikings managed just 67 rushing yards all afternoon.

The NFL's best offense, the most feared defense, were shut down by the AFL champions and their offense and defense.

Final score was 23 to 7 and the American Football League won its second straight Super Bowl.

The series was tied in a merger.

The merger was supposed to be the NFL.

Absorbing the inferior rival would happen on the AFL's terms.

Now Len Dawson was named Super Bowl MVP of that game and he completed 12 of 17 passes for 142 yards and a touchdown.

He was the fourth consecutive winning quarterback to win the award and he had done it in six days after his name had been dragged through the national news playing the game of his life.

We need to have built everything and put it on the line.

Lynn Dawson, Hank Strahan, Bobby Bell, Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier, Curly Culp, Johnny Robinson, John Stennerud, Emmett Thomas and owner Lamar Hunt and later kick return.

And Nolan Smith's teammate Otis Taylor, who belongs in Canton and maybe still debated day one of the greatest wide receivers in AFL history.

Scoring those first nine points to put the Chiefs up was very helpful.

Hank Strahm waited 26 years for his hall of Fame induction.

Miked up footage from the Super Bowl 4 having become the most iconic piece of NFL films audio ever recorded up to that point.

He spent decades as one of the most beloved broadcasters in football, calling Chiefs games, hosting HBO's Inside the NFL and becoming the voice of a franchise.

Super Bowl 4 was the last game of the American Football League.

The merger took effect the following season and the AFL's teams becoming the American Football Conference of a single national Football League.

The super bowl, once a grudging compromise between warring leagues, became the single biggest annual event in American sports.

And at the center of it, a quarterback who'd been cut by the NFL, buried on the depth charts for five years, told he wasn't good enough, a quarterback who lost his father two months before the super bowl and played anyway, and a quarterback who had six days to clear his name and 60 minutes to prove to a league that he belonged.

He did both.

He walked into Tulane Stadium under a cloud.

He walked out with a championship, an MVP trophy, and a place in history that no investigation, no narrative, and no league establishment could take from him.

Len Dawson, the man who kept playing for his name in the last war the AFL ever had to fight.

What a year that was.

We have some great guests coming on.

We're going to be talking about many of the quarterbacks, as you can imagine, some of the big games in college and in the NFL, just like we are the rest of this week.

Right now, we're releasing a new year every single day, going chronologically.

But you go to the pigskindispatch.com and visit our timelines.

Go by day of the year, go by month of the year, go by every year and you'll see what we're talking about.

But all of our podcasts, all of our YouTube videos and our YouTube shorts and many of our articles are focused on the year of the week, on the grit Gridiron timeline.

Hope you enjoyed this segment on football history.

Glad you could join us.

Tune in next time as we talk some more football history.

Until then, everybody have a great gridiron day.