While WCT was a rising presence and an artistic success in the mid-’70s, it was still only barely profitable, a function of the vast guarantees paid to players to get them under contract. (Lamar had negotiated a $1 million deal to sign Arthur Ashe, brokered with Ashe’s agent, the former player Donald Dell—who would recall, in the midst of a marathon, past-midnight negotiating session, Lamar taking a break to fire off ten quick push-ups, as a way to keep himself fresh.)
By 1973, though, WCT’s place seemed secure; it had carved out a niche of about four and a half months in the first half of the year, coinciding nicely with the football off-season. And very quickly, the annual Finals Week in Dallas became the stuff of party legend. One of the staples of the week was an outdoor cocktail party for press from around the world, hosted by the Hunts at their new Gaywood home, and over which Norma Hunt presided with an assured sense of gracious inclusion.
“She was a great partner for Lamar because Lamar tended to be quiet,” said Jack Steadman. “And he would ask her to tell something to someone. And Norma was, oftentimes, the life of the party. And Lamar really enjoyed that.”
“When you think of the different worlds she had to move in,” said Richard Evans, “the soccer and the football and the tennis and the oil and God-knows-what-else Lamar was involved in. We used to see this every year, this batch of British and French tennis writers used to turn up, there was probably about a dozen of us. And as we arrived at the house, she’d greet us all by name. I thought, ‘Girl, you do your homework. Or else she’s got the most astounding memory.’ She knew who was married and who wasn’t, and the whole bit. That was Norma: the ultimate charming hostess.”
“I certainly did my homework,” admitted Norma, and there was plenty of it to be done. Even with the WCT’s success, Lamar was an outsider in the tennis world, but here he was vying for a foothold in a hidebound sport whose leaders often blamed him for the larger revolution of professionalism. In the face of that opposition, and in the volatile environment of the emerging world tour, the rise of WCT occasionally had the frantic feeling of the Oklahoma land rush. By 1973, there was a pair of thirty-two-man tours going on, in parallel eleven-tournament seasons for which the top four finishers in each group qualified for the final, won that year by Stan Smith over Ashe. In 1974 and 1975, that grew into an eighty-four–player organization, with three different tours, and a dizzying amount of logistical headaches.
In the end, it was too much too soon for the tour. “I never understood why Lamar insisted on growing it so fast,” the agent Barry Frank would say later. “It just became diluted.”
“I think it was the reality of the market,” said Ivan Irwin, the lawyer who served as a key assistant to Lamar in WCT. “You had to sign players before somebody else did. We signed an awful lot of players. Those were crazy times. I was traveling all over the world to tennis events, with Al, Jr., usually. It wasn’t any trouble to sign the players—they all wanted to sign. It’s pretty hard to manage something that size.”
By the mid-’70s, Al Hill, Jr., was spending even more time traveling than Lamar. He wasn’t yet thirty, just ending a marriage, and spent part of the period dating the model Cheryl Tiegs. “It’s difficult about Al,” said Richard Evans, who covered much of the WCT’s itinerary. “He was very young—I suppose I could say immature—to start with. He was very much the rich kid having a great time. But he served a good purpose, quite apart from the fact that he had financial clout through his family. Al was around a lot. And it was good that he was young, because he was the same age as the players, and he could relate to a lot of the players, and I think many liked him and enjoyed his company. Others found him a little too ‘Let’s go off to a nightclub and have some drinks and a good time and a party.’ He was just a little immature. But as he grew up he became more influential and more serious.”
“I think Al turned out to be very important,” said WCT staple Cliff Drysdale. “He really rose to the occasion.”
Lamar and Al agreed that at least one of them should make an appearance at every tournament, and to do that required a punishing travel schedule for both men. Very early on, Al, Jr., had sensed the disappointment on the part of tournament hosts and sponsors when he was the one there to represent WCT management instead of Lamar. In response, he asked Lamar to get more involved: “I said, ‘Lamar, I need you present. Not just running the show from Dallas, but I need you here.’ And he was very good about taking a more active part in the running of WCT.”
That required a real commitment from Lamar, who was already ridiculously busy. The WCT was in Tokyo and Denver one week in ’75, and then Charlotte, Houston, and Stockholm the next. Lamar went, and WCT was stabilized because of his attention and presence, but those gains came at a price—Lamar was gone more, away from the Chiefs, away from the Tornado, and away from home. “We were on the road one time,” said Al Hill, Jr. “I don’t even remember where, and Lamar said, ‘I’m not going to be around to see my son born.’”
Norma was pregnant with their second child in 1976. By November 21, when Daniel was born, Lamar was back in Dallas, but that was an increasingly rare occurrence; he spent more than 200 days traveling each year in the period from 1974 to 1976.
Norma had grown more comfortable (in a way that Rose Mary never was) with the reality that her husband would be almost constantly in motion. He frequently made it back to the city for an important event—Lamar, Jr.’s flute recitals or football games, Clark’s soccer matches—but then he’d be off again. “And he just loved it,” said Norma. “He loved hard work. He thrived on it. So I was happy for him. Heavens, if this is what makes him happy, then great. You always hear about women who say, ‘Oh, my husband is just gone too much,’ and that’s a difference in personalities, I guess. A lot of people need to have their spouse with them. And some people, maybe more independent people, can handle that a little better. We always talked on the phone. If you couldn’t figure out what to do with the children, you could just call him up and say, ‘What do you think about this?’”
