Whether you know his name or not, Lloyd Wells belongs in the Chiefs’ Hall of Fame
In the pulsating Chiefs locker room at Tulane Stadium moments after they had dismantled the Minnesota Vikings 23-7 in Super Bowl IV, Frank Gifford of CBS was interviewing running back Mike Garrett.
Amid the hubbub, the man who would become enshrined in franchise lore for a 5-yard touchdown run (later revealed to the world as “65 Toss Power Trap” by mic’d up Chiefs coach Hank Stram) interrupted Gifford.
He pulled in a bystander likely known to few watching … and who remains obscure to all but the most ardent fans today.
“I must do one thing,” Garrett said, reeling in Lloyd Wells. “This guy is a scout for us, and he does a great job.”
The ever-smooth Gifford went with the flow, instantly noting that Lloyd Wells had “scouted and brought in so many of these outstanding stars for the Chiefs.”
The fleeting moment offered a snapshot of various facets of the unique and fascinating force of nature that was Wells, who was 81 when he died in 2005 from complications related to Alzheimer’s Disease.
Among many other aspects of his persona, he had a knack for maximizing his visibility that perhaps was honed by his experiences as a photographer. So he happened to stand that day near Garrett after sitting behind Chiefs owner and founder Lamar Hunt and Stram as NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle presented them the championship trophy.
Turns out he was always something to see.
Per a former Houston Post columnist, the former Marine who served his country in World War II and the Korean War painted his Houston home “traffic-light yellow with blood-red trim.”
He hobnobbed with a who’s-who that included the likes of Jesse Jackson. Richard Pryor and Howard Cosell, and he orchestrated sensational shenanigans such as signing Otis Taylor out from under the Dallas Cowboys by luring him out a window.
And he came to occupy another distinct spotlight as a friend and confidante of Muhammad Ali, thought then to be the best-known person on the planet.
Chris Watson, a Houston political consultant working on a documentary about Wells, said he’d seen George Foreman in a sermon credit Wells for the words Ali used to break his spirit in the “Rumble In The Jungle” in Zaire in 1974: “Is that all you got, George?”
“He was as close to me as my brother“ Ali spokesman Gene Kilroy told the Houston Chronicle on behalf of Ali when Wells died in 2005. “I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself.”
Still awaiting his due
Indelible and irresistible as those images of him seem, Wells never has been properly recognized for his substantial role as the first full-time Black scout in pro football that is at the heart of his legacy.
A legacy that is overdue to be commemorated in the Chiefs Hall of Fame and, for that matter, merits consideration for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Enshrined in Canton, after all, are three players Wells scouted and signed (Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier and Emmitt Thomas) from historically Black universities (among eight All-Pros he brought in from those schools) who might otherwise not have had a chance to play in the climate of the times.
The Hall of Fame also pays tribute to the Super Bowl IV team that was the first in pro football history to feature a majority of Black starters, many of whom were discovered and procured by Wells … including Taylor, who also belongs in the Hall of Fame.
At a time the very art of scouting was in its infancy, he was a trailblazer and catalyst for opportunity and change ahead.
“You can’t tell the story of pro football without him,” Watson said.
All of which helps explain why Garrett was compelled to make sure Wells was celebrated. Even in the commotion after that Super Bowl.
And even if he couldn’t yet fully appreciate the impact of a man he already considered larger than life:
A man who was involved in various civil rights breakthroughs in Houston … and had a supporting role in Texas Western beating Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA title game … and, Watson has learned from interviews, was a key behind-the-scenes proponent of moving the 1965 AFL All-Star game to Houston from New Orleans in protest of racist practices there.
“Black Lives Matter, that was his theme in the late ‘60s,” Garrett said in a phone interview.
Agent of change
What Wells was able to achieve with his pivotal role also was testimony to the crucial role the organization and Hunt, its founder, and Stram, its breakthrough head coach, played in accelerating the integration of pro football.
As the man who founded the American Football League and the Dallas Texans franchise that would become the Kansas City Chiefs after the 1962 season, Hunt was the engine behind an enterprise that inherently was flouting convention.
That also meant welcoming Black players at a time the NFL either was doing so haltingly or guided by unwritten quotas.
