If there were one person in Kansas City I'd like to sit down and shoot the you-know-what with about the history of the Chiefs, near the top of the list would be Associated Press reporter Doug Tucker. He's covered every Chiefs head coach except for Hank Stram and has what I'm sure are a boatload of memories.
Mr. Tucker is retiring this year after nearly 42 years with the (other) AP and shared a bunch of memories of his time covering Kansas City sports in an interview with 810 WHB's Kevin Kietzmann this week.
I pulled out one of the stories he told about Joe Montana's arrival in Kansas City back in 1993. "Montana Mania", Tucker recalled....
"That first year when Montana was here at training camp, in River Falls, I'll never forget," he said to Kietzmann.
"I'm driving into River falls, you come through Minneapolis, I turn in and I'm driving down that little road into River Falls and there's a big billboard that says, 'River Falls Welcomes Joe Montana!' in big red letters and then in very small letters, at my age now I probably can't read it, it said, 'And The Kansas City Chiefs'.
"They caught a kid under his car," he continued. "They didn't know what he was doing under there but some kid had crawled under Joe's car and some security guard saw him, yelled at him, and the kid started running The kid started running. They said he was about 15 or 16."
Kietzmann asks, "What was he doing?"
"I don't know," Tucker explained. "I asked Joe that question and he said, 'We don't know yet.' They had a security guard start the car because, if someone was going to get killed, it's not going to be Joe."
If you have an extra 45 minutes sometime this week, I'd encourage you to listen to Tucker's appearance on 810 WHB.