SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Back in 2020 when the Chiefs earned a return to the Super Bowl for the first time in 50 years, chairman and CEO Clark Hunt let on that his mother, Norma, had been all but drumming her fingertips on a table anticipating the moment.
“ ‘Clark, it sure would be nice if we could play in this game while I’m still able to go,’ ” Hunt in 2020 recalled her saying a few years before.
From out of that drought, it’s become a virtual embarrassment of riches: As Norma Hunt, now 84, attends her 57th straight Super Bowl, the Chiefs on Sunday will be appearing in their third in four years — one more than in their entire previous history.
“She was really upset at us the last couple years,” Hunt said with a laugh on Tuesday morning at the team’s Scottsdale hotel. “So we’re back in her good graces.”
Even so, Hunt well understands the preciousness of this time with Patrick Mahomes at the helm. And he knows how little can be taken for granted even as the Chiefs recent successes now verge on dynastic implications if they beat the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday — part of a decade that has transformed Hunt’s legacy as an NFL owner.
His perspective is partly because he understands that with the salary cap and what he calls “other mechanisms” (including the scheduling and draft systems), the NFL is geared toward creating parity.
But it’s also because the “tremendous joy” that Hunt experienced with his team winning Super Bowl LIV — and contending ever since — also came with a quite personal sense of relief after years of struggle that at times smacked of futility.
The 50 years between championships, Hunt said just before the Chiefs returned to the Super Bowl to play Tampa Bay in 2021, was “far too long, and there were a lot of ups and downs on the roller-coaster. And when you’re in those dips when things are really going poorly, you wonder if you’re ever going to be able to do it.”
Within that half-century time frame, though, was a more acute window for the son essentially replacing a legendary father in the role after the 2006 death of Lamar Hunt — whose vast reach and influence includes the founding of the franchise and the AFL, being a vital force in the merger with the NFL and even having been responsible for the naming of the Super Bowl itself.
“When I succeeded my father, I knew I was stepping into some very big shoes to fill. And I could never be like him, right?” he said Tuesday. “There was only one Lamar Hunt, and he was so special, such a visionary, such a great leader. Somebody that people followed because they just absolutely loved him.
“So I knew that I couldn’t be like him, and I had to just do it my way.”
Despite having grown up around sports and taking more and more of a role with the Chiefs in the years before his father’s death, he added, “Until you’re in the position and have to make the decisions, you really are never going to have the experience. Experience is sort of the best teacher.”
Not that it wasn’t evident to Hunt what it would take to rejuvenate the Chiefs. In 2008, for instance, he told The Star he was a “strong believer that continuity at the head coaching position is very important to long-term success.” And he pointed to the Steelers as having a model “system and an approach about how they do it, and it’s important we develop that kind of mind-set here.”
Executing those imperatives, though, was another matter.
In his first six seasons presiding over the team, the Chiefs went 29-67 with no playoff wins. They endured their second 2-14 season in five years in 2012.
By the time he hired coach Andy Reid and, soon, general manager John Dorsey 10 years ago last month, Hunt already had fired three coaches and two general managers in his tenure.
But if that was trial by fire, or firing, as the case may be, it was serving its purpose in forging Hunt’s evolution.
“I think about that period frequently,” he said. “And I knew that we were going to have a tough time, because when I took over we had a very old roster and we had not drafted well for several years. So the cupboard was literally empty.
“And I’d like to second-guess myself that I should have done this or I should have done that. (But) I’m not sure it was correctable in those first few years, although there were definitely some decisions I wish I’d made differently.”
Just the same …
“Looking at it from today and having the perspective of 15 years, I don’t want to say that I’m glad it played out like it did,” he said. “But it was probably necessary for it to play out like it did to end up with Andy as the coach.”
In several ways and on multiple levels as Hunt came to reassess best practices moving forward.
Particularly after the chaos of the Scott Pioli regime as general manager, he reconciled to change the organizational flow chart and have both the GM and the coach report directly to him instead of the more traditional format of coach to GM to owner.
While Hunt didn’t specify why he came to that specific decision, his answer Tuesday spoke volumes about it.
“NFL teams that have the structure that we do (now) have a better chance of hiring a head coach who’s a good fit with ownership, right?” he said. “Because in the other structure where that’s been delegated to the general manager, there’s a disconnect.
“And you also end up in a scenario where the head coach wants to circumvent the general manager on some issues and go directly to the owner. And that undermines the relationship, as you can imagine, between the GM and the head coach.”
He added, “I’m much more informed about what’s going on with the football team than I was under the other structure. Because in the other structure I was relying on the general manager to provide me that information and occasionally talking to the head coach about it.”
Now he speaks to both Reid and GM Brett Veach on a weekly basis to get their independent perspectives. And if they’re not on the same page, which he noted they “mostly are,” then he’s aware of it.
But another crucial way Hunt prospered by those painful years was deciding to change his personal approach to the hiring process itself. Instead of just being “someone who’s consulting and approving,” he said, he wanted to “be the guy doing the interviews and making the decisions.”
Which brings us to a Philadelphia-area airport on Jan. 2, 2013, three days after Reid and the Eagles resolved to part ways after 14 seasons and Hunt had fired Romeo Crennel.
The interview between Reid and Hunt, along with several other Chiefs representatives, was scheduled to last three or four hours.
From the start, Hunt was hearing much that he liked — including that Reid would embrace the new structure despite having long also been the GM in Philadelphia and exercising strong control over personnel even after he’d put aside the title.
As the session went on and on and on, though, Hunt grew curious about a plane with its door open in plain view from the conference room.
At some point, he recalled saying, “I wonder what that is.” And Reid replied along the lines of, “Yeah, I’m supposed to get on that plane. Or was supposed to get on that plane.’”
The plane had been sent from Phoenix, where Reid initially had planned to go for an interview with the Arizona Cardinals.
While Hunt joked that he might have tried to prevent that rendezvous if he’d known, it turned out it would have been redundant: The conversation went on about nine hours with Reid, who somewhere along the way got word to the Cardinals that he was canceling.
“It was really just that the interview was going so well and that we had so much to talk about,” said Hunt, noting that this included Reid effectively flipping the script and interviewing Hunt.
If they didn’t quite come to a full agreement that day, Hunt said, “Both Andy and I left that meeting thinking that this was probably going to work out.”
So it did … after an interview that others who were there have said was all about Hunt’s handling of the day.
And it’s also worked out about ever since as Hunt has adapted.
That’s including replacing Dorsey with Veach in 2017 and accepting Veach’s inclination toward the free-agent market “more than I was accustomed to.”
All part of an organizational alignment along with Mahomes and president Mark Donovan — making for a harmony that would scarcely have seemed possible a decade ago and figures to continue serving the franchise well. Challenges ahead include determining the very future of GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.
“I would say I’m much more comfortable in the role and worry less about things that I know I can’t control, right?” Hunt said, smiling. “And the best solution to not worrying about things you can’t control is having great people like Andy, Brett and … (Donovan) in that category, too.”
Much is being made, and properly so, about the legacy of Reid and Mahomes in the context of this game and presumed future opportunities.
But that’s also true for Hunt himself, who found his own way toward resurrecting his father’s franchise and fashioning it in an image worthy of that broad and poignant shadow.
And getting back in his mom’s good graces.
