Most avid Chiefs fans can cite the exploits of the great players in team history, but there are many other players, and staff, too, who have escaped the hype but yet played vital roles in their teams' success. This is another in a series of profiles of one who did more than simply play a part in franchise history.

Look around the National Football League and you'll see kickers come and go, but few leave the imprint that Tommy Brooker did for the Dallas Texans, the forerunner of the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs can boast the first kicker in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Jan Stenerud and the team's current kicker, Harrison Butker, has made some of the most important boots in club history in recent years.

But Tommy Brooker will always be remembered for one kick.

Brooker never missed an extra point in his professional career, and while he made just 41 of 87 field goal attempts, he never made a bigger one than in the double overtime win in the 1962 American Football League Championship game against the Houston Oilers, who at the time were the two-time AFL title holders. His 25-yard field goal in the game's sixth quarter clinched the game for Dallas.

It was a different kind of league back in the early 1960s. Whether a kick was good or a miss, the ball simply went back to the opposing 20-yard line whatever the case.

Brooker also played tight end, which was not uncommon given the league's 33-man roster in the '60s. Jack Spikes, a running back, had done the prior kicking and was on the field a lot in the process. This was a time before soccer-styled, sidewinder poses became common. Brooker's career ended after the fourth game of the 1966 season as the franchise had moved to Kansas City from Dallas and become the Chiefs. He suffered a thigh muscle separation in his right kicking leg and was of little use to the Chiefs in a 29-14 loss to Buffalo.

Every time he kicked in the first three games, Brooker would re-injure his leg. Eventually, the Chiefs made a deal with the Bills and acquired Mike Mercer on what was known then as a "loan."

Although Mercer had been struggling, his fortunes quickly turned and he went on to help his new team win the 1966 AFL Championship and reach the first Super Bowl.

Brooker went on injured reserve and returned to his native Alabama, watching his team on television capture another AFL title to reach the AFL-NFL Championship game, soon to become known as the Super Bowl.

When Mercer returned to Buffalo after the conclusion of the 1966 season, Kansas City drafted Jan Stenerud, leaving Brooker to ask for a trade. The Oilers were looking for a kicker, but Head Coach Hank Stram and Houston's Don Klosterman, who had been the Chiefs' top talent scout at one time, could not work out a deal.

Brooker reasoned that Stram was fearful of letting a traded player go to a perennial powerhouse like Houston and instead sent him to Denver. Used as little more than a fill-in until the Broncos' regular kicker, who had a no-cut contract, returned, Brooker saw his career end, and he went home to Alabama, where he had been a member of legendary coach Bear Bryant's first recruiting class and the university's 1961 national championship team. He became a successful businessman in Tuscaloosa and a driving force behind the school's A-Club Charitable & Educational Foundation.

He would routinely return to Kansas City for alumni events and always took pride that he had played for the Texans-Chiefs. And whatever the length of his pro career, he knew one thing: he would have a place in the game's history for that one kick he made on December 23, 1962.

Few players could say that.

Brooker died in 2019 at the age of 79.