On a pristine, sunny Saturday morning in London, July 30, 1966, people across the city awoke with a heightened, palpable sense of anticipation. The festive bustle felt, to many Londoners, like a joyous return to normal, even as it came with an undertow of tension. On that day, national pride would assert itself, with something achingly important at stake, tangible in its particulars but ineffable in its immense gravity: At hallowed Wembley Stadium, England was facing West Germany for the World Cup title.
The contest would surely hew to the British tradition of impeccable sportsmanship, and yet how could an English team face off against a German team in any sport within a generation of the end of World War II without there being an extra hint of truculence rooted in the history of the century? That morning, Vincent Mulchrone in the Daily Mail led his column by imploring his countrymen, “If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs.”
On the very same morning back in the States, Lamar awoke in his house on Armstrong Parkway (he and Norma had moved back from Kansas City two months earlier, the successful season-ticket drive complete). There was exercise to be done and shrubs to be trimmed in front of the house, but on this day, he sat in front of his television set, tuned into ABC Wide World of Sports, to watch the broadcast from London of the World Cup Final.
Lamar had not seen a soccer match in three-and-a-half years, since he and Norma had thrilled to the Shamrock Rovers match in Dublin, but he had been following as best he could in the U.S. press the emerging storylines of the tournament—the overdue return of pageantry and frivolity to London, just twenty years after much of the city lay in rubble from the war; the saga of the gifted Pelé of Brazil, who had been hacked and harried mercilessly as the twice-defending world champs were eliminated; the shocking performance of the mysterious North Koreans, a team hidden from much of the build-up to the tournament by the Communist regime from which it sprang; and the rise of the West German team, technically adept but also tightly knit, restoring a measure of cautious pride to its shamed and broken land. It was billed as the “biggest sports event in the world,” and this alone was enough to merit Lamar’s attention.
That day, as the two sides dueled in one of the most memorable matches in the sport’s history, Lamar watched, raptly absorbed in the game’s unfolding drama. Remembering it later, he would describe himself as “very fascinated” by the game, “especially by the crowd reaction as indicated by the noise level from the spectators as the game rocked back and forth. I was especially impressed by the internationalism of the game. The nation of England against the nation of [West] Germany—not the type of thing I was accustomed to seeing in American sports.”
What he saw on the field was something he scarcely comprehended—pell-mell running and wild goal-mouth scrambles, a tense, stuttering rhythm to the movement of the ball that sometimes entranced and sometimes confounded, the phenomenon of action that continued in a fluid, uninterrupted siege of 45 minutes at a time. No commercials. No timeouts. No substitutions. All this he saw as a stranger, and at times it was quite unfathomable.
But the sound inside Wembley Stadium, the glimpses of the fans in the grandstand, the packed, raucous chants and cheering and singing in the shadow of the two towers—this was something he recognized instantly. It was the sound of fans transfixed and intent, engaged with the action, riding the events on the field in a surging wave of emotion, antipathy, hope, disappointment, and, ultimately and unforgettably—after two goals for the home side in extra time—triumph. After the game, Lamar marveled at the sight of the English players, marching up into the stands, in front of the queen’s box, to receive their world champion’s medals.
Lamar was captivated with the excitement and pageantry, and he found that in the days following, he couldn’t really shake his fascination with what he’d seen. Over the next several months, he would begin to explore the ways he might transport the game, the atmosphere, and the unique culture of the sport to America.
This goal would preoccupy him, to a great extent, for the rest of his life.
•
From the moment in 1958 when Lamar sat in wonder at the stirring finale of the Colts–Giants title game, he had been focused on finding success with a pro football franchise. The massive effort involved in launching the AFL and running his own franchise had taken precedence over all his other business interests at the time. He still owned a portion of Penrod Drilling and Placid Oil, and there were tax advantages to him keeping a minimal hand in these operations (“he wasn’t really involved,” said Herbert). He shared an interest in a Dallas apartment complex with his brothers, and he was accumulating other real estate. He owned and oversaw the management of a 72-lane bowling alley, the Bronco Bowl, and had nominally been involved in former next-door neighbor Curtis Sanford’s National Bowling League (the Dallas franchise, the Broncos, played their games at the bowling center’s amphitheater in 1961 and 1962). Since 1964, he had been a part-owner, with limited involvement, in the Dallas Rangers baseball team, and he was still interested in bringing major league baseball to the city.
In 1966, Lamar was approached about buying a stake in yet another sports enterprise, an expansion basketball franchise based in Chicago. Norma, who had played basketball in high school (“with great mediocrity,” in her words), remembered taking a walk with Lamar one day, when he asked her, “What do you think about this investment, in pro basketball?” She encouraged him, reasoning that college basketball was growing in popularity, and the pro game could logically follow, as it had with football. So that summer, Lamar purchased a portion of the Chicago Bulls, an expansion franchise in the National Basketball Association. As a minority owner (with just an 11.25 percent stake in the team), he traveled to Chicago for a couple of games that first season, but he was never intrusive. “You’d see him in the stands occasionally, and he’d be there for some of the board meetings,” said the team’s first GM, Jerry Colangelo, “but Lamar never meddled. He was just there to support you.”
The duties of running the Chiefs, his added responsibility as the founder of the AFL and conduit for its owners, plus the obligations he had for his share of the family’s oil and real estate interests made for a daunting workload. All that, combined with Lamar’s growing family, assured that he would remain almost constantly busy.
