Can we all agree that the Kansas City Chiefs are the closest thing to Tony Soprano’s waste management business in a four-state region? Take it or leave it, the Chiefs always get their way. Like a mob business, they bring good to many people throughout this region, but they also always get their way, even if it means playing on the fringes of what is right.
If you think the Missouri governor’s commutation of Brit Reid’s prison sentence is the biggest example of this, you’ve not been paying attention.
They are calling nearly all the shots on Truman Sports Complex reorganization that has the Royals headed downtown and decades longer of tax money flowing to their coffers. They were able to oust a well known radio host that criticized Andy Reid, they almost certainly helped secure a dropped case for Jackson Mahomes in Johnson County and I suspect they have a host of lawyers and fixers that have taken care of a buttload of other incidents in the metro area over the last decade that we never even heard about.
Winning Super Bowls brings lots of problems and lots of fixes and it’s all pretty much business as normal, until it no longer is. Brit Reid walking out of prison based on a political gift on a Friday afternoon is just another day in the back office of the strip club we know as Arrowhead Way.
Remember when they had a linebacker shoot himself in the parking lot in front of the head coach and general manager? That seemed bad. Particularly since he had killed his girlfriend before that. That was 12 years and four Super Bowls ago. Pick your poison, because it’s our money, passion and “look the other way” that fuels all this.
Don’t get me wrong, I kind of get it. If I had Clark Hunt money, I’d pull some strings with my cash as well. So would most of you. It is also inevitable with a billion-dollar business that mixes a group of young, suddenly rich men from hugely divergent backgrounds to start each year. You were 21 once and probably could have used a “fixer.”
To me, it is the public outrage over each progressively bold show of power that gets me. The social media world erupts with moral outrage over guns, drinking and driving or shooting people, but then the same group of people pop up a few weeks later telling us how important sports franchises are to our daily existence.
Seem to have a bit of irony involved, for those of us grounded in “keeping it real.”
Honestly, if they do put a “Bada Bing Club” in the basement of the new Arrowhead, I take back everything bad I said about the Chiefs. I suppose that is my “break point” in all of this. Some of you settle for Super Bowls and others for strip clubs, to each their own.
(Guy Speckman can be reached trying to find an affordable personal fixer)