Global Courant 2023-05-10 00:49:47
The football player on the vintage Sports Illustrated cover looks defeated.
He’s up from his chest, the number 11 on his crumpled purple Minnesota Vikings jersey barely visible. The sky behind him is blue, but the midday sun shines on his face. The player is squinting, he has sweaty, shaggy hair with a few gray locks, and his mouth is open and panting. Scars adorn his chin.
Defeated, but still standing. Still looking for a chance to win.
Minnesota Viking quarterback Joe Kapp is knocked down by Kansas City’s Jerry Mays (75) as another KC player moves in during the first half of Super Bowl IV on January 11, 1970 in New Orleans.
(JS / Associated Press)
“The Toughest Chicano: Viking Quarterback Joe Kapp” is on the front cover of the July 20, 1970 issue. Nothing else.
I first saw it in the late 1990s when I was trying to learn more about Kapp, who died Monday at age 85 after a 15-year battle with dementia. Even then I knew my place in the sport: on the sidelines. While my favorite cousins Vic and Plas and our best friend Art ruled pigskin games in the neighborhood and Madden, my noodle arm and butterfingers read books and articles about the sport’s past.
One of them must have mentioned Kapp, because the short sketches about his career that I came across stuck with me. His short, snappy name, of course. The general impression I got was that while he wasn’t the most talented player, he remained a formidable competitor. Kapp’s signature move that seemed to fit all descriptions: While most quarterbacks of his era tried to dodge tacklers as they scrambled a few yards away, he put his shoulder down and crashed into them—and always got the upper hand.
“I am aware of my own reputation and I enjoy it. I’ve been called one half of a collision looking for the other.
– Joe Kapp wrote in a first-person Sports Illustrated story published in 1970
Once the internet became a thing, I decided to see what else I could find out about him. That’s how I came across Kapp’s “The Toughest Chicano” cover.
I was already politically awakened, but still trying to figure out how I belonged in Southern California. Calling myself a Chicano didn’t fit my rancho-libertarian ethos, which felt the term was outdated and used only by leftists.
Kapp’s coverage changed so quickly. If a Super Bowl quarterback like him could embrace the term, why couldn’t I?
But I also felt confusion. None of the pieces I’d read about Kapp—who I’d summarily discovered was the son of a Mexican-American mother and a German father—had ever mentioned his ethnicity. Why? And if the history books didn’t tell us things like this, what else were they hiding?
Minnesota Vikings quarterback Joe Kapp is lifted high in the air by Lee Roy Caffey (60) of the Green Bay Packers after throwing a pass on December 3, 1967 in Minneapolis.
(Robert Walsh/Associated Press)
That simple flip unlocked a world of pride in me and a passion for finding the truth that continues to this day.
Twenty years after I first saw it, I still think “The Toughest Chicano” is one of the boldest covers a magazine has ever published. As Latinos continue to fight for visibility in popular culture and especially the media, it remains a milestone to see one of the most prominent publications in the United States use such a loaded term – it was the “Latinx” of its day , children -. It also shows how ridiculously simple representation can be.
I mean, if Sports Freakin’ Illustrated could do it, anyone can.
SI’s use of “Chicano” would be impressive today, but it was nothing short of radical in 1970. The Chicano movement was in full swing, hindering the status quo. Earlier that year, the La Raza Unida party was founded, which would use the ballot box to disrupt elections in Texas and Los Angeles. About a week after the cover appeared, the United Farm Workers signed contracts with the grape growers they had boycotted for years. A month later, an anti-Vietnam War protest in East LA ended in brutality, when sheriff’s deputies beat up protesters and three people were killed, including pioneering Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar.
At a time when headlines about Mexican Americans portrayed us as criminals, immigrants, or activists, Sports Illustrated portrayed Kapp and Chicanos as admirable. We can disrupt the status quo. We can also go to the Super Bowl.
The cover of “The Toughest Chicano” was so iconic it became the title of Kapps’ 2019 biography and is mentioned in all memoirs about him now published. But what the Sport Illustrated tribute and accompanying article failed to point to was that Kapp would exemplify the spiritual and mental fortitude that all prominent Mexican Americans should maintain.
Kapp has no chance of being inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, but his resume on the gridiron remains impressive. He was the leader of the last Cal Bears team to reach the Rose Bowl and one of the first Latino college All-Americans. Kapp remains one of only two quarterbacks to lead teams to the Canadian Football League’s Gray Cup and Super Bowl (Joe Theismann being the other). He was the Cal head coach during the infamous 1982 “The Play” showdown against the Stanford Cardinal, which ended in an unlikely last-second victory for the Bears.
Still, Kapp’s career off the field was arguably more impactful.
He filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the NFL when no football team hired him in the offseason after his Super Bowl run. Once his playing career ended, he became a youth motivational speaker, established a scholarship fund in his name, and spoke out against the anti-Latino racism he endured throughout his career and continued long after .
Kapp also made public with the mental battle that plagued him later in life, which his family says stemmed from the many hits their patriarch suffered on the field. Kapp joined the 2017 class action lawsuit against the NFL alleging that the league’s long-standing rejection of concussions and hard blows resulted in brain damage to former players.
To the end, Kapp showed up to win, damn the odds.
“I’m aware of my own reputation and I enjoy it,” he told Sports Illustrated in the first-person narrative that accompanied his 1970 cover. “I’ve been called one half of a collision looking for the other.”
“The toughest chicano”, indeed. Joe Kapp, ¡present!