But in 1967, he chose to add to this workload, in dramatic and unlikely ways. The profile of spectator sports was undeniably rising—the massive television audience for the Super Bowl had been just one in a long line of positive factors. Among the millionaires who owned sports franchises in the 1960s, there was a growing belief among a small group that proved quite seductive. Some owners believed that with football and the other major American team sports growing, there could be room for another sport as well.
“I can’t say that I heard him say, ‘This is why I want to be in the soccer business,’” said Norma. “Lamar, as best as I could tell, wanted to be in every sports business. It’s all he ever did. It never surprised me when he said he thought another sport was going to be great for America.”
Lamar knew he wanted to invest, and sent a note to his longtime friend Bill McNutt. “The day I got a brochure on soccer,” he said, “I wrote Bill for his advice. I didn’t ask him to invest. He wrote me back in substance that ‘this has to be the worst investment I ever heard of. The only one worse would be the Brooklyn Bridge.’” But within weeks, McNutt had agreed to join in the endeavor, trading some of his Collin Street Bakery stock to Lamar for a percentage of the new team, which they agreed to call the Dallas Tornado.
Within six months after the ’66 World Cup, two different groups of owners pushed to start major soccer leagues in the United States. Perhaps only in America could a sport that had been dismissed or despised by the mainstream suddenly become the subject of not one but two major start-up efforts. Lamar found himself aligned with Houston’s Judge Roy Hofheinz and the North American Soccer League, which earned recognition from the United States Soccer Football Federation and the sport’s worldwide governing body, FIFA.
But another organization, the National Professional Soccer League, with backing from some NFL owners (including the Bidwill family in St. Louis and Daniel F. Reeves in Los Angeles), was also intent on bringing soccer to the states. While the NPSL didn’t have the official sanction of FIFA, it had something its owners viewed as being far more useful, a national TV contract with CBS. With both groups convinced that the first league to get a product on the field would be successful, the NPSL green-lighted an inaugural season in the spring of 1967, backed by its TV contract with CBS. Faced with that, Lamar and the rest of the NASL group decided they needed to do something sooner rather than later, though they were aware that they lacked a suitable pool of players, as well as the infrastructure to find them in America, where the participation level in the sport was microscopic. In early 1967, the NASL changed its name to the United Soccer Association, USA, to avoid confusion with the rival NPSL, and then set about importing entire teams to play a short season in the summer of 1967, so the league could have some kind of presence to fight the NPSL.
The franchise in Cleveland farmed in the Stoke City club, from England’s First Division; Jack Kent Cooke in Los Angeles brought in another English team, Wolverhampton Wanderers; Houston imported Bangu FC Brazil, while Boston brought in the Shamrock Rovers side that Lamar and Norma had watched back in Dublin. After corresponding with manager Jerry Kerr of Scotland’s Dundee United, Lamar and Bill McNutt convinced the club to play in America as the Dallas Tornado.
Dundee United had just finished in the middle of the table of the Scottish first division, but they were a team that had played in the European Cup against the likes of Barcelona and Juventus in earlier years. The squad was entirely British, raised in an environment of frigid gamedays when the sun was but a rumor, and in which beer and lager were training-day staples and fish and chips a common pre-game meal. In America, they would have to adjust to a climate that was oppressively hot. “You could tell that they were technically skilled,” said one fan of the first season. “But they were dying in the heat.”
Even as that season was progressing, with the surrogates from Dundee United finishing last in the USA’s Western Division, Lamar and McNutt were discussing ways to stock their team for the following season, 1968, when owners were expected to provide their own players for a full campaign.
It was at this point that Lamar received a letter from Canada from someone named Bob Kap. He was a small, round-faced man whose command of English, like his résumé, was extremely sketchy. But in a series of letters and a visit to Dallas, he convinced Lamar and McNutt to install him as the Tornado’s manager and, extraordinarily, send him on a worldwide tour over the winter months, playing exhibitions with a handpicked roster of up-and-coming young players. Kap boasted that he possessed the requisite coaching badges from England and had played with Manchester United, and he profited from these claims since none of them, in Dallas in 1967, were easily verifiable.
Lamar had made specious hires at the beginning of the AFL, but because he knew football, he was able to identify his mistakes there much more quickly. The problem was exacerbated in soccer, since he knew so little about the sport. The tour that followed was a fool’s errand, though a grand one.
The idea (so elaborately fanciful that no one claimed authorship of it after the fact) was that Kap could recruit an all-star international squad of young and inexpensive young players, take them on a global tour during which he would mold them into a genuinely cohesive unit, and along the way raise enough funds to offset the cost of the tour.
Lamar granted Kap authority to hire a team of young players, time and money to train them in Seville, Spain, and then the itinerary to set off on a 25,000-mile world tour, with stops in Burma, Singapore, Pakistan, and other exotic outposts, all the while scouting for more young players with a taste for adventure. Lamar sent out his administrative assistant, Paul Waters, as an advance man to secure games and set up lodging, and then left the rest to Kap.
The tour began August 22, 1967, in Cordoba, Spain, and ended nearly six months and forty-seven games later, in Papeete, Tahiti. Along the way, the team was fitted out for Stetson hats and cowboy boots, and expected to serve as ambassadors for a country most had never visited.
