Documentary: The unknown history of Kansas City Chiefs basketball

A documentary from the Kansas City Chiefs reveals the hidden history of a forgotten Kansas City sports team – Kansas City Chiefs basketball.

The documentary, The Lost Game: The Untold Story of the Kansas City Chiefs Basketball Team, was released earlier this month and shares the story of how the Chiefs football team raised money for charities for 36 years by competing in basketball games.

The Chiefs basketball team began with current Chiefs Chairman and CEO Clark Hunt’s father, Lamar. Lamar set out to make a new football team in 1959 in Dallas, his hometown, but when the National Football League (NFL) wouldn’t let him join, he created the American Football League (AFL), which served as NFL’s rival in the 1960s.

The AFL had eight original teams and the teams’ owners were nicknamed “The Foolish Club.” The elder Hunt’s team, the Dallas Texans, which later became the Kansas City Chiefs, won the AFL championship in their third season in 1962.

The birth of basketball in football

Hunt was known for his unorthodox schemes to promote the Texans, such as hosting a “bring your barber” game day where the team and fans invited their barbers to watch the game. The reason? Barbers tended to know the talk of the town and would likely spread word to their clients about their football experience.

Hunt created a basketball team using the Texans players during the football offseason to continue advertising.

At first, the team lost almost every basketball game. To fix that, Hunt reached out to hall of fame basketball coach Max Williams, who trained a mix of Texans players and basketball players to make a team who lost only one of their roughly 35 total games.

The Texans become the Chiefs

The current pride of Kansas City – the Kansas City Chiefs – was a team born when Lamar Hunt decided to move the Texans to Kansas City in 1963. The AFL would merge with the NFL in 1970.

The average football salary that year was $23,000, Springfield Daily Citizen reporter Steve Pokin said in the documentary, and in comparison, the average NFL salary in 2025 was $5.2 million, according to Sports Illustrated.

In the ’60s and ’70s, training camps for the players weren’t offered during the offseason, and the players had to find another job to support themselves and their families.

“My part-time job was as a Chief,” former Chiefs linebacker and defensive end Bobby Bell explained. “My full-time job was at General Motors.”

To help the players earn money during the offseason, Hunt continued the tradition of a basketball team. He created the Chiefs basketball team and it would play against other teams to raise money for charities.

“Every NFL player thinks he could’ve played in the NBA, I’m just telling you,” Allen Wright, the Chiefs’ equipment manager and longest-tenured employee, said.

The team had fun playing basketball, but in football they were suffering at the time.

“We were not winners,” former Chiefs running back Ted McKnight, also known as Touchdown Teddy, explained. “We were not winning at that time and you know, you had an 80,000-seat stadium and we might have 25,000 people in it.

“You could fire a cannon and not touch a soul.”

Basketball highlights

While the team burned through coaches and continued losing popularity in football, they received several calls in the offseason with people wanting to play them in basketball.

The Chiefs played against teams of high school coaches and firefighters and police officers. The team also played against the Green Bay Packers, Denver Broncos and St. Louis Cardinals in basketball.

“They wanted to say they had the opportunity to play against the Kansas City Chiefs players,” Bell said, amused. “If you could beat Bobby Bell, you could go around and tell everybody. But that’s not going to happen.”

In one game, the Chiefs basketball team played against prisoners in the Leavenworth penitentiary.

“We got a call to see if we wanted to go up and play up in Leavenworth against the prisoners, which was really kind of a frightening thing,” McKnight said.

He explained the deeper they traveled into the prison and with every door that closed behind them, the more intimidating it felt.

“And we walk in and this place is packed and it’s not fans – it’s prisoners.”

In the second half of the game, the room went dark.

Emergency lights turned on a few seconds later and while the guards were unfazed, the players were rattled.

“You never saw so many guys grab wall in all your life,” McKnight said. “We panicked. … That was an interesting experience. I could leave you with a few nightmares.”

The Chiefs also played basketball against Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals – who were much more popular than the Chiefs at the time – in 1979 at a sold-out Municipal Auditorium. Hall of Fame former Royals player George Brett broke his thumb in the game, and this served as the beginning of the end for the Chiefs basketball team.

Goodbye basketball, hello football

In 1989, Marty Schottenheimer took over the Chiefs football team and revived its losing streak into a winning one. He transformed Chiefs football into a source of pride for Kansas City, Clark Hunt told ESPN when Schottenheimer died in 2021.

As the team got more serious, a broken backboard of an uninsured basketball hoop in one game and an eye injury to former wide receiver Chris Penn in another led to the team’s decision to stop playing basketball.

Even though the decision was a tough one, especially when it came to no longer offering support to the charities, Wright said, “It was certainly the right decision at the right time.”

“These guys weren’t just a football player, they weren’t just a basketball player,” hall of fame sports broadcaster Frank Boal said in the documentary. “They were athletes and they were the greatest athletes we know.”

The current Kansas City Chiefs team will kick off their 2026 season in just 53 days on August 8, and they will face the Los Angeles Rams at Arrowhead Stadium. The team’s training camp will begin on July 29.

(Photo credit: screenshot/Youtube/Kansas City Chiefs)