Chiefs Super Bowl Parade: Thousands brave the cold to fight for their right to party
The meteorologists predicted snow and wind and c-c-c-cold. The police warned of barricades and major traffic jams.
And yet like quarterback Patrick Mahomes miraculously spinning and scrambling and sprinting his way into the end zone for a touchdown, the fans found their way to the destination of their dreams: the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade in downtown Kansas City on Wednesday.
By comparison, the Royals’ World Series parade in 2015 was a breeze — a balmy, sun-kissed autumn breeze.
A parade in the thick of winter is a bit different. But Kansas City is tough.
Even a car chase down the full length of the parade route was startling but didn’t dampen spirits.
Fans who waited hours were rewarded in style, with red double-decker buses brimming with Chiefs players rolling down Grand Boulevard to the afternoon rally at Union Station (see Sports for coverage of that event.) Along the parade route, some players got the crowd going by raising their arms, just like in Arrowhead Stadium. Some tossed aluminum bottles of Bud Light beer. (Is that legal?)
And Mahomes himself, standing at the back of one of the last buses in the parade, threw a few footballs to the crowd with perfect aim.
From before dawn and throughout the day, Chiefs fans took to heart the immortal words of tight end Travis Kelce (borrowing from the Beastie Boys) after last month’s glorious AFC Championship Game: “You’ve gotta fight, for your right, to party!”
Here’s how some of the thousands of fans at the parade did just that.
Happy campers
Hotel rooms were scarce Tuesday night, but a few folks brought their own lodging: tents.
As the temperature hovered in the upper 20s, Michael Peters of Blue Springs and his family set up a small tent with a heater at 17th Street and Grand at about 7 a.m. — more than four hours before the parade was due to start.
“We woke up at 6 o’clock, gathered up all our gear — wife does all the packing,” said Peters, who was huddling with wife Casey and their children, ages 13 and 14. “Took about 30 minutes to get everything loaded up, packed up the heater, got a little tent. We have kids in competitive sports, so we’re used to the weather.”
He and his family weren’t alive the last time the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, in 1970.
“It’s been 50 years, so it was before my time,” he said. “So getting to witness it with the kids, giving them the day off of school was pretty cool.”
Roger Porter said his family and friends spent the night in his real estate office at 33rd and Main streets.
“We just brought tents and sleeping bags and had an office party,” Porter said.
They arrived at Union Station about 5 a.m. and came prepared with candles tucked under terra-cotta plant pots to warm their hands, lots of blankets and snacks.
One man didn’t bother with a tent — or anything. He just lay down along Grand near 17th Street, right on the concrete with no padding. It seems he needed to rest up before the parade started.
Parade entrepreneurs
At 14th and Grand, vendors wove through the crowds selling $20 T-shirts. We can’t tell you all that the shirts proclaimed, but you probably have a good idea:
Patrick +@#&%* Mahomes, the front reads.
And on the back, *&%#@, I’m a Chief.
“I can wear this to the bar,” one woman said.
Tamer shirts were selling for $15; pennants were $5.
Fans quickly realized that money does make life easier.
John Fuller said getting down to the parade from Overland Park was easy: He just paid $50 to park a few blocks from Grand Boulevard. “As a 50 year fan of the Chiefs, I don’t think I would ever miss this,” he said.
Tammy Noyes and her family drove up early from Louisburg, Kansas, and staked out a spot around 19th and Grand Boulevard.
“We paid $40 to park, but it was just two blocks away,” Noyes said. “And it was worth it.”
Starting early
The biggest and earliest gathering was at Union Station, where the rally was scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. Before 5 a.m., the plaza in front of the building was filling up.
Grace Kahn, 15, a student at Lee’s Summit Academy, and Aubrey Kolberg, 21, a hairstylist, arrived at 4:30 a.m. to get a prime spot right up against the gated barriers at Pershing Road and Main Street.
“We wanted front row seats,” Kahn said. She missed the Royals parade and wanted to be sure to support the Chiefs.
They were so close to the front, “we could get a phone number,” Kolberg said, laughing.
“Yeah,” said Kahn, “and maybe get a great Instagram pic.”
Somehow Jody Feuerborn’s coat didn’t make it when she and her family packed the car around 5:30 Wednesday morning, but on the whole, the day was going smoothly.
