TRAVELOGUE

On the Road: Kansas City

Aug 21, 2015, 8:20 AM | Updated: Aug 28, 2015, 4:53 pm

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KANSAS CITY – The game was a chance to catch a glimpse of what Seattle’s football season may hold in store.

The trip, though, included a look at our country’s past first by visiting the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and then the National World War I Museum and then the best meal I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant that used to be a gas station.

That was how I spent my 25 hours in Kansas City, kicking off the Seahawks’ 2015 travel schedule with a whirlwind tour that held special significance for me. Kansas City was the site of the first road game I covered after being assigned to follow the Seahawks. This was 10 years and two newspaper jobs ago, and I had just switched assignments to the NFL after three seasons of covering our now dearly departed Seattle Sonics.

It was 2005, and the Seahawks played a preseason road game in Kansas City that season, too. I remember exactly two facts: Seattle won the game, and lost Floyd Womack – the presumed starter at right tackle – to an arm injury, opening up a spot on the line that Sean Locklear never did let go of.

The reason I don’t remember much else? I didn’t do much else. I stayed at the Kansas City hotel that is closest to the airport. I ate dinner at that hotel. I exercised at that hotel. I returned to that hotel after covering the game, and flew out in the morning without having so much as walked a block downtown.

I feel embarrassed to admit that in retrospect. For 13 years now, I’ve been lucky enough to have a job that not only entails writing about, discussing and analyzing the games and teams that others pay to see, but I have flown around the country to do that.

It is a remarkable chance to see the country, but an opportunity that required me to open my eyes and look. And over the past 10 years, I’ve become diligent about doing just that so when this year’s travel schedule started out in the middle of the country, I had a full itinerary from the moment I touched down on Alaska Airlines flight 752 on Friday afternoon to covering the game that night to taking a look into a unique slice of American sports history on Saturday morning.

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum opened in 1990, documenting a part of baseball’s past that I find simultaneously sad and inspiring. These leagues, after all, were the result of discriminatory employment practices in which African-Americans were prevented from playing baseball at the highest level in this country for the better part of half a century.

It is tragic that we never know how catcher Josh Gibson – called the black Babe Ruth – would have compared against the sport’s top sluggers or what Satchel Paige would have accomplished with a full Major League career.

But I also found the museum inspiring, a testament to the power of the human spirit. Faced with the abject racism and discriminatory employment practices, African-American athletes and businessmen built a vibrant enterprise of their own and largely on their own. The first formal Negro Leagues forming in 1920 and spanning up to and through the integration of the Major Leagues. Night baseball games were played first in the Negro Leagues. They drew huge crowds and was home to accomplishments that are rightly recognized as part of the history of our national pastime and not just a footnote.

The National World War I Museum is both more elaborate and more global, providing a glimpse into a war that was triggered by the elaborate – and arcane – Old World alliances yet fought with increasingly modern technology. Nine million soldiers are said to have died in the conflict, and to walk through the museum, seeing the arcane versions of gas masks and the raw reality of trench warfare is both to feel sympathy for the combatants and a bit of pride in the United States’ ambition in helping end it.

I saved the best for last on my trip. The best meal that is. I completed the holy trinity of Kansas City barbecue by eating at Joe’s, the original location where there’s still a fully functioning gas station out front. The place was called Oklahoma Joe’s until recently, and as much praise as the restaurant received – the eminent Anthony Bourdain listing it as one of 13 places to eat prior to one’s death – well, I had a hard time thinking reconciling eating Kansas City barbecue at a business bearing the word Oklahoma.

So I stuck with Gates and Arthur Bryant’s with Jack Stack as a more upscale option.

But Joe’s is a Kansas City business. Has been since 1997, and its recent name change to Joe’s Kansas City Barbecue cements that fact in place. Saturday is the day for burnt ends at Joe’s, and if you don’t know the burnt ends, well, that’s a shortcoming you best remedy, and there is no better place in this country to do that than Kansas City. The burnt ends are the trimmings from a smoked beef brisket, a little bit dried out and utterly ideal for barbecue beans or stews or anything else that they can imbue with an incredibly smoky flavor.

They also delicious by themselves, served on a single slice of white bread and slathered with barbecue sauce. I ordered the “Burnt End Luncheon” at Joe’s with a side-order of spicy slaw ($10.95) on Saturday, got a local Boulevard Brewing Pop-Top IPA to go with it and sat at the counter for my last taste of Kansas City.

I waited 70 minutes in line before reaching the counter to order, but in reality, I had been waiting much longer than that. I first came to Kansas City 10 years ago on a trip, and I’ve been making up for it ever since.

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