From all over the world, the contacts poured in. Lamar exchanged regular letters, cables, and telegrams with Waters, who responded with nearly daily updates by telegram: “NO GAMES KOREAN WEATHER TOO COLD PROCEEDING TOKYO PAUL,” “LEAVING CALCUTTA FOR BANGKOK THEN RANGOON GAME SCHEDULE UNCHANGED PAUL.” Lamar would occasionally respond. On September 20, he wired back, “CONGRATULATIONS TAIWAN, TOKYO, PHILIPPINES. CONTINUE SCHEDULE GAMES EVEN IF YOU EXCEED FORTY. LAMAR.”
In August there came from Waters: “AM AT INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL IN KARACHI HATE BEING REBELLIOUS BUT FIRMLY BELIEF [sic] AFGANISTAN [sic] A MISTAKE. PLEASE RELY MY JUDGEMENT [sic] AWAITING ORDERS. PAUL.” Lamar promptly replied, “YOUR REQUEST TO SKIP AFGHANISTAN OKAY. PROCEED TO INDIA. LAMAR.”
While the system of player recruitment was entirely haphazard—one of Kap’s signees, Frank Randolf, had never played an organized game, and was soon designated by Kap as the team physician, “Dr. Frank”—it also had its highlights. The trio of signees from the Netherlands included Niels Overweg, who would go on to be capped on the excellent Dutch team of the mid-1970s. But his career with the Tornado came to naught. One idle evening during the team’s training camp in Spain, Overweg and his two Dutch teammates took turns urinating into Overweg’s Stetson. Then, standing on a balcony above the terrace where their coach was enjoying a steak dinner, they poured the contents of the hat onto Kap’s head, and then bolted from the scene. The act of insubordination resulted in Overweg’s immediate release the next morning (when Kap inspected all the players’ Stetsons for evidence).
During the worldwide junket, the assembled youngsters on the team would experience an amazing education, only a portion of it having to do with the sport itself. There were State dinners at several stops, a hotel across the street from a brothel, a shark attack on the Indian Ocean coast in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), malnourished and deformed beggars on the street in Pakistan. Kap’s communiqués from the road, in his fractured English, updated Lamar on the team on the field (“Tornado beat easily this team, but they missed many chances for more goals. Steady improvement, but still far of this what I want from them. Many games team will lose before become solid and good”) and off (“Our Spanish is improving. We can order Coca-Cola without major disturbance in the cafes”).
It must have appeared to Lamar very quickly that the Kap experiment was going to be a calamity. On September 15, he wrote Kap a carefully worded letter asking him to document his expenses more clearly. “Charles Winn tells me that of the advance of $2,000 ($100 cash plus $2,700 check) which we gave you around June 1, he has received only a very small amount of verified bills from you… In addition, Charles tells me we have advanced a total of $6,100 in Spain and have expense verifications of only $700 or $800 from you.”
Even as Lamar was monitoring the progress, and occasionally visiting the team overseas, he was returning to the new football season, unaware that he was about to take up a major battle on yet another front.
•
It was an eventful preseason for the Chiefs. On August 23, 1967, the Chiefs took the field in front of a sellout crowd of 33,041 at Municipal Stadium for their first interleague preseason game, against the Chicago Bears, still coached by George Halas and thus the embodiment of the NFL’s old guard. The Bears were an unsuspecting football team caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unable to adapt to the frequent shifts on offense, the Bears came unglued in the second quarter, when Kansas City exploded for 32 points. The Chiefs maintained their intensity in the second half, adding 13 points in the last two minutes of the game. On the sidelines, Fred Arbanas was yelling for the team to score 100. The final score sent a message heard throughout the NFL: Kansas City 66, Chicago 24.
After the game, Lamar came to the Bears’ dressing room, to share a few words with Halas, a man he’d been following since 1940, when as an eight-year-old boy he’d sat in the library at Mount Vernon, listening to the Bears’ stunning 73–0 NFL Championship win over the Washington Redskins, and had become a Bears fan. Though they had been on opposite sides during the formation of the AFL, Halas had grown to respect his young adversary. When he spotted him from across the room, Halas said, “Lamar, have mercy on us. You really buried us.” Lamar was, as ever, gracious in victory, allowing as to how the Chiefs were fired up to prove themselves against the older league. But Halas was not bitter; as the coach on the winning end of a 73–0 score, he wasn’t about to ask for any quarter from an opponent. “They gave every evidence that they were as good as any team,” he told the press. “They were fired up and played with great spirit. They went 100 percent on every play.”
In the Chiefs’ locker room, a game ball was awarded to Lamar, along with the other three figures who’d received most of the criticism for the Super Bowl loss: Stram, Dawson, and cornerback Willie Mitchell. Many Chiefs of the ’60s would remember the game as being one of the most memorable victories in the franchise’s history. “That’s about as satisfied as I’ve ever seen Lamar after a football game,” said Norma.
It was barely a week after that signal triumph, as the Tornado’s global tour was just beginning, when Lamar traveled to Los Angeles, on September 1, 1967, for a return to the Los Angeles Coliseum, to watch the Chiefs face the Los Angeles Rams in a preseason game.