In the midst of that travel schedule, Lamar seemed caught in a never-ending quest for more productivity. He wrote notes to himself, mapping out his days, admonishing himself to find the time (and at other times, trying to discipline himself; more than one to-do list included the item, “Go to bed by 10:30.”)
By the early ’70s, Lamar had taken up jogging, much against the protestations of his more dormant, chain-smoking traveling companion Bill McNutt, who used to proclaim, while taking a deep drag on a cigarette and watching Lamar run past, “He’s going to exercise himself to death.”
Years later, Clark would explain to his half-brother, Lamar, Jr., “You know, it wasn’t just you that he was gone a lot of the time for.” It was said not with a trace of bitterness but rather a sense of understanding. Those who loved Lamar came to understand that his was not a body comfortable in repose. And they also recognized his commitment to be there whenever possible.
After Lamar, Jr.’s high school football team went undefeated in 1974, Lamar presented him with a scrapbook of the team’s exploits. “He had taken the time to clip out everything from it,” said Lamar, Jr. “From school newspapers, the regular Dallas papers, he laid it all out.”
“What we all, I think, would unanimously say about Dad was, he was present, but he was preoccupied,” said Lamar, Jr. “I lived in another house most of the time, so there wasn’t the daily contact, but I think even Clark would echo there wasn’t a whole lot of hands-on guidance and stuff. Dad I think was just consumed with his activities, and it wasn’t out of selfishness, because he was a considerate person. But I think he parented—whether it was Sharron and I because we were in another home, or Clark and Daniel where they were, live and in color every day—the same way. It was how he parented, which was distant, very hands-off. I can remember calling him once because I needed a car, and he said, ‘Well you have some money of your own, why don’t you use that?’ And I was like, ‘Really? I didn’t even know.’”
A week after Clark’s horrible foot accident the morning of the ’72 WCT Finals, Lamar bought his bed-ridden son a half-dozen baby ducks and another half-dozen baby geese. “We raised them in the bathtub in the house,” said Norma. “Only Lamar’s mind could have thought of that. I’m a clean freak, so I definitely would not have.” When the ducks and geese became old enough to fend for themselves, Clark—still in a wheelchair—led a parade out to the backyard pond, where they were released.
That summer, Clark finally got out of the wheelchair and began his rehabilitation, with Norma still taking him to weekly visits with the vascular surgeon, trying to get the wound to heal. It was around then that Lamar, in the front cadre of American recreational joggers, had the idea that his son should start training to run in the eight-mile Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot, since 1968 held on the shores of White Rock Lake.
Norma was initially dumbfounded.
“Run in the Turkey Trot?!” she said. “This child is barely walking, and you want him to run in the Turkey Trot?”
“Yep, we’re gonna do it.”
“Lamar, when I tell his doctors that you’re going to do this, they are going to tell me no way,” said Norma.
“You’re not going to tell them,” he said, gently. And so she didn’t.
That Thanksgiving, Clark was not yet eight years old, but he’d already developed some of his father’s resolve, along with a stoic resistance to pain. On the second half of the race, he was in tears. But they finished, with Clark the youngest runner to do so.
•
On Nov. 29, 1974, H. L. Hunt died. The family patriarch had created a vast empire, but he had not been especially close to the children of his first family in later years.
What had been whispered about in certain social circles—the truth that H. L. Hunt had fathered three families, all during his marriage to Lyda—now became a matter of public record.
“Any dysfunction there might be,” said Norma, “that was something that Lamar never talked about. I’m not saying he didn’t think about it. He might have. But it’s just not something that he ever would have said anything to me about his father.”
This, too, proved a painful jolt to Lamar. After H. L. married Ruth Ray in 1957, Lamar had reluctantly conceded that her children had been fathered by H. L. But Lamar didn’t want to talk about it. And though Frania Tye had met both Margaret and Hassie, her existence wasn’t common knowledge within the rest of the family. “We never talked about it,” said Margaret decades later. “We still never talk about it.”
Shortly after H. L.’s death, when news of Frania Tye and the “third family” became a matter of public record, Lamar was crushed. He called Lamar, Jr., in college at the University of Cincinnati, and apologized to him for his grandfather “bringing shame on the family.” He also delivered a tearful apology to the sixteen-year-old Sharron, who was shaken by her father’s outpouring of emotion.
“The first time I heard my father cry was on the phone to me,” said Lamar, Jr., “when my grandfather’s will was being probated, and this other family stepped forward. There was a bunch of splash of news, and he was embarrassed by that—‘I’m sorry you have to go through this.’ But I really now look back and think, I think he was mainly crying for himself, because when you’re a grandkid, you’re really pretty removed from grandpa’s shenanigans.”
It was left to Ray Hunt, H. L.’s prized son with Ruth, to inherit Hunt Oil, and sort out the awkward multifamilial puzzle. H. L.’s last will had given much of his estate—that which was not already tied up in trusts for H. L. and Lyda’s children—to Ruth, and divided the rest equally among his children with both women (but had excluded Frania Tye and the children he had with her).
