SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — When Hotchy Kiene landed in the Arizona desert in 1994, the Kansas City, Mo., native didn’t have any friends to watch Chiefs football with him.
Now he has almost 3,000 of them, and a lot of them will be watching Super Bowl LVII alongside him at Pub Rock Live, the home away from Arrowhead for many Chiefs fans who have migrated to Phoenix over the years.
“When I first moved out here, I was lucky if I could find a bar that would put the game on,” Kiene said. “If they did, it would be one TV and there wouldn’t be any sound.”
Kiene grew up a Chiefs fan in the Brookside neighborhood in Kansas City. After years of wandering from location to location, he eventually pulled up to the bar at Pub Rock Live, a Scottsdale bar owned by Nancy Stevens. A couple of other Chiefs fans were there, and they asked Stevens if she could turn on the team’s game. The group slowly began to grow, and eventually, Kiene started a Facebook group so they could keep in touch during the offseason.
Just like most things Chiefs related, there was a Mahomes Effect. Attendance started rising when the Chiefs drafted quarterback Patrick Mahomes, and things really started taking off during his MVP season in 2018.
AZ Chiefs Kingdom now has nearly 3,000 members. Anywhere from 300 to 600 fans show up at Pub Rock on game days. The bar has been hosting events through Super Bowl week including autograph sessions with Chiefs players.
“We have a lot of people who have moved here from Kansas City and other places in the Midwest,” Kiene said.
There are even some converts. Plus they found an ally in Stevens, who comes from a family of Broncos fans but has counted herself as a Chiefs fan since she was a rebellious child.
Pub Rock Live is a concert venue, so it’s used to putting on a show — and that’s exactly what game days have become here. As the crowds began to grow, Kiene picked up the microphone from the concert stage and started mimicking the public address announcer by shouting, “First down!”
Now the seemingly mild-mannered Kiene, who by day is a senior account executive in sales for Voice Media Group and the Phoenix New Times, is the DJ for Chiefs games. He keeps the crowd entertained during commercial breaks with music and entertainment. The venue also brings in food trucks for games and sets up TVs outside to accommodate the crowds, with an expanded footprint for Super Sunday.
The bar offered up the Pub Pass for Sunday, a $159 ticket complete with priority seating and a swag bag with exclusive perks such as a t-shirt, hat, free raffle tickets, a $10 food truck voucher, access to a Pub Pass-only line and more. There were only 150 passes, and those sold out on Friday.
The bar expects around 1,000 Chiefs fans to inundate the venue and the parking lot on Sunday. There will be three 90-inch monitors set up in the parking lot for the game along with opportunities to follow along with the action inside and outside the bar. On Saturday afternoon two different Andy Reid impersonators were wandering through the crowd.
Chiefs Hall of Famer Nick Lowery is a familiar face here. He has a home in the Phoenix area and has partnered with Pub Rock for charity events to support his youth foundation that champions the cause to battle homelessness. This week he’s brought a few of his friends, namely former teammates Neil Smith, Christian Okoye and Stephone Paige. All four players signed autographs for fans during their visit.
“Christian has been here a couple of times,” Kiene said. “That was my first time meeting Neil Smith, that was amazing.”
But what strikes Kiene is the community that has been built by the Chiefs fans in the Phoenix Valley.
“We give Chiefs fans a place to come and feel like they are home,” Kiene said. “This is as close as you can get to being at Arrowhead without being there.”