While staying at the Ambassador East Hotel, he had agreed to a meeting with the avid New Orleans promoter Dave Dixon. Even after Lamar decided to move the team from Dallas to Kansas City rather than New Orleans, he and Dixon had stayed on good terms. Dixon had been a talented amateur golfer, had worked as a plywood salesman, and would one day open his own antique store in the French Quarter; what he was, more than anything, though, was a promoter, an idea man who was exceedingly good at selling his ideas.
Many of those in Lamar’s and the AFL’s inner circle had grown suspicious of Dixon. Jack Steadman never liked the man and still felt a measure of exasperation over how close the Texans came to a move to New Orleans that would have given Dixon a stake in the team. Others in the league felt Dixon was at least partially responsible for the fiasco of the 1965 AFL All-Star Game in New Orleans, when black players were denied service in many establishments, and treated to scurrilous verbal abuse, prompting them to boycott the game, at which point the league decided to leave New Orleans and move the All-Star Game to Houston.
But Lamar retained a good bit of affection for Dixon. The two men shared a boyish sense of the power of “What if?”, though Dixon possessed only a fraction of the resources of Lamar. On this occasion, Dixon had a new project in mind, and he made his case with the zeal of the truly converted. He had glimpsed the future of sports, and the future would be . . . professional tennis. Dixon wanted Lamar to join him as a partner in his bid to revolutionize the sport.
The rising tide of television revenue had lifted virtually all boats in the ocean of spectator sports: pro football had led the way, of course, with its frantic bidding among the networks for the NFL and AFL packages. ABC’s NCAA football package was growing more lucrative by the year, the quadrennial Olympics telecasts were growing in length and value, the previously ramshackle National Basketball Association was having some success for its “game of the week” on ABC, golf’s major tournaments were becoming a staple of spring and summer Sunday afternoons, and the rise of ABC’s Wide World of Sports—with its dog’s breakfast of one-offs and obscure sports, from ski-jumping to cliff-diving to demolition derby—seemed to indicate that a portion of American sports fans were so starved for action that they would watch virtually anything from virtually anywhere.
The future had arrived for spectator sports, with one notable exception. In contrast to the modernization going on almost everywhere else, the world of tennis was still locked in a pristine past of white cotton and ostensible amateurism, a world in which gentlemen and ladies played for the sheer joy of the sport, in which clubs around the world took a paternal interest in the best players, put them up for the week they were in town, and sent them on their way, both sides blandly extolling the virtues of the “purity” of the amateur game.
The reality was decidedly different. Donald Dell was a young player making his way around the amateur ranks for a time in the mid-1960s, and he remembered the unvarying pair of questions that he was greeted with by oblivious rich people at every stop. “The first thing they would ask me is, ‘What do you do when you’re not playing tennis?’ And then, when I told them that tennis was all I did, that it was a full-time job, they would always come right back with, ‘But how can you make a living at it?’”
The answer to that question was the sport’s dark open secret, the “shamateurism” that lay just beneath the game’s pristine surface. The best players received cash for appearance fees, for winning tournaments, for giving lessons, and almost all of it was under the table. “We were kept men,” said the South African star Cliff Drysdale. For the best players of the ’60s, the itinerant existence meant cadging rides to a new city for “a free place to stay, somebody’s starry-eyed teenaged daughter to chauffer them about, the chance to actually sign for club sandwiches in the members’ lounge.”
The only alternative to the kept existence of the amateur ranks was the hard life of the pro tour. The open declaration of professionalism brought immediate excommunication from the game’s most hallowed events and institutions—the grass of Wimbledon and Forest Hills, the clay of Roland Garros, the global prestige of the Davis Cup. “It was so entrenched,” said tennis journalist Richard Evans. “This real sort of vitriolic hatred of professionalism, it was quite extraordinary. The old amateur leaders really looked down on the pros as a sort of a servant class. It was absolutely amazing. You would have had to live in the times to understand the vehemence of their opposition to the idea of the pros sullying their country clubs.”
So the pros, most of them in a loosely constructed barnstorming tour put together by the great iconoclastic American star of the 1940s, Jack Kramer, rode in station wagons from city to city across America, playing mostly one- and two-nighters, deftly directing their lobs through gymnasium rafters, grabbing a shower and enduring the subpar conditions. One night in the early ’60s, the headstrong young Welsh player Mike Davies, who had just turned pro, found himself in a small makeshift room, without bathrooms, lockers, or any other facilities save four barren walls. “Where are we supposed to get dressed?” he asked fellow pro Tony Trabert. The veteran Trabert didn’t answer at once, but reached into his tennis bag and brought out a hammer and six-inch nail, which he proceeded to pound into the wall.
“There,” said Trabert. “That’s your dressing room.”
Dixon felt sure that with the right promotion and the right funding, convincing not just one or two but five or six of the top amateurs to go pro at once, the landscape would change, and the world of amateur tennis would have to be opened to the professionals.
Lamar left his meeting with Dixon intrigued. Upon returning to Dallas, he called a meeting with Al Hill, and his son, Al Hill, Jr., who had played on the amateur circuit for much of the early ’60s. Lamar knew that Al, Sr., was well-connected—when Kramer had brought his barnstorming pro tour to SMU in the late ’50s, he had stayed with Al and Margaret at their house. For his part, Al, Jr., had looked up to Lamar for a long time, climbing on his uncle’s back when Lamar was working at the Garden of the Gods during summers in the early 1950s, and, as a ten-year-old, enjoying the spiked punch at Lamar’s first wedding reception in ’56. More to the point, Al, Jr., was one of the best players in the state of Texas, studying under the legendary coach Clarence Mabry at Trinity University while nearing his degree, and getting a glimpse of the two worlds—the visible one and the secret one—in amateur tennis at the time.