She and her husband, Matt Feuerborn, and three of their children were lined up hours before the parade, relaxing on blankets five rows from the barricades along Pershing Road near Union Station. To pass the time, the family watched “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on Matt’s cellphone.
“We’re watching Ferris Bueller — skip school and go to the parade,” she said with a laugh.
Their commute from Shawnee took only 30 minutes, a far cry from the three hours they spent trying to get to the World Series parade.
“I don’t know if we started earlier or the city planned better,” she said.
They arrived around 7 a.m. and found a spot in the third row — until the car chase cleared the area after 8 a.m.
The first thing Feuerborn noticed was officers shouting, and they scrambled to get up from their spot and away from the barricade.
“We didn’t hear really the car coming,” she said. “Just all of sudden everybody goes, ‘Get back, get back, get back!’”
Feuerborn said the car had almost reached the spot where they’d been sitting when a police car hit it and spun it around.
“We could smell the rubber, smell the burning rubber,” she said.
The early bird gets the prime spot
Seeing a Chiefs Super Bowl parade “means everything” to Yolanda Holman, who said she became a fan because of her late aunt.
“This would have been a day she would have been so happy — getting into the Super Bowl,” she said.
Holman and her sister, Kimberly Harvey, set out from Grandview around 6:30 a.m. and found parking up the hill from Union Station. They trekked slowly down down, taking their time because of Holman’s arthritis, and found spots for their lawn chairs along Pershing Road.
“It was hard, kind of, because it’s all downhill, but I mean, I just took my time, wasn’t in no rush,” Holman said. “That’s why I came really early so I wouldn’t have to fight too much of a crowd.”
The two were settled in their spots more than three hours before the parade began. So they came prepared.
“I got my lawn chair. I got about four tops on, my long johns. I have on my warm socks, heated socks, boots. I have hand warmers — the whole shebang,” Holman said.
M.J Ringstad came to the parade with his best buddies, Bennett Jones, Evan Jurad and Logan Hansen, all of them football players at Olathe Northwest High School.
They started planning where they would stand at the parade “as soon as we got to school on Tuesday,” Jones said.
Then when they woke Wednesday morning, “we started having second thoughts because we were just so tired,” Jurad said. But it was worth the early rise to claim a spot at 3 a.m. along Grand Boulevard, right up against the metal barriers.
“Front row seats,” they cheered in unison. Besides, they were all bundled up, and everything was warm and toasty. “Except our toes,” Ringstad said. “I can’t even feel my toes because they are so cold.”
Kaitlyn Carey of Independence and her family arrived at 12:30 a.m. to capture a prime spot at Pershing and Grand.
“We made sure we had a good parking spot and a sick spot (on the parade route) and we got both — boom,” Carey said. “I have not been to sleep yet. I have been up since 6:30 a.m. yesterday.”
But standing at that prime corner didn’t work out for everyone.
Poor Marybeth Gilbert, a 5-foot 1-inch-tall teacher at Center Elementary, was surrounded by the crowd as the players passed by. The crowd roared “Go Chiefs,” waved flags and held up their phones taking video.
Gilbert couldn’t see any of it. “I bet it looks great,” she said.
Nearby, Tein Braughton, 7, sat atop his dad’s shoulders. His mission: “to see Patrick Mahomes.”
Shortly before the parade started, what could he see?
“Heads!” Braughton shouted.
And then there were those who weren’t concerned about seeing the parade.
On 12th Street, a block west of the parade route, Ben Stueve, 35, was busy throwing a foam football to his 6-year-old son, Henry in a tiny park. The parade was about to start, but Henry didn’t care. He just wanted to play catch.
Dad, who grew up loving the Chiefs, was fine with that. He expects his son will have a great role model in Mahomes for years to come.
“It gives me a little bit of comfort knowing that his favorite player and the player who he’ll want to emulate the most is such a good person and a good leader,” he said.
The cold doesn’t bother me anyway
Philip Schottel, 59, knows how to keep warm for his Chiefs. A 30-year season ticket holder, he deemed Wednesday’s weather “perfect.” Nothing like that playoff game in the ’90s, he said, when it was so cold “the beer in the neck of my bottle was freezing.”
