For much of the nearly quarter-century that Lamar had been out of college, he had gone his own way. He remained in the Hunt Oil offices, at the Mercantile Building in the ’50s and ’60s, then moved with his father and his siblings to the new First National Bank Building in 1965. At the beginning of the ’80s, he’d already planned to join his brothers after they completed the construction of Thanksgiving Tower, on 1601 Elm Street, when the fifty-story skyscraper opened in 1982.
He remained an equal partner, with his siblings, in Placid Oil, and a partner with Bunker and Herbert in Penrod Drilling. There were still tax reasons for him to invest some time and money in oil exploration on a regular basis.
But the picture that emerges of the Hunt brothers in the ’60s and ’70s is one of Bunker and Herbert acting in concert on many business deals, while Lamar journeyed out on his various sports endeavors. The explanation that Bunker had given Bud Adams when Adams asked why Lamar wanted to meet him in the spring of 1959—“I don’t tell Lamar my business, and he doesn’t tell me his”—remained largely true.
“I don’t think there’s any question but Lamar went down a totally separate path from what Bunker and Herbert were doing,” said Ivan Irwin, Lamar’s SMU classmate who served as outside counsel for WCT during much of the ’70s and ’80s. “Bunker and Herbert were very much wrapped up in oil and gas, and while I’m sure Lamar Hunt Trust Estate had some investments in oil and gas, and certainly through Placid they had investments, I don’t think Lamar ever paid any attention to the oil and gas business. He had other people doing that for him, but I don’t think he was ever interested in it. He was really, really wrapped up in sports. He got so wrapped up in it, you wonder how in the world he had time to do anything else.”
Lamar was friendly with his brothers, dined with them at the Petroleum Club occasionally, but he had quite intentionally followed his own path. When Bunker had offered to invest in the Texans in 1960, Lamar had politely declined. He did convince Herbert to stand in as a part-owner of the Tornado in ’67, though only to avoid the dual-ownership rules the NFL was putting in place at the time. In 1973, when Bunker put Lamar up for a 5 percent stake in the George Steinbrenner–led syndicate that was purchasing the New York Yankees, Lamar demurred (he was already hearing enough criticism from other owners for his involvement with the NASL). He shared little of Bunker’s interest in horse racing; while Bunker for a time owned more thoroughbreds—over 700—than anyone else in the world, Lamar owned none. And while Herbert’s real-estate holdings grew extensively, with significant property in Arizona, Lamar focused largely on the area in and around north Kansas City, where his Worlds of Fun and, later, Oceans of Fun amusement parks were located.
Bunker hewed more closely to his father’s political stance than anyone else in the family, while Lamar remained mostly bored by politics, a solid Republican, but someone with little passion for the minutiae of policy, and dedicated to a more inclusive view of patriotism. (This was true in sports as well. Although he dutifully served on NFL subcommittees when drafted by his peers, he didn’t seek them out, and he was minimally involved in the politics of the United States Tennis Federation, to his detriment, some of his longtime allies said.) He had friends on both sides of the political spectrum, and his views on race were, to put it gently, far more evolved than Bunker’s.
So in the ’70s, while Bunker and Herbert were growing fascinated with the soundness of silver as an investment and a hedge against inflation, Lamar generally agreed in theory but remained focused on sports. His friend and former AFL star Jack Kemp, by then an aspiring young U.S. Congressman from Buffalo, had begun arguing the merits of the gold standard—and the value of a hard currency that could withstand all manner of market fluctuations.
It was well into Bunker and Herbert’s buying spree, in which they bought over 40 million ounces of silver bullion, that Lamar grew interested enough to invest himself, though not in concert with his brothers. This came against the explicit advice of his lawyer, Jim Seigfreid, who at one point in the late ’70s sat down with Lamar and said, “I don’t think this is a good idea for you. And I know you have a lot of trust in Bunker and Herbert. I’m not going to stop you; I can’t stop you. But I’m going to tell you it’s very dangerous.” Lamar responded as he usually did, thanking Seigfreid for his advice but maintaining his interest nonetheless. And as the price of silver rose in the late ’70s, from a historic low of $1.25 per ounce to the otherworldly highs of $20 and then $30 and then $40, Lamar joined in on the investments. By the end of the decade, at his brothers’ behest, he had purchased millions of dollars of silver on his own.