Taking on the entrenched amateur ranks was, on its face at the time, a foolish decision. But Dixon was on to something. Wimbledon chairman Herman David, the quietly competent patrician who’d overseen proceedings at the sport’s most prestigious address, had invited a group of professionals to play at the All-England Club that very month, just six weeks after Wimbledon’s annual tournament. Though David had not gone on record, the pros invited believed that if the event drew well, David would find a way to make the Wimbledon championships open to all in 1968. It was this potential development that Dixon emphasized in his meeting with Lamar and the Hills.
And it was that promise that finally convinced the Texans to participate. Lamar offered up a 25 percent stake, as did Al, Jr., from his sizable trust. Dixon would control the other 50 percent and, with business manager Bob Briner, operate the circuit from offices in New Orleans. In Lamar’s mind, that would be enough. He expected to be a silent partner, as passive in the tennis gambit as he had been for the first year of his minority ownership of the Chicago Bulls.
With the name of Lamar Hunt as cache, Dixon swooped in and signed five of the top amateurs in the game: Australians John Newcombe and Tony Roche, South African Cliff Drysdale, Brit Roger Taylor, and Yugoslav Niki Pilić. Those five, joined by established pros Butch Buchholz, Pierre Barthès, and Dennis Ralston, made up the first WCT touring pros, dubbed the Handsome Eight.
At the same time that Dixon was preparing to launch World Championship Tennis, another investor—former U.S. Davis Cup Captain George MacCall—was beginning his own circuit, which he dubbed the National Tennis League. The dissolution of Jack Kramer’s tour was plagued by a lack of tennis expertise. Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and other top pros chose the proven MacCall, since Dixon had equally specious tennis credentials.
The unintended consequence of the competition between WCT and the National Tennis League, was to further dilute the top ranks of pro tennis. Whereas the best players had been separated by the divide between the ostensibly amateur ranks and the openly professional players, now it was further divided in the pros between the WCT and the NTL.
Even before the group played its first matches, the concussive announcement came December 14, 1967, that Wimbledon would be open to professionals in 1968. That prompted a swift response from the International Lawn Tennis Federation, effectively suspending the English federation from all ILTF activities. But the stricture would not hold. “Wimbledon was tennis,” said Richard Evans. “And if Wimbledon said we’re going to do this, then the ILTF knew the game was up.” Soon the other federations rallied in support. In the United States, USLTA chairman Robert Kelleher came up against the same fusty opposition that decried the changes in England, plus an unusually alarmist view of the machinations of Lamar Hunt and the WCT. He held strong at a contentious USLTA annual meeting, and soon the American federation was on board with the English.
Dixon had envisioned a departure from the sport’s staid on-court traditions as well. Emboldened by Wimbledon’s capitulation, he brought his new stable of players down to Australia in late December. The new era of tennis would begin in a parking lot in Sydney, with the players playing not the traditional 15-30-40-game structure of tennis’s long history, but instead a 31-point “pro set” format that owed more to ping-pong (players taking turns serving five points each), with the added variation of a time clock scoring in individual quarters. It was barely recognizable as tennis. From there, the tour would head to the States.
Marketing naïvete ran rampant, and the assumption was made that the ideal place to begin the tour was Kansas City because of Lamar’s presence and the deep list of sports fans that made up the Chiefs’ season-ticket rolls. Meanwhile, Al, Jr., met with representatives from Sears, who were eager to come out with a new line of sportswear to coincide with the tour’s February beginning in the United States.
But the downtown Municipal Auditorium was already booked, so the American debut of World Championship Tennis was held in the Kansas City stockyards, at the site of the American Royal rodeo, where the minor-league Kansas City Blues played their hockey games. It was billed as the future of tennis, and Sports Illustrated dispatched writer Frank Deford to cover the opening. What he found was a circus of disappointment, a haphazard outfit that wasn’t ready for widespread media exposure. As Lamar looked pensively into the stands at the empty seats, the players were still in the dressing area, trying to fit into the Sears & Roebuck sportswear designed to bring more color into the game (none of the original shorts fit, because the company hadn’t made allowances for the muscular thighs of tennis players). Even the players took a while to adjust to the new color schemes. Pierre Barthès, the headstrong Frenchman, took one look at the assigned outfit he was given—a russet and lime combination—and protested to his friend Butch Buchholz, “Butch, I am not a clown.” The night before the Kansas City final, Deford met up with John Newcombe and Dennis Ralston for drinks at a bar in the city. They were both disenchanted and depressed, convinced that present system, as constructed, wasn’t going to work.
In this, they were correct. Dixon’s plan was to trot the players out to two tournaments a week (the original March 1968 WCT itinerary called for the players to play two- and three-day tournaments in eleven different cities), but just over two weeks after Kansas City, the entire enterprise was imperiled. Dixon called Lamar and explained that he couldn’t continue to suffer the losses. With the entire operation in doubt, the partners agreed to bring the Handsome Eight for a summit conference, at Al Hill, Sr.’s home in Dallas. They were joined by the former touring pro Mike Davies, invited at Buchholz’s request, for his expertise in tournament and player issues.