For Ray, at Hunt Oil, there was a sense that his stoic loyalty had been vindicated. Not all of the “first family” had been warm to him—Margaret was often dismissive, Bunker was at times plain rude. Among the most noted exceptions was Lamar. “He was never anything less than warm to me,” said Ray Hunt.
Though some of the first family was bitterly disappointed by the terms of the will (as well as H. L.’s stipulation that any child who protested it would be cut out of the will entirely), Lamar seemed to take it in stride. For their part, his children were most disappointed that the Palette Ranch no longer belonged to the first family but would now be controlled by Ruth and Ray.
“I thought he should have made more of a point about making sure we could still visit there,” said Sharron. “But he didn’t. It wasn’t like Dad to rock the boat.”
•
To those on the outside, the presence of the Dallas Tornado and a North American Soccer League franchise in football-silly Dallas remained an anomaly.
What was going on in Dallas, because of the Tornado, wasn’t easily visible from the outside, but it was real nonetheless. When the Tornado debuted in the summer of 1967, there couldn’t have been a more difficult outpost to try to sell the world’s game. The players who were imported were, for the most part, paid a flat rate of $75 per game. Yet attendance was poor, and the initial investment—especially the around-the-world tour—was significant.
But Lamar hadn’t been the only one touched by the ’66 England–West Germany final at Wembley. On the same day that he was watching at his home, the thirteen-year-old Kyle Rote, Jr., was with friends, watching the match elsewhere in Dallas. Rote’s father was the Hall of Fame football player, who starred at SMU and then went on to a distinguished pro career with the New York Giants. By the mid ’60s, he had retired and was working with Curt Gowdy, as the expert commentator on the AFL’s Game of the Week for NBC, a job that some of his friends in the NFL viewed as tantamount to treason.
Kyle, Jr., was blessed with his father’s athletic skills and was building a promising career as a three-sport star at Highland Park High School. Rote and his friend, Rocky Davis, lived to play games, and when they saw the ’66 World Cup final, they were moved by the athleticism and the intricate geometry of the passing game. Their enthusiasm quickly bumped up against the reality: There were no soccer balls to be had in Dallas; in fact, there wasn’t a sporting goods store in the state that sold them. But they persevered, ordered away from Soccer Sports Supply, on First Avenue in New York, and were playing a rough approximation of the game by the middle of August, even forming their own team, which they dubbed the Black Bandits. Rote appealed to the Dallas Parks board to get a third soccer field (there were only two in the city at the time, both used largely on weekends by the Mexican-American community), for their burgeoning Dallas Independent Soccer League.
Over the coming years, Kyle Rote, Jr., and his friends would belong to the first broad wave of Dallas youth who grew to understand and love soccer. And the Tornado players—Mike Renshaw, who had been on the original Tornado world tour of ’67–’68; the goalkeeper Kenny Cooper; the defenders Bobby Moffat and John Best—all conducted hundreds of instructional clinics around the city. In high school visits, Best would stand in front of the students and ask anyone to take the ball away from him without using their hands. When the inevitable football player would lunge and try to kick the ball away, Best would dribble it away, demonstrating that the sport of soccer valued skill over size. Rote and his teammates saw those early incarnations of the Tornado—first the Dundee United visitors in ’67, then the first “true” Tornado team, culled from the world tour, in ’68. They marveled at the ball control and the stamina—always the stamina.
After starting college at Oklahoma State as a highly recruited football player in ’68, Rote eventually transferred to Sewanee, the University of the South, on a soccer scholarship, and by 1972 he had been signed by the Tornado—by virtue of NASL’s first college draft, which itself was an idea of Lamar’s, designed to increase interest in the league during the offseason, just as it had for pro football.
As the ’73 season began, the Tornado was playing at Texas Stadium, trying desperately to draw fans. In Rote they had an established name adept at a skill that supposedly eluded most American players: heading the ball. Fast and more broadly built than most of his foreign counterparts, Rote showed an affinity for getting prime positioning in the unstructured chaos of goalmouth scrambles, and a gift for finding open teammates. His 10 goals and 10 assists won him the “NASL Scoring Title” (another Lamar idea, computed the way the National Hockey League computed its scoring leaders, with two points for each goal and one point for each assist).
In the finals that year, held at Texas Stadium, Philadelphia scored two late goals to win, 2–0, but the game wound up as the first soccer cover in the history of Sports Illustrated, with Atoms’ goalkeeper Bob Rigby batting a ball away from the charging Rote under the headline “Soccer Goes American.” Edwin “Bud” Shrake’s story covered the game, but it was the lead to SI’s “Letter from the Publisher” that hinted at the beginning of a revolution:
Lamar Hunt had extra lights turned on in Dallas’ Texas Stadium last week so Sports Illustrated photographers could better shoot the pro soccer finals in color, but it is unlikely that he expected the pictures to show an upset of his Dallas Tornado, which is what happened. We can only hope that he was cheered by what the Philadelphia Atoms’ victory implies about the state of the sport in America. The astonishing success of a team that has consistently started more U.S.-born players than any other in the league, under the direction of the league’s only American-born coach, is the most heartening sort of evidence that soccer is alive in this country and very well indeed.
While the final was a loss, the impact of the Tornado in Dallas could already be felt. There had been eleven amateur teams in the city in 1967. Just over five years later, there were 1,170 teams, more than 25,000 people playing soccer in Dallas.
