Which, honestly, is one of the first things I’d tell you I took from reporting on a very scary Wednesday in Kansas City.
Unfortunately, sometimes, it takes a situation like this to remember that. And after the Super Bowl parade shootings at Union Station, as the Chiefs celebrated their third championship in five years, having those types of people around provided an indelible silver lining after gunshots marred what had been, in the words of one team front-office man, “about as perfect a day as you can get.”
With every person I talked to over the last few days, I’d stumble into another story.
It was team president Mark Donovan whose steady hand kept folks calm in a storm of uncertainty. Donovan was in one of the first groups ushered to the buses—when things went haywire, some Chiefs people made it there, others were holed up in the train station—and helped to tell people in transit to find a bus to get on, with those being the safest places. He also helped direct heads of departments to get ahold of their people and established a line of communication with the authorities.
There was Anne Scharf, VP of community impact and civic affairs, who rather than running to the buses, came to the aid of one personnel man and his wife, who’d been separated from their oldest son. Scharf stayed out, joined the dad in the search and eventually found the kid and got him back to his family.
Then there were the players. On Wednesday, on social media, I told the story of Trey Smith, who saw the distraught son of a Chiefs exec, took the WWE title belt to him, gave it to him and sat and talked with him until he calmed down.
That was hardly the only story that resonated with everyone.
There was long snapper James Winchester, hurrying people into a closet, securing the area and settling people in to wait. “It was like he had military training in it,” said one observer. There was defensive tackle Mike Pennel, who was helping lead a group to the buses—a group that would watch a door open and see cops with guns drawn chasing a shooter—then quickly reset and got them into a secure, windowless hallway. There was Blaine Gabbert, leaving the security of the bus to go help others get there. There was a local news story out there, too, explaining how Clyde Edwards-Helaire protected a teenager separated from his dad.
There was a whole lot of humanity on display.
Then, there was the other side of it. Another story I’d heard came from a coach with two elementary-school-aged kids. When people started running and turning over tables and diving for cover, the older of his kids said, “Dad, walk fast but don’t run.” As they made it to a hallway, his younger kid reminded him to lock the door behind him.
That, to me, was chilling.
I was reminded by someone soon after all this happened how these players, mostly in their 20s, are part of the first generation to grow up with all of this as a part of their lives. I was a freshman in college when Columbine happened. Patrick Mahomes was 3. Trey Smith wasn’t born yet. Pennel was a 7-year-old in nearby Aurora, Colo. Sadly, we, as a country, have had to teach all these kids what to do in these situations. The kids younger than them know, too.
This is because, of course, kids now go through active-shooter drills the same way my generation went through fire drills, or a kid in Kansas City might go through a tornado drill. How we got there is obvious—through incidents at schools, churches, preschools (for Christ’s sake), movie theaters, concerts and, now, a freaking Super Bowl parade.
I don’t want to get political here. But it sure seems to me like the lawmakers, on both sides of the aisle, have conflated having a hunting rifle or a handgun in your house to protect your family with walking around on a city street armed for combat or owning a weapon of war. That they can’t find a middle ground on the issue because of where their money is coming from is an indictment on the character of every last one of them.
I that the Chiefs showed their own character in such an adverse situation last week, the type of situation that’s uniquely of this generation in America.
I just wish, on a day like that, it wasn’t necessary.
