Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback - Hardcover

Dent, Mark; Dodd, Rustin

 
9780593472033: Kingdom Quarterback: Patrick Mahomes, the Kansas City Chiefs, and How a Once Swingin' Cow Town Chased the Ultimate Comeback
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593472039 ISBN 13: 9780593472033
Verlag: Dutton, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Fresh off of a gutsy, thrilling 2023 Super Bowl win for the Kansas City Chiefs, two inspiring stories that fit perfectly together—a biography of superstar quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, who brought the Chiefs to their first Super Bowl win in fifty years in 2020 as well as a second in 2023, along with the historical struggles and recent resurgence of the former “Paris of the Plains,” Kansas City.

There is nobody like Patrick Mahomes.

In three seasons, he has won a Super Bowl and competed in another, earned the titles of First Team All-Pro, NFL Offensive Player of the Year, and league MVP, and turned the Kansas City Chiefs from famed playoff failures into the most successful team in the NFL. With his unique and groundbreaking playing style, and winning personality both on and off the field, Mahomes has become a truly transcendent quarterback in a journey that mirrors and accentuates the rebirth of the once swingin’ cow town of Kansas City, Missouri.

Once an adventure-filled jazz epicenter and nightlife hub to rival New Orleans, Kansas City’s wild edges and captivating neighborhoods were snuffed out in pursuit of a suburbanized dream that largely left out people of color. It’s been a long road attempting to move past the scars of segregation and overcome the city’s flyover reputation, but Kansas City is now poised to make a comeback, and no other person or team embodies that hope like Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Kansas City and Mahomes represent the story of the midwestern American city—how they grew, how they shaped the country, how the sport of football came to mean so much to them, how they failed, and how they are changing.

Kansas City–area natives Mark Dent and Rustin Dodd have written for outlets such as The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, and Texas Monthly, bringing their deep connection to the city, football expertise, and polished writing skills to create a serious book about a very entertaining subject—the rebirth of a city, a team’s triumph, and how Patrick Mahomes, and the team he led, were exactly what was needed to bring Kansas City back together again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Dent is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Vox, Wired, The Kansas City Star, and elsewhere. He is also a senior writer at The Hustle, a business and tech newsletter. His work has been cited as a notable mention in The Best American Sports Writing, and he has also been named Texas Sportswriter of the Year. Dent grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Dallas.

Rustin Dodd is a senior writer at The Athletic. He previously worked as a sportswriter at The Kansas City Star from 2010 to 2017. His work has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Dodd grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Brooklyn. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas.

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No Boundaries

Nobody knows where Kansas City is. This is because there are two Kansas Citys-though there is really only one Kansas City-and because the whole region sprawls across the border of two states.

But it's also because of a bar fight. At least, that's how it started.

It happened in November 1831 in Missouri, and the only person we know was there for certain was Gabriel Prudhomme. He lived on a plot of land in what would one day be the middle of the United States (the dead center, if you were measuring crudely), a heavily forested patch of bluffs along the Missouri River, one of the muddiest waterways on the continent.

Millions of years ago, much of North America was covered by glaciers. Mountains formed. The ice melted. The long process of glaciation left a labyrinth of rivers and tributaries crisscrossing the continent. Two of those rivers-eventually named the Kansas and the Missouri-would meet in the middle. Native American groups built what we now call Hopewell settlements, and tribes like the Osage, the Missouria, and the Kanza hunted bison and farmed in the region. The Kanza-or Kaw people-lived along the river that came to bear their name, building a village in the mid-eighteenth century forty miles northwest of what would become Prudhomme's land. The Osage, known for their skills as hunters, farmers, and warriors, built lodges with domed roofs in their Missouri settlements and facilitated trade through a wide swath of Missouri along a route called the Osage Trail. The tribes were forcibly removed from their home territories by the US government in the 1820s and '30s, around the same time more French Canadians moved in and built a few trading posts. Prudhomme was one of them, a blacksmith who purchased 257 acres from the federal government in 1831. His property contained what might've been the only valuable piece of land around: a rock outcropping that jutted into the river, ideal landing for ferries and steamboats.

Prudhomme started farming. He opened a grocery store and-fatefully, it seems-a tavern, where in the fall of 1831, a barroom brawl broke out, somebody drew a gun, and, according to an account from an early resident, Prudhomme ended up on the ground, his body in a pool of blood. The murderer was never caught.

