By Max Goodwin
The Kansas City Chiefs are now a true sports dynasty as back-to-back Super Bowl champions winning three of the last five championships.
Mahomes, the youngest quarterback to win three Super Bowls, elevated the franchise and the city when the Chiefs drafted him in 2017.
“To really sum up what Patrick Mahomes has meant to the Chiefs, I mean, we’re witnessing generational greatness from a sports context,” said Rustin Dodd, a Senior Writer for The Athletic originally from Overland Park.
Dodd co-authored a book about what Mahomes’ rise has meant for Kansas City. It was released last August as the season kicked off. A few months after Mahomes’ first Super Bowl, Dodd talked with Mark Dent, a journalist he met at the University of Kansas, while the two wrote for the student newspaper.
The conversation was about how the Chiefs were on the verge of a potential dynasty and would bring more attention to Kansas City than ever. Dent and Dodd decided to co-author a book using football to tell the history of Kansas City.
They would title the book Kingdom Quarterback. It goes far beyond football, weaving through two centuries of Kansas City history to bring together a story about Patrick Mahomes, J.C. Nichols, redlining, and the resonant history of a city in the middle of the country. While Kansas City’s history is too often a story of division, the Chiefs have always had the power to unite people of all backgrounds.
“I think that football and the Chiefs in general are like the currency of Kansas City, or maybe like the language that people speak. It kind of holds the city together,” Dent said.
Anybody who has lived around Kansas City has likely heard of J.C. Nichols and the neighborhoods he created, from the Plaza to Brookside, Ward Parkway, and over into Kansas in Prairie Village and beyond. These neighborhoods used racially restrictive covenants to exclude black people from living there.
Nichols would become one of the most influential American developers in the early 20th Century. The racial covenants he used in neighborhoods around south Kansas City were also used nationwide.
While they worked on the book, Dent attended a community meeting. He began conversing with a woman sitting next to him, explaining the project he was working on, exploring the history of race and real estate through the story of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.
“She was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to really try to inform Chiefs fans?’ Dent said. “And I hope that that’s kind of what happened with the book.”
As Dent and Dodd grew up in Overland Park, the outcome of each Chiefs game drove the mood of the city for the week. But teams with good defenses and promising playoff hopes always seemed to fall in the first round as they were missing the quarterback to lead the team under pressure.
Patrick Mahomes was the first quarterback the Chiefs had drafted in the first round in more than 30 years, and they waited for the exact right guy. He has transformed how Kansas Citians see themselves and their home.
“It has reconfigured how the city thinks about what’s possible,” Dodd said. “I always hesitate to put too much emphasis on sports and football. But I think there is this idea that if Kansas City is known around the world because of its great football team loop and because Travis Kelce is dating Taylor Swift, as silly as that sounds, why wouldn’t people have a bigger vision of what the city could be in so many other ways.”
Patrick Mahomes has and will continue to change the face of Kansas City. What can that mean for the future of the city? Kingdom Quarterback is an entertaining and educational read exploring the idea. It’s even more relevant now that the Chiefs have cemented themselves as a sports dynasty with their fourth Super Bowl and third of this era.
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