A very Brahms farewell

 Len Dawson passed the other day at 87, and so dust off that piano bench, Mr. Burford. I'm ready to go hand-to-hand with Brahms again, two falls out of three.

Some explanation is likely in order here.

The explanation is all tied up with childhood memory, which frequently is triggered by the death of a piece of that childhood. Len Dawson was one of those -- the quarterback of the mighty Kansas City Chiefs of the 1960s, and also a Sports Illustrated cover on my bedroom wall.

 I papered the whole room with SI covers as a kid, and now they're long gone. So, too, are  many of those who graced them; one by one they go, taking with them the childhood conceit that mortality is just an ugly rumor.

But the memories remain, and come flooding back. And so Len Dawson goes, and here they all are again: Mike Garrett and Otis Taylor and Willie Lanier; Buck Buchanan and Johnny Robinson and Emmitt Thomas. Fred Arbanas, the one-eyed tight end. Hank Stram, the strutting peacock on the sideline, matriculating the ball down the field in his club jacket bearing the Chiefs crest. 

And Brahms, of course. Always Brahms.

 Brahms comes into this, you see, because my piano teacher, Mr. Burford, never heard of the Kansas City Chiefs. Never heard of the Green Bay Packers, either. And so, on the day they squared off in the very first Super Bowl, he obliviously scheduled our annual recital.

I drew the dreaded last spot in the lineup that day. Lucky me.

There I sat, sweating out the afternoon, the tie around my neck feeling even more like a noose than it normally did. I hated ties. I hated the iron maiden suits that went with them. What 11-year-old boy doesn't?

Especially when he has to sit through two hours or so of tortured plinking by his fellow performers, while the dads in attendance squirmed like 11-year-olds themselves. What indignities must Bart Starr 'n' them be inflicting on the poor Chiefs, speaking of torture? And who scheduled this thing on the day of the game?

Waiting at the end of all this, for both the dads and me, was Brahms. I don't remember what the piece was. All I remember was finally -- finally -- sitting at the piano, and plowing through old Johannes like Donny Anderson plowing through Fred "The Hammer" Williamson. I was not as deft as Max McGee, plucking two touchdown passes from thin air and the haze of his legendary hangover, but I got through it. 

Me 1. Brahms 0.

And, out in L.A.: Packers 35, Chiefs 10.

Three years later Dawson and the Chiefs would get their revenge, pounding the Vikings 23-7 in Super Bowl IV while Stram gloated unabashedly on the sideline. And now it is -- what? -- 52 years later, and Len is gone. And the dust lies thick on the piano a few feet away here in our den.

Like old Hank Stram, Brahms must be gloating.