On January 21, 1980, the Hunts and Steadmans were in Honolulu, for league meetings and the Pro Bowl. Jack and Martha Steadman were sitting at dinner with Norma that evening, when Lamar walked in late, ashen-faced. He’d just learned that Comex, the New York commodity exchange commission, and CBOT, the Chicago Board of Trade, had both initiated severe restrictions on purchases and sales of silver. As Lamar sat down to dinner, he said, “Comex changed the rules. I think we’re in trouble.”
It turned out to be far worse than that. Silver, which had increased to a preposterous $50 an ounce on January 17, began free-falling, to $34 an ounce just days later, and all the way down to $21 an ounce by mid-March. Bunker and Herbert’s losses were immense—as much as $2 billion by some estimates—but the larger problems were yet to come. What Lamar had gotten himself into, by following his brothers, was the biggest full-scale silver crisis in modern history, and one that threatened the entire family fortune.
Margaret was furious at the brothers for putting the entire family at risk, and Norma felt much the same way. As the pressure mounted in the weeks ahead, Lamar found himself regretting his involvement. On a trip to Kansas City, he sat down with Seigfreid and began a discussion by saying, with a mirthless laugh, “Jim, I wish I’d listened to you before.”
The loan that allowed the Hunts to remain solvent resulted in the family mortgaging Placid Oil—Herbert and Bunker required more than $50 million to cover their positions, while Lamar needed a fraction of that, $5.5 million, to cover his own investments. Even that didn’t end Bunker and Herbert’s calamitous misfortune, or Lamar’s involvement in it. The ride would be a perilous one, and though many people were advising him to separate himself from his brothers’ predicament—and though his involvement was probably minor enough that he might have been able to extricate himself—it was never a question. The Hunt brothers stood together. The repercussions and the lawsuits would drag on through the decade and seemed to mark virtually everything Lamar did.
“The Silver Crisis” would just about span the decade of the 1980s, a nearly endless procession of meetings with lawyers, negotiations with banks, and unpleasant sit-downs with government officials. The days burned away from Lamar, drew his energy, and left his brothers as caricatures of public ridicule. Through it all he was reminded, on a daily basis, why he had chosen a life based on something other than turning a large fortune into a larger one. During the crisis, the New York Times Sunday Magazine did a cover story on the brothers, in which a Dallas historian remarked, “There is something about being a Hunt: You’re never rich enough.” That may have been true for Bunker and Herbert, but it decidedly wasn’t for Lamar. While Bunker was making a play for the biggest oil field in the world in Libya, Lamar was busying himself with flower arrangements on the morning of the WCT final and working on the wording of mailers for Tornado season-ticket holders.
He had possessed the same means and options as his brothers, and he had chosen an altogether different course. But now, with the brothers paying a million dollars a month in legal fees, and with their debt to banks growing at a rate of six figures per day—with a billion more in bank debt than the liquidation value of their assets, his entire life’s work was in jeopardy.
And throughout the ordeal, Lamar continued to go to the office every day, tried to answer every piece of mail, saw every Chiefs game, got to every tennis tournament and soccer match he could. At home, after Clark left for college at SMU, Lamar and Daniel would spend time up on the third floor of the house, playing marathon ping-pong contests. The games would continue.
Norma, as worried as anyone over what the ordeal meant to her husband and all that he’d worked for, didn’t hear a single instance of complaint.
“It just wasn’t in his nature to dwell on anything negative,” she said. “So he moved forward.”
He lived by Lyda’s words: We do not collapse.
•
After the disappointment of the Paul Wiggin years, the Chiefs began anew under Marv Levy. He was a calmly assured presence, willing to take a deliberate path toward improving the Chiefs, starting with a stout defense, to better keep the team in every game, and then working to fill in the missing pieces on offense.
Progress was slow, both in the standings and at the gate. After a 4–12 opening season, Levy’s Chiefs went 7–9 in ’79 and 8–8 in 1980. The fans had grown disenchanted with the team’s persistent failure in the ’70s, and they were slow to return. In those first three seasons, the Chiefs drew more than 70,000 fans to a home game just four times.
The Arrowhead Stadium of that period was still a magnificent edifice, but one that already seemed antiseptic and out of step with the times. The vast parking lots were spacious, with room for more than 20,000 cars, but there was little activity to speak of prior to games (fans from nearby colleges were used to tailgating, but it was not a common practice in Arrowhead, which included no bathroom access in the parking lots and precious few garbage receptacles). Inside the stadium, the staff in 1980 were still wearing remnants of the early–’70s mod looks: double-knit leisure suits with polyester neckties for the male ushers, long skirts and white boots with fringed vests for the female “usherettes.”