A bit down Grand, die-hard fans Grant Mong and daughter Mallory, of Overland Park, said a little cold weather wasn’t going to keep them from celebrating. “Bring it on!” said Mong, who was all decked out in a furry vest, leather chaps, cowboy hat and dark goofy glasses with red boxing gloves draped around his neck.
He was ready to celebrate.
John Mesa was 13 the last time the Chiefs staged a victory parade through downtown Kansas City.
He wasn’t smoking cigars then, but 50 years after his first Chief parade he enjoyed a stogie as he lounged in a lawn chair on the steps of the former federal courthouse at Ninth and Grand.
“My wife dumped me off and went back home,” Mesa said. She was cold, but he wouldn’t have missed it short of a blizzard.
“I’ve been a season ticket holder 26 years,” he said.
Rayshonda Johnson of Kansas City said her family tailgates at every home Chiefs game (their parking spot is J31 at Arrowhead). They know what they’re doing.
At 4 a.m. Wednesday, they snagged a parking space at 16th and McGee and set up a grill and fire pit, where they were roasting hot dogs and brats.
“We are true fans,” she said.
Going the distance
Charles Willsie said he and his wife drove 4.5 hours from Sioux City, Iowa, Tuesday night “so that we can celebrate with all of our friends and family in Kansas City.”
“It’s important for me to witness this. I grew up in Kansas City,” Willsie said. “I’ve been a lifelong Chiefs fan. I’ve been through all the trials and tribulations with the team. And I’m ready to finally celebrate a victory.”
Shawn McMullen and Reggie Oliver weren’t missing this.
McMullen, 41, drove 14 hours from Charlotte, North Carolina, to watch the Super Bowl with family in KC. Oliver, 40, spent $600 on a last minute flight to KCI Tuesday.
Childhood friends raised in Kansas City, both lined up for the parade at 7 a.m. near its beginning at Sixth and Grand.
“Chiefs nation,” McMullen said. “It don’t get any better than this.”
They figured the spot would allow them to see the parade and quickly get out of the cold to watch the rally on television later.
Bundled up in multiple layers, neither seemed fazed by the freezing temperatures.
“It is what it is,” Oliver said. “It’s Kansas City.”
Both planned to stick around town for a few more days.
“I just want to take it all in,” McMullen said.
The shuttle bus wasn’t the problem
At the 2015 World Series parade, the shuttle bus system was so slow and crowded that some fans said they waited hours and never made it.
Kansas City Area Transportation Authority CEO Robbie Makinen said officials learned from that. This year, he said, twice the number of buses were deployed, made possible with dozens of school buses.
In all, more than 400 buses were used. By 10:30 a.m., Makinen said, 30,000 people had used the shuttle service.
”It’s been working really well. The longest wait times I’ve heard is around 30 minutes, so people are happy with that,” he said. ”We learned a lot from 2015. And now we need to do this more often with more victory parades because we’ve got it down.”
At Oak Park Mall around 8 a.m., the line for the shuttle bus was moving along, but Bart Putnam still had a challenging morning.
The Olathe resident and lifelong Chiefs fan joined a few hundred others at the mall in Overland Park to catch a free ride to the parade — but not without enduring some stress first.
“We dropped off the car last night so we could have a way to drive back. But then Uber drivers weren’t coming to Olathe this morning,” he said, adjusting his arrowhead-shaped hat. “So we decided to come to Oak Park Mall and get on the shuttle bus. Well, then I forgot my jacket.”
Putnam and his wife returned home, still couldn’t catch an Uber, then arrived back at the mall in Overland Park.
In the end, they caught a shuttle after a 30-minute wait. But he said he would do whatever it takes to make it to the parade.
“The last time the Chiefs won the Super Bowl was on my birthday, but a year before I was born,” Putnam said. “I never got to see this before. (I’m a) big football fan. I’d definitely go a long way to get there.”
By 10 a.m., there were shorter wait times, or no wait times, at all of the shuttle bus stops.
At Swope Park, fans said they were grateful to see the long line of buses awaiting them after they walked more than a mile in the snow. Many hopped aboard in a matter of minutes.
