RIP Lenny the Cool
I loved listening to Len call Chiefs games, and loved him repping KC every chance he got. The 90s "Inside the NFL" on HBO was amazing. Lenny + NFL Films were incredible, and I feel blessed to have been able to witness them.
Len Dawson is a KC legacy. Legendary. KC loves you, Lenny! Always will. [Reply]
I might have posted this somewhere else on here, but Jackie Dawson, Len's first wife, was a patient of my Dad's.
Dawson also used to eat lunch with a group of doctors on the Plaza on a regular basis, back when a group of MD's and an NFL quarterback could be considered relative social peers, and my Dad was part of that group.
In fact, his peers in the hospital used to call my Dad Lenny, b/c he was this funny looking Filipino doctor back when there were only 3 Filipino doctors practicing in Kansas City. My Dad had what seemed to them an odd first name (Leonardo), but also part of it was because they thought my Dad didn't crack under pressure just like the no. 1 sports hero in KC.
My Dad did have a bit of an odd background in medicine in that he had first practiced in the rural Philippines, which meant he did things very few doctors educated in the US medical system would do. For example, my father was once confronted with the aftermath of a wild bar fight in the Philippines where someone pulled a butterfly knife (Filipino martial arts are known for their slick knife fighting techniques). He ended up having to treat a guy with half of his face hanging off his skull and no on call plastic surgeon to summon. This was before emergency medicine was its own highly-developed specialty even in the United States. It was a sort of sink or swim situation, and my Dad later became a gastroenterologist in the US, so this was WAY out of his area of knowledge. These kind of experiences helped him develop resilience when things didn't go according to plan.
So, for me, Len Dawson always makes me think of my Dad's medical career. My Dad also had a nodding acquaintance with a number of the players from the Super Bowl 4 era. Jim Tyrer lived across the street from my family when I was a very small child and Fred Arbanas had a house about a block away. Jan Stenerud was also a patient of my dad as well as Vince Costello, who was the D coordinator of the Chiefs in the 70's and was middle linebacker for the Browns during the Jim Brown era. [Reply]
