Smokey Stover: An Appreciation

While Stover was out of the starting lineup by 1962, he remained an important contributor to the team’s success for four more years. He played on championship teams in 1962 and 1966 and in what is now known as Super Bowl I. Even after his departure from the Chiefs, he played one more year in Canada for the Grey Cup champion Hamilton Tiger Cats. He is the only NFL player to play in both the Super Bowl and Grey Cup championships in the same calendar year.

Along the way, he had earned his Master’s degree in geology during the offseason when he played for Kansas City.

When the Chiefs’ history department was established in 2010, Stover became the go-to guy for information on the club’s early days with his photographic memory of players and events.

As the franchise’s first historian, I counted heavily on him to fill in moments from those days and, at the same time, to identify long-gone players from aged photographs we had in the archives. He was especially helpful in aiding the Chiefs’ campaign to have his fellow teammate and Louisianan, Johnny Robinson, recognized as an inductee to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was a perennial attendee at the Chiefs’ legacy weekend in Kansas City.

Professional sports can be a melancholy business because an athlete’s career compresses much of life into a short span. But Smokey Stover was never the melancholy sort. He continued to remember his days in Dallas and Kansas City with fondness, speaking to the many authors who penned stories on the American Football League and its history.

As his life and career would show, Smokey Stover was a warm-blooded man with strong feelings on the Kansas City Chiefs, his family, his faith, and the events that punctuated the early days of the American Football League.