Artifacts located in the Chiefs Hall of Honor or stored in the team's offices inside the caves of SubTropolis represent powerful tools that bring the team's and the American Football League's history to life. They forge an emotional connection that crosses time and space, bringing fans closer to the past in a way that words alone often cannot do. Over the coming year, look as we identify a team artifact and tell you its story.
Perhaps no artifact on display in the Chiefs Hall of Honor attracts a more amusing response from visitors than a bank check made out to receiver Chris Burford, payable for $48.50 and dated August 12, 1961.
Once onlookers discover that it is Burford's game check for his play in a preseason game, surprised looks are sure to follow.
Wages for professional football players at the dawn of the turbulent '60s were a far cry from amounts we hear and see today as reported in newspapers. In those long ago days, AFL and NFL players routinely held down other jobs during the offseason to make ends meet.
At the start of the American Football League — and Burford was among one of the earliest players contracted by the then Dallas Texans who became the Kansas City Chiefs — many of the highest paid players were college draft picks who the AFL was trying to lure away from the NFL.
The average salary for an AFL player in the league's early years was somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000 dollars.
It was reported in some circles that a future Chiefs and Pro Football Hall of Fame player, a rookie no less, was perhaps the highest salaried player on the team during the franchise's first year at $15,000.
Of course, as the war between the two leagues continued, payment extended well beyond just dollars and cents and included other incentives.
Skill players — in particular quarterbacks — had seen their wages rise by 1964.
Pete Beathard, who had been drafted by both the Chiefs and NFL's Detroit Lions, gravitated towards Kansas City which offered him a $15,000 signing bonus, a no-cut contract for $20 grand a year, a new car, life insurance, free rent in an apartment for a year, and some other perks. The deal was reportedly for three years.