Levy’s Chiefs in 1980 had begun 0–4, then turned around to win four straight games, only to alternate losses with wins the rest of the way. The scrambling Clemson quarterback Steve Fuller had been taken in the first round in 1979 but wound up losing his job to the lightly regarded Bill Kenney, who showed an admirable toughness and more accuracy on deep passes. In 1981, with Kenney taking most of the snaps, rookie running back Joe Delaney running for 1,100 yards, and a young defense anchored by a strong secondary finding its way, the Chiefs started 6–2 and took first place in the AFC West, with a rare road win at the Oakland Raiders. But they lost five of their next seven games, wound up mired in a quarterback controversy between Fuller and Kenney, and finished third in the AFC West, just a single game behind San Diego and Denver. They did beat the Colts in the season finale for their first winning season in eight years.
Over the years, Lamar and Levy developed a rapport. One summer, Marv and his wife Dorothy traveled to France and went to the Louvre, where they attempted to match Lamar and Norma’s “record” of walking through the entire museum in 56 minutes. “Despite a valiant effort on our part, Dorothy lost concentration under pressure and stopped too long at the Mona Lisa,” Levy wrote, “and we had to settle for a 58:16.4. I’m sure that the experience we gained will help us next time.”
But the era of Lamar making weekly visits and having regular dinners with his head coach were long gone. With Lamar’s hectic schedule being what it was, the daily oversight of the football side of the organization—which historically had been Lamar dealing with the head coach—moved to Jack Steadman. He had been with the franchise for two decades, had a strong understanding of the finances of running a franchise, and remained resolutely loyal to Lamar.
Steadman’s manner was more stern than Lamar’s, and many in the organization felt as though he overstepped his bounds. Lamar would evaluate his coach’s personnel decisions after the fact, but he would never presume to recommend which player should be drafted beforehand. According to Levy, Steadman was different, pressuring him to draft offensive skill position players in the draft, and then pressing him to start the highly publicized Fuller over Kenney in the 1981 season. “Jack was so imperious, he was hard to like,” said one longtime Chiefs employee.
For his part, Steadman took seriously his role as the chief financial officer of the team, and he had concluded years earlier that any commercial success would follow on-field success. With this reality a given, as well as Lamar’s fierce competitiveness, it was Steadman who felt responsible for putting a winning team on the field.
The 1982 season looked like a decisive year for Levy—just as the 1966 season had been for Stram—and after a hard-fought 14-9 road loss at Buffalo, the Chiefs had come home and defeated the three-time division champion San Diego Chargers in their Arrowhead opener. Then came the 1982 NFL Players Association strike, and all the momentum and continuity that had been built up by Levy in the four-plus years dissipated.
In the coming weeks, the offices at Arrowhead took on a haunted aspect. The coaches remained at work, all revved up with nowhere to go. Coaching secretary Ann Roach saw the staff spend their days in a directionless funk. “They’d come in the office anyway,” said Roach. “I don’t think their wives wanted them at home.”
When the team returned, there was a residue of dissension, both between players and management, but also among the team itself. (The strike lopped seven games from the schedule, and five of those would have been home games for the Chiefs.) They returned with three road games and a home game against the Raiders, all of which they lost. The NFL had expanded the playoffs to sixteen teams but it didn’t matter: Kansas City was 1–5, its season effectively over.
By then, Lamar was agonizing over the prospect of yet another coaching change. On the morning of the December 19 Chiefs–Broncos game in Denver, he began drafting a letter to Steadman, unusually bleak in its tone. “We are possibly in the worst position that the organization has ever been in,” he wrote. “There are a lot of factors involved in that—the major one being the after effects of the strike, which I believe place the entire business in the most jeopardized position it has been in since the failure of the [New York] Titans late in 1962.”
After acknowledging the slow growth of the team under Levy, and the steady disappointments of the strike year, Hunt came to the coaching staff. “I think Marv is a good, basic coach, but I think he is not capable of making the big breakthrough.” Lamar cited a number of factors, including the team’s inability to win as a favorite, Levy’s “lack of exterior toughness,” the uneven handling of quarterbacks.