That’s a story in itself, but for the purpose of this point, let’s focus on one snapshot: Running back Abner Haynes was among several Black players on that first Texans team in 1960, a matter over which Hunt took considerable heat and that led to numerous threats and vocal abuse of Haynes.
In his biography of Hunt, “Lamar Hunt: A Life In Sports,” my friend Michael MacCambridge wrote that Hunt had “seen too much pain and suffering in Blacks that he cared about … to not empathize with the Blacks that he knew. But he was not one to lecture, preferring instead a more subtle, often entirely personal approach.”
Such as taking Haynes to lunch.
“He’d take me somewhere, and I’d walk in with him, and I could tell there’d never been a Black man served at this restaurant before,” Haynes told MacCambridge. “But I was with Lamar, and nobody said anything.”
Sometime in the AFL’s first year or two of operation, Hunt was invited by Wells to a Black high school all-star football game he had organized in or around Houston and met him at a related event.
Wells, then in his mid-30s, was working as a sports editor and columnist for the Houston Informer and Forward Times and was known for his role in desegregating press boxes and trying to integrate seating at local sporting events.
Ernie Ladd, who later played with the Chiefs, with regret once told the Houston Chronicle that Wells had tried to organize a players’ strike against the policy of segregation and that Wells called him “gutless like a worm” for not wanting to participate.
But Wells soon was extending his influence in yet another way after telling Hunt, “I can find you some football players.” That began on an informal part-time basis for a period before Wells became full-time in 1963 with the emphatic approval of Stram.
“Hank Stram, I tell you what, he was one of the no-color people: All he saw was ‘W’ and ‘L,’” defensive back Jim Kearney, a Houston native whom Wells later convinced to leave the Detroit Lions for the Chiefs, said in a phone interview.
Man of many talents
Persuasiveness and a discerning eye for talent were Wells’ greatest attributes in the job. So was his inclination to drive in gaudy cars understood to be adorned with a Chiefs decal, exploring places that few NFL coaches or general managers even considered at the time.
Here he was, on the road to Tennessee or Mississippi or Grambling in Louisiana to see Buchanan, the overall No. 1 pick in the AFL just as the Texans were about to move to Kansas City.
Or to now-defunct Bishop College in Texas to see Thomas.
Or to Morgan State in Maryland to check out Lanier, who initially resented and rejected Wells’ slick negotiating attempts but came to appreciate him as essential to what the Chiefs accomplished — and to the broader influence of that.
Then there was his adventure in Richardson, near Dallas, to coax Prairie View’s Taylor away from the Cowboys — who had him hemmed in a hotel room seeking to secure his services at the height of the NFL-AFL signing wars.
Because of his omnipresence around Houston athletics, Wells had known Taylor since junior high and was close to both Taylor and Worthing High basketball teammate David Lattin — whom Wells convinced to go to Texas Western and thus became part of history himself on the first team with an all-Black starting lineup to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship ... against all-white Kentucky.
(By phone on Thursday, Lattin said he remained close to Wells until the day he died, and that he had been a “big part of everything” in his life — including the Chiefs selecting him in the 17th round of the 1967 AFL Draft despite the fact that he had no interest in playing football.)
Like many stories when it comes to a character like Wells, there are a few variations of the one with Taylor, who is alive but has been incapacitated for years.
The best-documented version is shared by MacCambridge, who interviewed Wells and former Chiefs executive Don Klosterman. He wrote in “America’s Game” that Taylor had crawled out the back window after Wells hissed to him from outside and told him he might lose his job if he didn’t come. And that there was a red T-Bird waiting for him in Kansas City.
Other narratives have it that Wells posed as a photographer for Ebony Magazine to get into the room and whisk away Taylor through the window.
Whatever the specifics, the result was the same thanks to the man MacCambridge calls “an American original.”
Taylor became a Chief and yet another dominant product of Wells’ imprint on the changing of the game. That was punctuated in the last game played by an AFL team before the merger … the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory over the Vikings.
And by an exclamation point attached by Garrett after the game.
“Lloyd Wells,” Garrett said, “was like part of the fabric of the Kansas City Chiefs.”
And should be known for at least as much.
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 4:22 PM with the headline "Whether you know his name or not, Lloyd Wells belongs in the Chiefs’ Hall of Fame."