Mahomes gives Kansas City reason to fall in love

Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes greets fans on his way to the locker room after last week’s victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars. After leading the Chiefs to a 5-0 start as they face the New England Patriots tonight, Mahomes has become one of the most exciting players in the NFL.
Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes greets fans on his way to the locker room after last week’s victory over the Jacksonville Jaguars. After leading the Chiefs to a 5-0 start as they face the New England Patriots tonight, Mahomes has become one of the most exciting players in the NFL.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Rob Gaskins jumped atop a massage table Wednesday night, hiked up the leg of his shorts and presented his right thigh to his favorite tattoo artist, Jeremy Taylor.

It needed to be cleaned, then shaved, so Taylor could begin illustrating this city's most beloved visage: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

Gaskins scheduled this tattoo about three weeks ago, just after Mahomes threw for six touchdowns at Pittsburgh, which preceded a scrambling scoring toss against San Francisco, which preceded a fourth-quarter comeback in Denver's caldron of cacophony, where the Chiefs' go-ahead drive was extended on third and 5 by a torrent of intuition: a left-handed flick by a right-handed passer.

Two days later, the Missouri Department of Transportation tweeted an image reminding drivers to follow Mahomes: always pass on the left.

These are strange days in the Kansas City area, where locals accustomed to coveting other teams' quarterbacks are savoring a sensation rarer than a vegetarian at Gates Bar-B-Q. After decades of playoff failures, of enduring quarterbacks like Tyler Thigpen and Tyler Palko and Brodie Croyle, the most exciting player in the NFL now shines at the sport's most critical position, for their team, in their town.

"Unless you have LeBron in your city, this is the best thing you can have," said Carrington Harrison, 30, a sports-talk radio host here and a Kansas City native. "The Chiefs have the coolest thing you can have in sports. That person lives in Kansas City now. The 'it person' lives in Kansas City."

Heading into tonight's game at New England, the Chiefs are 5-0, as they were last year, as they have been before, and yet the general sense here is that this season just feels ... different. That's the word evoked most often.

To the fans here, Mahomes embodies a New Year's resolution: a 23-year-old dude with a nasally Texas twang (called "froggish" by his coach) who can throw a football exceedingly far and exceedingly well and into exceedingly tight spaces, and whose exploits so far in his first year as a starter -- 16 total touchdowns, two turnovers -- offer them a chance to unburden themselves of the past.

And compel a grown man to request Mahomes' curly mop be pierced into his skin for all of eternity.

"We got him first," said Gaskins, who lives in Belton, Mo. "He started here. In Kansas City. He didn't start in Green Bay, he didn't start in San Francisco, he didn't start in New York. My home, Kansas City."

Harrison likened the enthusiasm to LeBron James' sitting courtside to watch Stephen Curry play at Davidson and to Jeremy Lin's unpredictable rise with the New York Knicks in 2012. The mania has spread west, to the set of the television comedy Modern Family, where members of the crew tell Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cam, that they've started watching Chiefs games just because of Mahomes.

"I can't tell you how many times I watched John Elway march down the field and beat the Chiefs," Stonestreet, a native of Kansas City, Kan., said in a telephone interview (the answer is eight, according to Pro Football Reference). "Now I feel like we have the guy who can do it to other teams after having it done to us so many times."

Instead of engaging in their traditional pastime of lamenting all the quarterbacks they could have drafted but didn't -- Dan Marino and Jim Kelly, for instance -- Chiefs fans now marvel at the one they did. They watch loops of his highlights, post fawning memes, allow themselves to submit to his promise.

The morning after Kansas City toppled Denver, Ashley Homan, a fifth-grade teacher in Smithville, Mo., told her students that they were now entering the Chiefs Kingdom -- loud enough for the teacher across the hall, a Broncos fan, to hear. Cheryl Jensen, a regular tailgater in Lot D17 at Arrowhead Stadium, watched Drew Brees set the career passing yardage record Monday night and then told friends on Facebook that she couldn't wait for Mahomes to surpass him.

"Even if they go 5-11 the rest of the way and we're Detroit for the next 10 years, I still got to watch this guy," said Clint Ashlock, 38, artistic director for the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra. "I've never wanted to go out and buy a jersey for anybody, but I did. I might get two."

Sports on 10/14/2018

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