So Rote’s star was on the rise already when he traveled to Boca Raton, Florida, in February 1974 as a late addition to the second made-for-TV athletic competition called “The Superstars” (similar to what Lamar had envisioned with the Bronco-thon of the ’60s), which he proceeded to win. (Rote would go on to win three Superstars titles in four years, interrupted only by football’s O. J. Simpson winning in ’75.)
That generated even more publicity and left Rote—as the rookie-of-the-year and the league’s leading scorer —in a good bargaining position as the ’74 season neared its kickoff. Though he and Lamar remained cordial, Rote held out for a better contract (he had earned $1,400 playing for the Tornado in ’73). Rote and Lamar each negotiated on his own behalf and wound up staying up late the night before the Tornado opener against St. Louis. After a negotiating session that ran past midnight, Lamar finally found a way to make a deal work, supplementing Rote’s athletic pay with more marketing and promotional work around the Tornado office. After they’d all shaken hands, Lamar accompanied Kyle and his wife, Mary Lynne, down the elevator to the ground floor, when Lamar thought of one other thing.
“Oh, I forgot to say,” he added, “we need to make sure that we agree that this contract must be confidential.”
“Don’t worry, Lamar,” said Mary Lynne. “We’re just as embarrassed about how little you’re paying Kyle as you are.”
The problem with the NASL, beyond the style of play and the difficulty with the seasons (conflicting, as they did, with the international soccer schedule, which was dominated by fall-through-spring leagues), was the lack of a culture. Curious Americans who tuned into a game on TV or ventured to a contest live, were seeing the game on the field, but missing entirely the flavor of the soccer experience in the stands.
The fields and stadiums were also poorly suited to the sport. In 1972, the Tornado moved their home games to the Cowboys’ Texas Stadium. Though it provided a major-league address, it was a horrible place to play soccer.
“There couldn’t have been a worse venue for it because that semi-roof that they had didn’t let air come into the stadium,” said Norma. “You would sit there and your clothes would just be drenched. So there’s no breeze at all and it’s a hundred degrees. I don’t know how the players stood it.”
“And then, you couldn’t see your passes,” said Bobby Moffat. “The crown on the center of the field was so large, that when you passed sideline to sideline, you sometimes couldn’t see what happened to the ball.”
Like Lamar, Rote had been astonished during his visit overseas to see the game he’d loved in an entirely different context, in an environment in which it was absolutely essential. “What was haunting about that trip, in a good way, was the chants, which were not led by a cheerleading squad, which erupted organically, and the passion and the loyalty and, yes, the drunkedness and all that, but also the total not just ignorance about American sports, but . . . they couldn’t care. They didn’t know who Tom Landry was, and they didn’t know who Roger Staubach was, and they couldn’t care.”
Lamar, trying to sell a grand sport to an apathetic public, struggled with the question of how best to do it. During one of the planning meetings at the Tornado offices, Ken Cooper suggested the unthinkable, uttering a thought that many of the English-born players shared but none dared to say: “What if Americans just don’t get it? What if we need to change the game to suit their tastes?” It was one moment where Lamar seemed particularly forceful. Sitting next to Cooper, he gently placed his hand on Cooper’s own and firmly stated, “Kenny, we must play the game the rest of the world plays.”
Unsuccessful at re-creating in America the fan culture that was so central to the soccer experience, Lamar did the next best thing: He brought American journalists to the World Cups in ’70 and ’74 to show them the real thing first-hand. The ’74 contingent included respected columnist Blackie Sherrod, as well as announcers Verne Lundquist and Tom Hedrick. “Blackie cared as much about soccer,” said Lundquist, “as I care about log-rolling. But he decided to go.” When the journalists arrived, they were greeted with hand-drawn signs of welcome from the Hunt and McNutt children.
Lamar believed that when the journalists saw the game played at its highest level, they would better understand and appreciate it. “Here’s where it didn’t work,” said Lundquist. “I saw Blackie’s lead one day, after West Germany had played Poland, and he showed me the copy, because he was chuckling to himself. His lead was: ‘Scoring at will, West Germany ousted Poland by a score of 1–0.’ So, that was probably not what Lamar was hoping to see in the Dallas newspaper.”
Those trips were particularly enjoyable for Lamar, because World Cup summers meant no responsibilities beyond being an avid fan, and he made it a point to visit as many of the World Cup venues as he could, to study the stadiums and the unique traits of each. In one public square in Germany, the nine-year-old Clark, fully recovered from his 1972 mishap, joined the family in watching German youths play a game in which guests tried to kick a soccer ball into the small target holes in a simulated goal. “There were some teenage boys hanging around, and I could see that they were having some degree of difficulty doing it,” said Norma. “And so it finally got to be Clark’s turn. And he stepped right up there and the first ball he sailed it straight through like a rocket. And I saw the teenage boys look at each other, and I could hear them say, ‘Americanski!’ They couldn’t believe that an American even knew what a soccer ball was.” The Hunts and the McNutts were game travel partners, hitting shopping sites, museums, and restaurants among all the soccer games, with Lamar tabulating the number of Michelin stars they could accrue from the restaurants visited during the stay.