That weekend in March 1968, Lamar spoke to each of the players about their perceptions, then interviewed Davies, and discussed the issue with both Hills and the departing Dixon. Finally, he decided to take over WCT, assuming Dixon’s 50-percent stake and shutting down the tour temporarily to reorganize it. While Briner was retained for a time as executive director, the organization’s offices would move from New Orleans to Dallas. Lamar recruited the willful Welshman Davies, whose brash confidence grated on some members of the tennis establishment, even as it was engendering loyalty from his peers. Davies joined the tour as associate director, helping provide direction in how to deal with sponsors, tournament directors, idle rich hangers-on, and the numerous logistical details of staging a tennis tournament. Davies was the “tennis guy,” but more than that he offered a sense of shrewd wisdom that went beyond what the outsider Lamar (or, for that matter, the twenty-one-year-old insider Al Hill, Jr.) might be able to bring to the table. As the players practiced down at the T-Bar-M tennis ranch in central Texas, the WCT worked on how it might survive the year.
Davies worked to adapt Dixon’s model of negotiating rent at each of the venues the tour would travel to, as well as advertising and travel. Famously, on the first leg of the tour, the only purely profitable night came in Shreveport, where the shipping company didn’t deliver the Astroturf court by the appointed hour and had to pay a $5,000 guarantee. “It was still pretty bleak,” said Lamar’s accountant, Wayne Henry, handling the accounts for the tennis enterprise back in Dallas. “We got more money for not playing than for playing.”
•
As it turned out, both the soccer and tennis enterprises were floundering at the same time. Though Lamar had seriously considered folding WCT before deciding to go forward with the venture, the nascent world of American professional soccer was, if anything, even more volatile. In 1968, the two leagues merged, with the NPSL and USA coming together to form the North American Soccer League (the original title of the USA, before it changed to avoid confusion with the other league).
The young Dallas Tornado team had emerged from a world tour with a sense of resiliency and growing cohesion. But the squad lacked the experience or technical skill of most of the teams in the league, and it showed, from a 6–0 season-opening loss to the Houston Stars. As the season continued its downward spiral, matters grew more surreal. Ed Fries, the Tornados GM, was the first to go, with Bob Kap given the duties temporarily. On Kap’s first day on the job, Lamar’s accountant Wayne Henry received a frantic phone call from the Tornado’s ticket manager, former football great Tex Hamer.
“Wayne, you need to get down here,” said Hamer. “Bob is taking all our records and throwing them out in the dumpster.”
Hoping for a literal as well as figurative housecleaning, Kap had jettisoned all the accounts receivables records, season-ticket holders installment plans, and other financial documents. Henry and two other men from the business office hurried to the back of the building and fished the Tornado business history out of the dumpster. The ultimate result? “We found us another general manager pretty quick,” said Henry.
The losses accumulated and, at one point, Kap was sent back to Europe to sign more players, and Lamar took over as the nominal manager for a couple of games. “We worked harder under Lamar than we had in weeks,” recalled Mike Renshaw, but the results were the same. Finally, when the team’s record stood at zero wins, twelve losses, and two ties, Kap was fired as manager and replaced with the English coach Keith Spurgeon.
The move was a tacit admission that Lamar had been hoodwinked by his own manager (“That’s Kap, spelled C-R-O-O-K,” said one Tornado player).
“It was generally accepted among the small group of supposedly knowledgeable soccer writers and suchlike of the time that Kap was a phony,” said the venerable soccer writer Paul Gardner, “if only because no one had ever heard of him in a soccer sense . . . But the fact that he had, apparently, come up with this dopey idea about a team of teenagers functioning in a pro league was further proof of his fraudulent status. Lamar denied being conned, but that was ingenuous.”
By the middle of the season, the Tornado was 0-18-3, at which point Lamar conceded, “It is the worst professional athletic team in North America.” Throughout the year, the level of apathy around the country was a constant reminder of how difficult it would be for soccer to gain purchase in a landscape already clogged with other historically popular sports. At the 94,405-seat Rose Bowl, the game between the Tornado and the Los Angeles Toros drew 1,251 fans. “When the season ends,” Bill McNutt said, “we’ll just have to sell the heck out of fruitcakes.”
The day of that game, the Toros owner, Jack Kent Cooke, was sitting up in a private box, watching the proceedings. Sitting next to him was a young lawyer from his firm named Alan Rothenberg, whom he had put in charge to keep an eye on the soccer team. But midway through that ’68 season, Cooke had already decided to jump ship. Looking down at the field, Cooke said, almost wistfully, “You know this is really a beautiful game.” Then, pointing at Lamar on the Tornado bench, he added, “Now, if I was a rich guy like him, I’d stick it out.”
At the end of the season, there were abdications everywhere, with many following Cooke’s lead. Teams folded from coast to coast, and the North American Soccer League was in shambles. Seventeen teams had entered the season, and each one found that the nation was not ready for a strange sport, in a market glutted with expansion in every one of the other, more established sports.
The experiment had failed, and yet, as he flew down to Atlanta for a postmortem with former Baltimore GM Clive Toye and Atlanta GM Phil Woosnam, Lamar remained determined. Despite the widespread financial failure, Lamar was not ready to concede defeat.