James Hansen of Leavenworth got to the stop at Worlds of Fun at 5 a.m. He waited outside the gate and eventually got on a bus at 7.
He then journeyed from the drop-off at Lydia Avenue and Truman Road all the way to Pershing Road, just outside the Westin Crown Center.
As a Chiefs fan for more than 20 years, he said it was important to see this “once in a lifetime” parade.
Driving into downtown Kansas City appeared to go rather smoothly as well. Periodic checks of KC Scout traffic cameras showed roadways flowing freely for the most part.
Authorities warned drivers not to park on the highways, like what happened during the World Series parade.
For one woman, walking worked just fine, even though she’s on the disabled list.
April Keith of Gardner, injured while shopping last December, showed up on a leg scooter.
“We just walked five miles on a broken foot because we were not going to miss this,” Keith said near the Liberty Memorial. “Because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and nothing’s going to hold us back.”
Cheers to the Chiefs
Police officially warned against public consumption of alcohol along the parade route. But that didn’t seem to stop many people.
Grand Slam Convenience store at Sixth and Grand enjoyed a steady stream of customers buying vodka, beer and other drinks. Out front, they sold aluminum bottles of Bud Light in plain view of police officers.
On the Grand Avenue bridge over Interstate 35, a couple went to work on two six-packs of frosty Smirnoff Ice. One man in a Chiefs jersey walked around with everything he’d need for mimosas: a gallon of orange juice in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.
Staff at Anthony’s Restaurant and Lounge blocked off the front and back entrances with folding tables.
Outside, employees shouted, “Cold beer! Get your beer here! Hot dogs too!”
Tables had only three condiments: ketchup, mustard and Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce.
On Admiral Boulevard, the Red Front Bar and Grill was packed with people pregaming on whiskey sours and bloody marys. But many flocked to the coffee, hot chocolate and doughnuts.
“Everyone’s just so excited,” said Jennifer Simone-Mandacina, who owns the bar with her husband, Charles Mandacina III. “People we’re down here at 3,4 in the morning.”
Her husband sold spots in the adjoining parking lot early in the morning for $40 apiece. It quickly filled up.
She said the bar wasn’t gouging customers on food and drinks. The coffee, hot chocolate and doughnuts weren’t priced — whatever customers offered was accepted.
Here they come
Up on Sixth street before the parade, speakers blasted oldies like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” The crowd knew game time was close when the music switched to the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right” and Tech N9ne’s “Red Kingdom.”
The parade started right on time at 11:30 a.m., and cellphones immediately lifted toward the cloudy sky as spectators sought to capture the moment — if they weren’t 10 rows back.
Aboard the buses, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas threw his hands out in celebration, and Missouri Gov. Mike Parson smiled widely.
The route was littered with confetti cannons, drawing loud applause at each shot.
Some fans complained that the players — particularly Mahomes — were hard to spot atop the crowded buses. One woman, though, gushed, saying it was just like the humble quarterback not to hog the spotlight.
Farther down the parade route, many of the players left their buses and danced on the street, greeting fans who filled the sidewalks.
One fan, clad in red and gold pants, steadied himself on top of a garbage can and yelled to hundreds of strangers: “This is the best day of my life!”
Fans dozens of rows from the parade craned for a look at Chiefs royalty.
“Andy!” one woman shouted as a man who may or may not have been Chiefs Coach Andy Reid rode by.
Near the Westin Crown Center, a man who looked an awful lot like Reid — graying mustache and all — donned a headset and conspicuously chomped his gum for the occasion. He elicited shouts and waves as he made his way along Pershing Road.
As the parade moved down Grand, Mahomes became a bit more conspicuous. As Chiefs fullback Anthony Sherman stood by atop the bus, getting the crowd going, Mahomes waved, smiled and launched a few footballs, before heading over to Union Station for the afternoon rally.
Touchdown, Kan-Za City!
The Star’s Chiefs parade team of reporters: Laura Bauer, Bob Cronkleton, Kevin Hardy, Mike Hendricks, Allison Kite, Katie Moore, Glenn E. Rice, Sarah Ritter, Cortlyn Stark, Judy L. Thomas, Mará Rose Williams.
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 8:14 AM with the headline "Chiefs Super Bowl Parade: Thousands brave the cold to fight for their right to party."