And along the way, he closely monitored the response of the American journalists he’d brought to see the event. Upon his return to Dallas, he clipped and saved the acerbic Sherrod’s straightforward, largely respectful report from the final, in which West Germany defeated Holland: “The bedlam after the German triumph was unbelievable, the triumphant parade around the field perimeter, the hugging and kissing by adult men, the deafening roar of partisans. V-J Day in San Francisco was comparable, but a distant second.”
While in Germany, Lamar had dinner with Clive Toye, by now the general manager of the NASL’s New York franchise, the Cosmos, who continued to work on a project that he, Lamar, and Phil Woosnam had discussed as early as 1969: the crucial objective of trying to coax Pelé (now retired) to come to play in the United States as an emissary for the game.
It was a year later when the deal finally came through, and Pelé debuted on a nationally televised game, against the Tornado, broadcast on CBS. That game featured the world’s greatest player squaring off against America’s best-known player, Rote, in front of a sellout crowd at Randall’s Island, New York. If you squinted, you could see the makings of a path forward for U.S. soccer.
Then again, as always seemed the case with the NASL, there was a dose of reality: The nationally televised spectacle wasn’t even a league game but instead a hastily arranged friendly, apart from the NASL’s regular-season schedule, not counting in any competition. And the Tornado had played a game the night before in San Antonio. The Tornado players were just glad to be there, on the same pitch with the legendary Pelé, but it didn’t change the humble existence of most NASL franchises or, barring a game in which Pelé was playing, the scant attendance.
Lamar reveled in the publicity for the league, and another Sports Illustrated cover that week, while expressing worry to partner Bill McNutt about the dubious advisability of signing other big-name players (in the same week, the Boston Minutemen signed Portuguese legend Eusébio), who lacked the same stature in America as Pelé.
He was right to be worried. There were sellout crowds when the Cosmos played around the country. That, combined with the frequent requests among investors for expansion teams and Woosnam’s messianic zeal for the game, led some to feel that success had arrived.
But Lamar was one of many in the NASL who was still skeptical. Despite the headlines and the infusion of new investors, he knew that the NASL was going to be a work in progress, and that Pelé’s reception didn’t necessarily signal a sea change.
“It was like bringing the Beatles over for a concert,” said Paul Tagliabue, then a lawyer at Covington & Burling, handling some of the NASL’s casework. “It wasn’t your own local singers. It was perfectly clear that in the inner-city, no one knew what a soccer ball was.”
•
From his office on the twenty-ninth floor of the First National Bank Building in downtown Dallas, Lamar presided over a group of holdings that were increasingly diverse and complicated. He owned the Chiefs and also had the largely ceremonial title of President of the AFC, though it did require his attendance at all NFL league meetings. He also owned the Tornado and was a key executive in the nascent NASL. He had WCT, along with two emerging tennis-related real-estate ventures, the Lakeway World of Tennis in north Austin and the Peachtree Tennis Resort in Atlanta, as well as a chain of WCT teaching academies across Europe. Though he had in 1971 divested his interest in the Dallas–Fort Worth Spurs minor league baseball team (selling to the owners of the Washington Senators, after they moved the franchise to Arlington to become the Texas Rangers), he still held his minority interest in the Chicago Bulls of the NBA (and, since the team was still losing money, he continued putting up more money during the nearly annual capital calls, to keep the franchise solvent), still owned the Bronco Bowl bowling complex and entertainment center (whose amphitheater, originally built for the defunct National Bowling League, had become a popular small concert hall for touring acts), and still had real-estate interests in Texas.
At the beginning of the ’70s, sensitive to not wanting to be viewed as an absentee owner, he invested heavily in land 10 miles north of Kansas City, building the Worlds of Fun amusement park, which he based loosely on Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. While Steadman oversaw the project on a daily basis, Lamar became keenly involved in the details. From the back lot of MGM Studios, he purchased the riverboat “Cotton Blossom” (featured in the 1951 movie Show Boat) and had it moved to Kansas City, where it became a hub of the amusement park, serving as both gift shop and restaurant. There was also a lemonade stand called “Lamar’s Libations” (and, eventually, another stand called “Norma’s Funnel Cakes”), and an emphasis on musical theater and stage shows.
On the same parcel of land he purchased for Worlds of Fun was a limestone mining interest, which he took over. (In the years ahead, the mining would leave underground space, which was turned into an underground business park, Subtropolis.) In addition to all this, there was his portion of the family’s oil and gas business, and various other family holdings, such as his stake in the chain of Shakey’s Pizza Parlors.
No rational person could expect to remain on top of all of those matters at once, and the effort to do so began to wear on Lamar. The travel was nearly constant; his devoted secretary, Jean Finn, worked longer and longer hours. Lamar himself had less time for the fine-grained detail that he loved focusing on.
Finally, around 1975, Lamar decided to seek more help. First, he designated a greater role for his longtime friend and traveling companion Bill Adams, with whom he had stayed close since the SMU days. Bill and his wife Molly frequently joined Lamar and Norma for Chiefs games, Cotton Bowls, and Palette Ranch vacations, and Lamar had asked Adams for some help during his interest in Alcatraz. Now, Lamar reached out to Adams again. His old frat brother was a fascinating mixture of homespun charm and flinty sophistication, and Lamar wanted him to help manage his side projects, citing the litigation in tennis, the two tennis resorts in the states, and the academies in Europe. Adams first balked, telling Lamar that what he needed was two more secretaries, then signed on when Lamar assured him that Adams would have the authority to fix the problems or dispose of them.