At the time, the league headquarters of the North American Soccer League were in a room off the side of the visiting locker room at Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium. The stars of baseball—Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey and Willie Mays—walked by the room on their way out to and back from the field for Atlanta Braves games. And during the day, amid the antiseptic smells and gameday detritus, Lamar would sit with Toye and Woosnam, and discuss how the sport might be preserved.
After a series of discussions, often over sandwiches on a park bench outside the stadium, the three men arrived at a rough consensus about what soccer needed to make it in America: 1) the best hope was to coerce the game’s greatest player, the Brazilian master Pelé, to join the league, and 2) the best hope to sign Pelé was to have a viable franchise in New York City, and 3) the best chance to bring about long-term growth in the game, above and go beyond the initial shock of a Pelé signing, would be to bring the World Cup to America.
Of course, at the time, there was no league to sign Pelé to, no franchise in New York for him to join, and the prospects of a World Cup seemed infinitesimal. But the fact that Lamar had, in the space of two years and despite extensive losses, remained a soccer true believer, was crucial.
“Lamar was always there, as the rock upon which we could rest if it was required,” said Toye. “Lamar was the owner. Particularly because Phil and I relied so much on Lamar during those two years when the league was coming back to life. Lamar’s focus always, over and above everything else, was the league.”
In the end, the NASL survived because Lamar wanted it to survive. The Tornado came back for another season, as did franchises in Atlanta, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Baltimore. The young league of just five teams was largely unrecognizable from its earlier incarnations. But soccer in America wasn’t dead yet. The 1969 season would proceed.
In this, Lamar persevered despite the indifference of many of his friends and business associates. Buzz Kemble thought it was a nearly complete waste of time (“just so boring,” he complained). Steadman saw in the new enterprise nothing but red ink. Even family members were dubious. “Soccer doesn’t fit the American personality,” Bunker told Sports Illustrated’s Bud Shrake in 1970. “The game doesn’t have enough climaxes. In baseball you have three strikes, three outs, and so forth, and in football you have first downs. In soccer you’re just out there kicking the ball around.”
“Believe me, I tried—politely—to talk Lamar out of soccer,” said Al Hill, Jr. “His premise was always the same: ‘If it’s this popular around the world, it can be this popular here.’ I thought that was wrong, and I told him that. I said, ‘Lamar, look at all the other things that go on in America. In those other countries there’s nothing else.’”
His three new enterprises—WCT, the NASL, and the Bulls in the NBA—were all losing money. But after surviving the AFL’s shaky early history—the Broncos’ vertically striped socks, the weekly rumors of the Raiders’ demise, and the folly of the New York Titans—and then seeing how the AFL emerged with patience and resolve, Lamar wasn’t inclined to give up on any of it.
During those bleak weeks, when the triumvirate of Hunt, Toye, and Woosnam were merely trying to keep the game alive, Toye spent plenty of time with Lamar, finding him both genial and, at some level, opaque. “Lamar, among many other things, was not the greatest conversationalist, right?” said Toye. “I certainly didn’t get the opportunity to sit down, over long, luxurious meals and a couple of bottles of wine, and talk about philosophy and the good of the game, and all that kind of stuff. I mean we met, we talked, perfectly friendly, decent conversations. But they were about what we were about. So I’m not sure why Lamar did it. He must have really loved it and wanted to do it, because by God did he put—never mind the money—there was also the immense amount of time he put into it.”
So Lamar remained a convert, with his efforts in the U.S. wilderness fortified by occasional trips back to Europe to watch the F.A. Cup finals in England or league games in Italy and Spain. Even as his love for the culture of the sport deepened, he was beginning to realize just how difficult it would be to convert the American public. At one point in 1969, when asked how the Tornado was doing, Lamar said ruefully, “You’ve heard of taking a bath? I think I’m in for a long swim.”
•
Still there was more. In 1965, at a time when the space race was accelerating, Lamar had read a newspaper piece about the possibility that the city of San Francisco might consider developing the land on Alcatraz, the notorious island prison that had been closed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 because it was antiquated and extraordinarily expensive.
Over the next four years, Lamar and a friend from Dallas, the young entrepreneur Morgan Maxfield, developed the idea for a multi-purpose attraction that would be a monument to the space program, a scenic recreation of nineteenth-century San Francisco, and a tour stop for those interested in the history of the prison, which had held Al Capone and other infamous convicts.
The most-discussed aspect of the proposal wasn’t the theme park or the prison tours, but a 364-foot tall observation tower (the exact height of the Saturn V Rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts into space). Lamar had loved towers and observation decks his entire life and had enjoyed scaling the interior steps of the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Eiffel Tower. After falling under the spell of soccer, he’d studied the site of the first World Cup, held in 1930 in Montevideo, Uruguay, and the Estadio Centenario, the stadium built for the event, whose most distinguishing feature was the 100-meter (328 feet) tall tower that overlooked the stadium and flew the flag of the winning nation after the tournament.
In the summer of 1969, the San Francisco board of supervisors voted to approve Lamar’s plan, which called for the city to invest $2.6 million to buy the island, and for Lamar to invest $7 million in developing the area, offering the city a percentage of his revenue.
As he was preparing to work his way through the legal ramifications, he called on his old SMU fraternity brother—and frequent traveling companion for sports road trips—Bill Adams. “We ran into every nutcase in the world that you could imagine on that deal,” said Adams.