Prudhomme left behind seven kids, a wife named Margaret, and a perfectly fine river landing, along with a legal mess that lasted seven years, until a group of fourteen men pooled their resources together and bought the land for $4,220 at an auction held on the coveted landing. One of the buyers, John McCoy, confessed years later that they were merely hoping for a quick profit. "None of them, he insisted, had any conception of town proprietorship, much less town building," wrote the historian Mildred C. Cox.

The only thing they knew was that a town needed a name. One grifter, Abraham Fonda, suggested they name the town after him, which didn't go over well. Others proposed Rabbitsville and Possumtrot. They settled on a name based on local geography. The French named the Kansas River after the Kanza tribe. The men were just miles from where the Kansas River flowed into the Missouri. They declared their new home the Town of Kansas, which would become the City of Kansas, and finally Kansas City. The new name didn't exactly feel like destiny. As McCoy said, they picked it "simply because nobody could think of anything better."

The men had no idea they had just ensured centuries of confusion.


Seventeen years before the town founders gathered in a livestock pen for the auction, Missouri entered the union as the twenty-fourth state. It was a controversial selection. Missouri was designated a slave state and granted entry through a compromise-the Missouri Compromise-that admitted Maine as a free state and held that no Louisiana Purchase lands above Missouri’s southern border would have slavery. It wouldn’t last, but it wasn’t the only issue. At that point, Missouri was also the westernmost state, and people were split about just how far west Missouri should go.

Missouri entered the United States as a territory in 1812 with a western border roughly twenty miles east of where the Kansas River collides with the Missouri River. It tried to become a state in 1817 with that original border, but Congress didn't believe Missouri was ready for statehood. The territory leaders tried again in 1818 with a border sixty miles farther west. Congress said no again, believing the territory would be too large.

This was all happening before Kansas City existed, and before the state of Kansas existed, and before anybody thought a town, much less a city, would rise up where the Kansas and Missouri Rivers met. In 1819, just as Missouri Territory leaders were negotiating again with Congress, the explorer Stephen H. Long journeyed across the middle of the country. Scoping out the vast plains aboard a steamboat with a prow designed like the head of a serpent-replete with nostrils that snorted steam-he and his expedition team described the area as uninhabitable. They helped inspire the naming of the region that stretched west of the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains as the "Great American Desert." There was no grand promise for riches here.

What did it matter if the western border was twenty miles farther east or sixty miles farther west? Nobody wanted to build a great civilization on a cliff overlooking a giant desert anyway.

So Missouri came back in 1820, proposing the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers as the boundary, and Congress accepted. The problem: The Kansas River travels east to west and does not provide a physical border, which meant Missouri ended at an imaginary straight line running north to south from the Kansas River's mouth.

It's impossible to know whether the Town of Kansas founders gave any thought to building a town at the edge of Missouri and calling it Kansas, a name that had been popping up on maps of the Midwest for years. (Given their general inability to plan anything, the answer is almost certainly no.) In their defense, they didn't know when another state might exist on the other side of the border, in the Great American Desert. Plus, in the 1830s, the land directly to the west was referred to as the Nebraska Territory, and that was still the case in 1853, when Town of Kansas was incorporated as City of Kansas. But a year later, Congress created the Kansas Territory-using the very popular name from all those maps-and now Kansas City was in a pickle. It was a city in Missouri with the same name as a new territory, a territory on the other side of an imaginary line following the mouth of a river that also shared the same name. Almost immediately, residents of the Kansas Territory falsely accused Kansas City of stealing their name, even though their territory had done the copying. Local leaders realized they were headed for a confusing disaster. In 1855, Robert Van Horn, an influential Kansas City newspaper publisher, sought the approval of the legislatures in Kansas and Missouri to move Kansas City, Missouri, into Kansas Territory. He could not have chosen a more complicated time.

A year earlier, Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, invalidating the Missouri Compromise. It stated that new territories, even those north of Missouri's southern border, would decide whether to allow slavery based on the popular vote.

Thousands of Border Ruffians from Missouri swarmed into Kansas for an 1855 election, voting a proslavery legislature into office. Antislavery Kansans, many of whom had migrated from New England, formed their own government, but President Franklin Pierce recognized only the proslavery legislature.

These proslavery lawmakers were open to Van Horn's idea, believing they could cement a voting majority to support entry to the union as a slave...

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Verlag
Dutton
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593472039
ISBN 13 
9780593472033
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
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