“I ended up with more projects than I knew what to do with,” said Adams. “Lamar was not a hands-on person with most of these things. He’d just kind of look at me. He wanted me to get him out of them. Lamar, basically, was a dreamer and a builder, and I was a man to put out fires, and run his projects.”
The accountant Wayne Henry, the Arkansas State graduate who’d moved to Dallas and worked his way up the ladder as an accountant for Hunt Oil, was moved to a newfound position in 1975, working as Lamar’s personal financial assistant, trying to bring more cohesion to Lamar’s varied enterprises.
“His interest was more in the field of sports and games,” said Henry. “Buying and selling leases, and the rest of the things in the oil business, he pretty well relied on us to put stuff in front of him that needed to be signed.”
Adams, as well, noticed that the regular oil business did not capture his friend’s imagination. “He didn’t have any numbers that were fun,” Adams said. “The idea of exploration excited him a bit, but not any of the rest of it.”
•
In July 1975, the franchise began its first-ever training camp without Hank Stram as head coach. “We’re Comin’ Back” was the promotional slogan featured on advertising, schedule cards, and media guides, heading into the 1975 season, with a depiction of Charlie Getty, the second-round draft choice out of Penn State who’d earned a starting spot in his rookie year of ’74.
But by the time Paul Wiggin’s tenure began, the talent on the Chiefs was in decline. The defensive greats—Lanier, Bell, Buchanan, Emmitt Thomas—were all into their thirties, some of them well into their thirties. “People said, ‘Why don’t you replace those guys?’” said assistant coach Vince Costello. “But that was the problem—we had nobody who could beat them out.”
A series of poor trades and barren drafts in the later Stram years had left the team with a dearth of young talent. Len Dawson, who agreed to stay on for one more season, was forty years old at the start of the 1975 campaign; Otis Taylor was thirty-three; and the key players in the offensive line, perennial all-pros Jim Tyrer and Ed Budde, were thirty-six and thirty-four respectively.
Just as importantly, many of the players left were an amalgam of malcontents and head cases. George Seals, who’d been acquired from the Bears for a first-round draft pick, retired to work at the Chicago Board of Trade. Lamar, at William Jewell for his annual training camp stay, performed his annual ritual of guessing the cuts and found he was hard-pressed to come up with the final forty-man roster, not because there was so much competition, as in the past, but because there was so little depth.
Wiggin was well liked and the Chiefs played hard for him, but there was not enough talent to make up for all that had been lost. Lanier and Lynch retired together after the ’76 season, and in ’77, the Chiefs got off to another woeful start, winning just one of their first six games. That October, Lamar wrote a four-page letter to Steadman, stating, “I do not believe Paul can cut the mustard.” He surveyed the team’s shortcomings and reasserted his personal fondness for Wiggin, but concluded, “I have no doubt we will continue to make mistakes on the elementary stuff like two minute offense, conservation of timeouts, ten men on the field, etc. I believe quarterback handling is beyond his comprehension (and desire) and I am convinced that he will let the entire season go by before he would take the step to make a change . . .”
After the team looked flat and dispirited in a 44–7 loss to the Cleveland Browns October 30, to drop to 1–6, Lamar reluctantly fired Wiggin, replacing him with assistant coach Tom Bettis. The response to the Wiggin firing was instant and voluble. Those who knew Wiggin well felt it was unfair. After the crying on the fourth floor, in and around the coaches’ offices, on Halloween morning, there was a vituperative reaction in the press.
Feeling bereft after the press conference announcing Wiggin’s firing, Lamar drove to Wiggin’s home to apologize personally, and to further explain himself. It had worked with Stram, but on this night it didn’t work. “My wife tore into him and he didn’t handle it at all,” Wiggin said. “He got up, walked away and left. She just wanted to know why. Simply, the repetitive why. ‘Why you, Lamar? The guy who put together the AFL. The guy who had the guts to hang in and stick to his principles. Why you?’ Lamar didn’t say anything.”
Lamar left and, in the weeks ahead, withdrew further. He was stunned by the vehemence of the opposition, writing a two-and-a-half–page letter to the Star columnist Dick Mackey, who had charged in a column that in the wake of the Super Bowl win, the “Chiefs became an egotistic, almost arrogant organization.” The jabs, some diplomatically hidden, others more open, were directed at Steadman. Even his friend, Lamar’s lawyer Jim Seigfreid, conceded that Steadman “could be pompous.” Bruce Rice, the veteran sports director at KCMO-TV who had been on the Chiefs radio broadcast crew and was a member of the Chiefs board, wrote to an outraged booster, “One other thing, Don . . . we seemed to reach a point . . . some time ago . . . when an organization which was built on a very ‘personal’ basis . . . has, for whatever reason, become ‘impersonal.’ This is the hole in the dike.”
Tom Bettis, hired to be interim coach to replace Wiggin, was a loyal soldier and a longtime Chiefs coach, but after an initial win over the Packers, the team returned to its losing ways, so by the end of the season, Lamar and Steadman were convinced it was time to make another change. Toward the end of the ’77 season, Lamar and Steadman and Jim Schaaf made the rounds again, this time interviewing an even wider range of candidates, as Lamar was looking for someone with whom he could develop the personal rapport that he’d once shared with Hank.