Lamar often described himself as naïve, but in this instance his staunch pro-growth optimism and love for spectacle ran headlong against the Bay Area’s legendary desire to stand alone and not adhere to the mainstream mores. By the fall, when the board voted to reconsider the development deal, Lamar arrived in a typically conciliatory mode, arguing his case in the face of vehement opposition. “I can only say that I didn’t come to San Francisco with the idea of ramming anything down anybody’s throat,” he told the assembled media after the hearing. “I’m interested in developing Alcatraz because I think it has exciting possibilities as an artistic and financial project.”
But inside the chamber, Lamar walked up to the sound of hissing and booing. “That was a true nightmare,” said Norma, along for the trip. “By the time you say ‘rich Texan’ in the Chronicle four thousand times, you have a lot of people up in arms.”
He would never get the chance to explain himself; two weeks after the development was tabled for further discussion, the board rescinded the deal altogether. It left Lamar perplexed, but those closest to him authentically angry. “It was an open competition and his idea was the best,” said Norma. “And then the things they said about him, it was terrible.”
The 364-foot tower was never built. Though in 1972, when Alcatraz joined the National Parks system, one of the features was a prison tour, very similar to what Lamar envisioned.
But the fate of Alcatraz was still unknown in the summer of 1969. Lamar submitted the original proposal to the city of San Francisco, and then headed for what amounted, in his life at least, to a rest.
Lamar had been entranced with the space program since its inception, inspired by the sheer audacity of the undertaking, and transfixed by the mountain of detail that was required for each mission. He tracked the missions and made time to watch launches and splashdowns on TV.
But for the historic Apollo 11 mission, he made a point to attend the launch on July 16, 1969. In the observation area, he was humbled by the grandeur of the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V rocket, and the thundering noise and thrumming tremors of the moment of liftoff, which seemed to encapsulate the best impulses of the awesome power of the military-industrial complex. After watching the launch, Lamar flew to Dallas to prepare for the annual vacation to the Palette Ranch in Wyoming. Even when life was at its busiest, he found time for the family’s yearly getaway to the splendor of Wyoming and the Palette, where he first traveled with Caroline shortly after World War II.
The ritual was by now entrenched. They would board the company plane, the eleven-passenger Lockheed Jetstar piloted by Jake Cobb, joined by all three children and another couple or two—usually Bill and Josephine McNutt, often Buzz and Dorothy Kemble, maybe Bill and Molly Adams. Cobb would consider the luggage the women were bringing along, raise his eyebrows for a moment, then smilingly comply. They would fly into Cody, Wyoming, then rent a car to drive to the ranch, at the base of the Shoshone National Forest. En route would be the inevitable stop in Meeteetse, Wyoming, where the general store in town boasted Lamar’s favorite milkshake in the world. (“Meeteetse was the nearest town to us and it had 450 people,” said Norma. “It had, like, three filling stations and five bars, and a general store, and I’m not kidding.”) And then it was onto the Palette Ranch and the full respite from his dizzying world.
The days were bristling with activities: volleyball games over a net stretched across a sloping yard, fishing, hiking, races, contests in which rocks were thrown over a fence or at a tree. Lamar would spend a few afternoons sketching out a schedule and then post the order of events for “the family Olympics.” There were ping-pong contests, during which Lamar gave Norma the nickname of “Stone Mitts” and Dorothy Kemble “Rock Hands.” It was a vigorous leisure—no phones, no meetings, just relaxation, which in Lamar’s mind meant nearly constant activity.
“Playing volleyball was the staple,” said Bill Adams. “One year we had a track meet with the wives—my wife was a good athlete; she’d been a cheerleader for four years. Fishing and hiking every day, horseback riding, walk down to the creek. Lots of games after dinner. It stayed light up there real late. More volleyball, throwing rocks over the fence, you name it.”
There were no TVs at the ranch, and Lamar’s children enjoyed this—there were fewer distractions all the way around. But on the night of July 20, they formed a caravan with the McNutts and drove the two hours back up to Cody, renting two rooms in a motel. In Lamar’s room, they huddled around the television to watch the ghostly black-and-white images of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon.
They returned and spent a few more days at the ranch, with Lamar organizing daily games of volleyball and all manner of nightly contests—who could catch the most fish, who could run fastest around the perimeter of the main house, which couple could win the mixed-doubles ping-pong tournament. “He always seemed the most relaxed when he was there,” recalled Sharron.
As he sat outside late at night, doing what hundreds of millions of other people were doing around the globe that week—looking at the moon and considering that there were actually humans on that distant sphere—Lamar was seized by the wonder of the world, its infinite potential, and its essential beauty. He was on the land that Colonel A. A. Anderson described as “the most beautiful I have ever seen,” and everything seemed possible.
In the midst of all of it, though—the humbling accomplishment, the unfathomable distance, the beautiful surroundings back on Earth—there was one thought that continued to percolate to the surface. He mentioned it one night as the group was sitting in the stillness of the Wyoming night, looking up at the spray of stars accompanying the moon in the night sky.
“I can’t wait to see Marsalis,” he said. “Hank says he’s looked great.”
There were so much going on, in Lamar’s world, and the world at large. But in three days, he’d be down in Birmingham, Alabama. The preseason was beginning, the Chiefs were playing, and there was a football game to watch.