Dick Ball
Following the Kansas City Chiefs’ worst season in his thirteen years as club president, CEO and head screwup Carl Peterson announced that ticket prices would once again rise. “Everybody in the league is doing it,” explained a straight-faced Peterson during the team’s wrap-up press conference last week.
This is akin to the guy who designed the Grandview triangle asking for a bonus. What’s next, pay raises for the Kansas City, Missouri, school board?
The once-proud Chiefs franchise is now a three-legged mutt limping around the NFL with two old men who can’t help pissing on themselves. Peterson just had to have his old buddy Dick Vermeil here in Kansas City to resurrect their glory days together at UCLA, where they kicked the holy crap out of Jed Clampett and the Okie Possums back in 1916. But now that Vermeil is 107 years old, instead of a run through the playoffs, we’re treated to a run through our pocketbooks by the most backward organization this side of the Taliban.
The Chiefs are spinning the yarn that this 6-10 season “feels different” from last year’s 7-9 campaign. The local media appears to be lapping up this propaganda and pretending Vermeil didn’t make the Chiefs also-rans before Halloween after inheriting a team that was in the playoff hunt well into December the previous three years.
Peterson and Vermeil don’t know any more about what it takes to field an NFL playoff team than half the drunks at Arrowhead do. Vermeil won his lone Super Bowl ring after his handpicked starting quarterback — a guy by the name of Trent Green — was injured during the 1999 preseason and a tearful Vermeil was forced to play a nobody named Kurt Warner who had been stocking grocery shelves only months before. Vermeil was so sure that Green was the man he needed in KC that he traded his first-round draft pick for him and smugly stated that Green was better than Warner. The truth is Brenda Warner might be better than Green, the guy who set a Chiefs franchise record for interceptions and excuses in 2001.
Regarding the Chiefs’ prospects for next year, Vermeil is as astute as ever. “Can we make the playoffs next year? I don’t know.” Hand that man $3.3 million and tell him there’s more where that came from!
Peterson and Vermeil are experts at fleecing the NFL fan out of thousands of dollars every year. The Chiefs haven’t won a playoff game since the 1993 season, but Peterson, who looks more like a grown-up Eddie Munster each year, has jacked prices up to where it now costs thousands of dollars a year for a family of four to own season tickets and a parking pass for eight regular-season and two worthless exhibition games.
If you find yourself staring at a Chiefs’ season-ticket renewal notice sometime in the next few weeks, take a moment to contemplate what an additional $4,000 or $5,000 can do for the average fan. It can buy a state-of-the-art 65-inch high-definition television that will make Howard Stern’s Crackhead Bob and Elephant Boy look like they’re sitting next to you on your basement couch. Tell me that’s not better than sitting at Arrowhead having a $6 beer poured down your back while two guys in wife-beater undershirts piss on another guy’s jacket.
If you had saved the money spent on Chiefs season tickets for the past eight playoff-win-free years, you’d have enough money to buy a BMW, a city councilperson or just about any residential block in Raytown.
Once you’ve passed up the opportunity to contribute to the purchase of another fur-collared floor-length leather coat for King Carl or a thoroughbred for Vermeil’s East Coast ranch, do not toss the order form in the trash. Use it in place of your Charmin. Then return to sender.