Lamar decided that he’d overcorrected in going for the simplicity of Wiggin. The two coaches he’d most wanted—Miami’s Don Shula and Washington’s George Allen—were both unavailable, so he returned to a candidate he’d passed on three years earlier. It was Marv Levy, the learned, avuncular coach who had been among the first special-teams coaches in the NFL and had gone on to coach the Montreal Alouettes to two Grey Cup victories in the Canadian Football League. The Chiefs had first interviewed Levy in January 1975 (he was recommended by George Allen) at a Los Angeles hotel. Nearly three years later, he sat down for another interview, on December 4, 1977.
Levy was a literature major who quoted Eisenhower (“Morale is built by victory in battle”), and he seemed both civilized and approachable. Lamar liked him, and he decided he’d found a man who was equal parts erudite and tough, who made no empty promises, but who clearly knew how to build a winner. On December 20, 1977, Levy was announced as the new coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.
And then Lamar headed off to deal with the other problems: the lagging attendance of the Tornado, the question of how the 1978 World Cup would affect the NASL season, and the latest round of recriminations and battles between WCT and others vying for control of the booming professional tennis business.
Things were so hectic and so fraught that Lamar didn’t even make it to the 1978 World Cup, with threats of kidnapping and civil unrest persuading him that he shouldn’t go. His sister Caroline was traveling in South America that summer and took in the final, though she cared not a whit for sports. Watching on TV, as the sea of confetti rained down on the bedlam of the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires, where Argentina beat the Netherlands 3–1 for the World Cup, Lamar longed to be there and might have also wondered if he’d ever be able to import that culture of soccer love to the United States.
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By the late ’70s, Lamar’s public persona was becoming more clearly defined. In the press clippings of this era, he was the mild-mannered eccentric who flew coach and was constantly in motion. In a 1978 feature story for the Kansas City Star magazine, Lamar was humble and introspective, recalling gaining weight (he estimated he had added thirty pounds) and finally realizing that his time was limited. “I can remember when I was, say, 22, 23 years old, and I don’t recall a feeling of urgency to do anything. There were things to be done. But now, as I’m getting older, I guess I feel I’m getting closer to the end of the line. And you want to accomplish things.”
His mornings at Gaywood featured light breakfasts—often just a slice of grapefruit with a sprinkling of sugar—and, when he was up early enough, an hour’s work in the yard (“the one thing I do best in the world is clip the bushes,” he would tell Norma), before driving Clark to the St. Mark’s School and then heading into the office.
“So he worked that gardening in, which he absolutely loved,” said Norma. “But he was very specific about what he liked: This was not the guy who likes to go out and dig in the soil season by season and put in flowers. That’s not Lamar.” At the Gaywood estate, Lamar developed an affinity for the delicate, precise craft of shaping the property’s forty-four Yaupon Hollies. “He called them being ‘poodled,’ trained into fanciful shapes. Not anything specific. The trees always told him what shape it wanted to be in—so he listened to the tree. He would trim it in incredible shapes. Not so extreme as you might have seen in the Japanese gardens —these were much more free flowing, very modern, sculptural looking.”
Lamar was an inveterate listmaker and record keeper. Each day would include an exercise notation of R (two-mile run), T (tennis), or W (his extended walk through the 11 acres of the Gaywood estate, shears in hand). In his daily exercises of still-dips, knee-lifts, and trunk-twists, he would endeavor to do ten of each, but often did one extra, for good measure. Self-denial didn’t work as well. For a time, he stopped reading the comics, but this struck even him as draconian, and soon he was back to his regular daily helping of Peanuts, B.C., and The Wizard of Id.
He would be greeted at the office by the redoubtable Jean Finn, who was the keeper of Lamar’s schedule and his cash, withdrawing money downstairs at the First National Bank so he would have funds for his trips and other outings. She would say in 1982 that, in twenty years, “I’ve never seen him lose control.”
Into the office, he’d spend a short time reading the paper before diving into his correspondence and solving problems.
With the Chiefs, he continually made an effort to stay out of his coach’s way, though he corresponded regularly with Steadman about his thoughts on the coaching staff and team’s performance.
And, when he had the time, he zeroed in on fine-grained details. His preoccupation with symmetry was evident. After a 1978 game at Arrowhead, he wrote Steadman, “the ‘NBC’ signs (and ABC and CBS whenever appropriate) should be placed equal distance between our Chiefs’ logos on the wall. They were off center.”
The Cowboys’ success was vexing for someone as competitive as Lamar. By the late 1970s they were Super Bowl champions and had been dubbed “America’s Team,” and, at times, he seemed to be responding to everything Tex Schramm did. Writing Steadman in ’78 about game production for the coming season, he noted, “I’m convinced we don’t need to go ‘sleazy,’ and what do we really accomplish if we (un)dress our girls like the Cowboy cheerleaders? Let’s be unique . . .” To that end, he suggested implementing gameday routines like “a 48-girl circle around the Arrowhead emblem for the National Anthem,” or developing “a full stadium ‘K’—‘C’ yell (each side of the stadium doing one letter) . . . I know a good cheerleader can, with help from the band, pull this cheer out of the crowd.”
