Tom Flores recalls winning his first Super Bowl ring with Kansas City Chiefs 50 years ago

Tom Flores’ statistical line for the 1969 Kansas City Chiefs season is about as perfect as it gets: one pass attempt, one completion, 33 yards, one touchdown.

“It’s hard to get better than that,” said Flores, a long-time Indian Wells resident.

That one pass, a completion on a fake field goal for a touchdown to running back Robert Holmes in a 24-0 Week 5 victory over the Houston Oilers, was Flores’ highlight in the season that earned him the first of his four Super Bowl rings. Flores was a backup quarterback on the Chiefs, the American Football League champions who beat the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings 23-7 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

Super Bowl IV was the last time Kansas City reached the title game until this week, as the Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers in Miami. Flores, identified mostly as a member of the Oakland Raiders as a player, assistant coach, nine years as head coach and 21 years as a radio analyst, said he’s happy the Chiefs are back in the NFL’s biggest game.

“You know why I’m happy for them? Because the Hunt family still owns the team,” Flores said. “Lamar Hunt (founder and owner of the Chiefs starting in 1960) was one of the best owners you could have. I still get, every year, invitations to their alumni events.”

Flores said even when he was working for the Raiders as a radio commentator, Hunt would run into him at games and invite him to events.

“He would say, ‘You know, you are one of us, too’,” Flores recalled.

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Injuries put him on Chiefs' squad

Flores might not have received that first Super Bowl ring – he later won one as an assistant coach for the Raiders and two as head coach of the team – except for a series of early season injuries to Kansas City quarterbacks.

Flores, the starting quarterback for the Oakland Raiders from 1960 through 1966, played for the Buffalo Bills in 1967 and 1968, battling Jack Kemp for the starting job. After just two games in the 1969 season, Flores was released by the Bills and head coach John Rauch, who had been the Raiders head coach who helped trade Flores to Buffalo after the 1966 season.

Meanwhile, Kansas City starting quarterback Len Dawson, who had led the Chiefs to an appearance in Super Bowl I three years earlier, suffered a knee injury in a Week 2 win over the Boston Patriots and missed the next six weeks. Dawson’s backup, Jacky Lee, started the Week 3 game against Cincinnati but suffered a broken ankle. That left second-year pro Mike Livingston as the backup, with the Chiefs signing Flores as Livingston’s backup.

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Flores said there was no problem for an old Raider to walk into the locker room of perhaps the team’s biggest rival in those days, the Chiefs.

“We were like a family, the old AFL, because we played the other teams so much,” Flores said. “So when we were in town, we would run into them at their watering hole. When they were in town, we would meet them at our watering holes. So when I went to Kansas City, it was like moving in with relatives. You walked into the locker room and it was 'hi, how are you, welcome.' It was no problem.”

Flores speaks fondly of the 1969 Chiefs team, coached by Hall of Famer Hank Stram, saying the team was so good overall it could overcome the loss of Dawson for six weeks and still win the championship.

One big moment in the season

As for Flores’ one pass for Kansas City that year, it came on a second-quarter field goal attempt in a home game against Houston, with the Chiefs already leading 17-0.

“Jan Stenerud (the Kansas City kicker) was my personal blocker, and he missed the guy.” Flores laughed. “And I got hit in the head. I was laying flat on my back and I heard the crowd cheers, and I thought something good must have happened.”

That Super Bowl ring makes Flores one of two men – Mike Ditka is the other – to have won a Super Bowl ring as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach.

Flores had hopes of being at the Super Bowl this year as one of the newest inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But even under expanded criteria for the NFL’s 100th anniversary celebration and with more people going into the Hall this year, Flores did not get the call to fill one of the two slots available for coaching candidates. Instead, former coaches Bill Cowher of Pittsburgh and Jimmy Johnson of Dallas will go into the Hall in ceremonies next August, along with players announced this week.

Davis can’t hide his disappointment over still not being inducted into the Hall of Fame.

“I don’t know. No one has talked to me this year,” Flores said, noting that Hall of Fame representatives talked to him both before and after last year’s Hall announcements.

Flores said the system, as it is set up now, doesn’t favor older candidates like him or a contemporary of his, Don Coryell, who coached the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Diego Chargers.

“They don’t even remember me, so how can you vote?” Flores said. “They go into a room and they argue. There are people who argue for me, I know people who do. Ron Wolff (a Raiders scout and later general manager of the Green Bay Packers) is one of them. But they are so eager to get younger people in there. So you look and see who is on TV right now. Look at that, and those guys (Cowher from CBS and Johnson from FOX) got it.”

Flores, who was the first Hispanic starting quarterback, head coach and team president (with the Seattle Seahawks) in professional football, said he doesn’t know what his status for the Hall might be next year, whether he is eligible for a regular vote or possibly could be inducted through a veterans committee.

“I’m pretty down about it,” Flores said. “I love the NFL and I love football, but I think the system is broken.”

Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer. He can be reached at (760) 778-4633 or larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @Larry_Bohannan. Support local journalism: Subscribe to the Desert Sun.