But the deeper lesson was that the crowd’s involvement sprang organically from an involvement with a winning team. By 1979, as the crowd continued to dwindle (the 12,000-person waiting list for season tickets was now a distant memory), Lamar was always seeking a way to rouse the crowd and placate the media. He wrote Steadman, “How about the Chiefs sending a box of candy to the wives of our media list next Valentine’s Day—with some type of no-serious, fun message? Something like: ‘Take heart—it’s only five months and two days until football training camp starts. We will need your husband back then because we are going to have a great season. (Signed) Kansas City Chiefs.’”
While Lamar was casting about for ideas to promote goodwill, Steadman was fretting the bottom line, growing increasingly arch and defensive. After the dismal ’77 season, he wrote a letter to Kansas City business leader and longtime Chiefs supporter Dutton Brookfield, all but demanding help (“the finest football stadium in the world is going to be half empty or worse during the 1978 football season unless the business leaders of this community take action to get a successful season ticket drive going . . .”) and exhibiting an epic misunderstanding of the nature of the draft and the team’s sterling history of selections and signings in the ’60s (“[b]ecause of our No. 2 drafting position, we should have the best draft in our history this May.”).
Yet for all the worries and concerns, Lamar was living a life that hewed almost exactly to his wishes—it was both hectic and exciting, with just as much glamour as he desired. At Norma’s fortieth birthday party in March 1978, Lamar had Howard Cosell tape a message, broadcast to the birthday revelers. Cosell assessed Norma thusly: “Exquisite beauty, but a woman who too early handicapped herself by marrying beneath her own status . . . doomed her to the task of ad sales for nonsensical women’s organizations and a lifetime of sitting on hard stadium seats.”
The dominant image of the couple during this era was of Norma as the supreme hostess, the warm, bubbly outgoing presence that helped draw Lamar out of his natural shell. She dutifully joined Lamar for most of his outings. “I never met a game I didn’t like,” she once said. “I can’t say the same about banquets.” Lamar already loved antiques when they met, but with Norma by his side, they became serious collectors, of both art and antiques. In 1979, when Lamar and Norma were in New York, they became fascinated with the story sweeping the art world, of American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s lost masterpiece The Icebergs. Found in the home of a late English railroad tycoon, it was put on auction through Sotheby’s in a fall sale.
Seeking a greater profile for the Dallas Museum of Art, Lamar spoke with Norma about bidding for the painting and giving it as an anonymous donation to the museum. They had been in New York shortly before the auction, and had run into Harry Parker, the director of the DMA, at lunch. Afterward, Lamar and Norma were somewhat circumspect. “We were looking at each other saying, ‘My God, do you think they’re going to bid on it?’” said Norma. “You certainly don’t want to bid against them—you’re getting ready to give it to them, you know?” Lamar and Norma were not in New York for the bidding, but they knew exactly what it would mean to the Dallas Museum of Art, even then publicizing a fundraising drive to build “A Museum our City Can Be Proud Of.”
On October 25, 1979, Sotheby’s Madison Avenue office was the site of Auction 4290, “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, and Sculpture.” As the auction began, all eyes were on item No. 34, The Icebergs (The North), Church’s lost classic.
Bidding began at $500,000 and went in increments of $50,000, topping $1 million in less than 30 seconds. By the $2 million mark, only two anonymous telephone bidders remained, one of them Lamar. At $2.4 million, the Sotheby’s president and auctioneer John Marion departed from the $50,000 sequence and asked if either bidder was willing to go to $2.5 million. Lamar did so, and then there was silence on the other line and, after the inevitable “going once, going twice . . .”, Marion announced the sale to the anonymous bidder, for a price of $2.5 million, far outstripping the price paid for any other piece of American art (the previous record had been George Caleb Bingham’s The Jolly Flatboatmen, which brought $980,000). In less than 3 minutes and 30 seconds, the deal was done, and the Hunts owned a five-foot by nine-foot painting that would become the talk of the art world.
Just days later, Lamar called Dallas Museum of Fine Arts director Harry Parker and inquired whether he would be interested in displaying Icebergs as an anonymous loan. The museum made the announcement November 7, at a time when much of the art world—and beyond—was still speculating about who the buyer was. Norma and Lamar were there to appreciate the painting at the opening, and their beneficence was by then an open secret among Dallas society (and the newspapers, since the Dallas Times Herald’s art critic Bill Marvel reported on November 8, the day after the museum’s announcement, that Lamar was the likely benefactor). An apocryphal story began to make its way around the city that the Hunts only donated it because it proved to be too big for the room in their home where they intended to place it.
When asked whether he was the donor, Lamar took his typically diplomatic tack, taking pains not to be dishonest. “I know it sounds funny, since I’m in a business as public as professional sports, but our collecting is very private. I will say that we’re tickled to death that it’s in Dallas. I think something like that is great because works of art become available to great masses of people.”
Lamar was forty-seven years old, still running every day, pursuing all of his interests, vying to restore the Chiefs to their past glory, to keep the NASL alive and to keep WCT relevant. He loved his work and loved his play, and the two were inextricably bound.
In the years ahead, he would continue these endeavors, but what he couldn’t know, on that festive November night when he appeared at the museum opening with Norma, was that his whole world would soon be imperiled for the most mundane of reasons: With all he was doing in his chosen field of sports, he still occasionally went along, at times absent-mindedly, with some of his brothers’ business ventures.