“My belief is that we need to consider a coaching change—if we can bring someone in who has a proven track record.” Lamar’s list was a short one: 1) Don Shula, 2) George Allen, both proven coaches who were already under contract. The third choice was the former Cowboys assistant John Mackovic, about whom he wrote, “I’ve never met him, but reputation, heightened by his outstanding performance as a head coach at a really ‘sick’ college (Wake Forest), put him in the ‘proven’ category . . . Mackovic, of course, would have to prove himself to the public and the players. There would be a degree of risk with him.” In conclusion, he stated, rather hopefully, that “if a change is to be made, I would envision asking Marv to ‘ask for a change of duties with the organization,’ which may or may not be acceptable to him as he may choose to continue to coach elsewhere. He does not deserve to be fired and I would hope that if we went that route that it could be handled ‘at his request,’ or with some type of ‘mutuality’ agreement.”
This was wishful thinking. Lamar still went to every game, but he’d not spent the time with the team or conferred with his coach the way he had in the past. The decision was made, in spite of the Chiefs winning two of their last three games, including a season-ending 37–13 rout of the playoff-bound New York Jets in front of a record Arrowhead low turnout of 11,902 people. When Steadman told him of the decision the next morning, Levy was calm but defiant. “You’re making a big mistake,” he said. When Steadman pressed further, asking Levy if he’d be willing to resign, Levy said, “Why would I want to do that? I’ve done a good job, and you’re wrong to fire me.”
The Chiefs came out of the 1982 season seeking to hire their fourth different coach in less than a decade. The new man was John Mackovic, the Cowboys’ assistant who had been heavily influenced by his time under Tom Landry, both in his insistence on a passing-based multiple offense and, less fortuitously, in his commitment to remaining an unemotional character presiding above the fray, removed from his players and unemotionally directing the team. (For his part, Mackovic said he’d always been unemotional; but his detachment, after some time on Landry’s staff, was even more pronounced.)
The 1983 draft would be one of the deepest in NFL history, as six quarterbacks were taken in the first round, starting with No. 1 draft choice John Elway being drafted by the Baltimore Colts, who subsequently dealt him (Elway insisted he didn’t want to play for Baltimore and used the leverage of his baseball career to threaten to not sign at all) to the Denver Broncos. With the seventh pick in the first round, the Chiefs—fully committed to drafting a quarterback—were looking at a draft board that included five other quarterbacks with first-round grades. They were Todd Blackledge, who had quarterbacked Penn State to a national championship in 1982; Ken O’Brien, a raw prospect out of Louisville; the mobile Tony Eason, who’d led Illinois to a Rose Bowl; Jim Kelly, the strong-armed passer who had helped revive the University of Miami program; and Dan Marino, the preseason Heisman favorite who’d suffered a disappointing year at Pittsburgh and had seen his pre-draft stock drop in the wake of a persistent rumor that he smoked marijuana.
While Elway was almost unanimously considered the best quarterback prospect, there was a great deal of disagreement over who was second best. With all five available when the seventh choice in the draft came, the Chiefs knew that much of the next decade of their franchise’s fortunes would be dictated by the selection.
In the draft “war room” where Mackovic, Schaaf, and Jack Steadman stood with scouting director Les Miller and Lamar, the new head coach felt that Blackledge was the right man to pick (Levy, who had spent some time looking at the same question before his exit, had strongly preferred the other two Pennsylvania-bred quarterbacks, Marino and Kelly).
Before the team even reported to training camp, the franchise suffered another trauma, as running back Joe Delaney—who’d been instrumental to the team’s rise in his rookie year of ’82—died while trying to save some children in a swimming hole in Louisiana. While Delaney’s death had nothing in common with the Stone Johnson or Mack Lee Hill’s tragedies, many longtime members of the organization couldn’t help wondering if the team was somehow cursed.
After a decade and a half of stability under Stram, the Chiefs had been reeling ever since. But by the end of 1982, it wasn’t merely the team that was in trouble—the entire NFL was embattled. On Friday, May 7, 1982—nearly two years after Al Davis announced his intention to move the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, only to have the NFL reject the move—a district court jury in Los Angeles brought back an all-too-predictable verdict in favor of the Los Angeles Coliseum Commission and the Raiders. In the aftermath, the NFL directly filed an appeal of the verdict, and both parties prepared for another trial, to decide damages.
Discussions of the implications of the Raiders’ victory were still in the news four days later, on May 11, when a new professional football league announced its formation in a festive press conference at 21 in New York City. The United States Football League was the brainchild of Lamar’s longtime friend David Dixon, who had been arguing for the merits of a spring football league for more than a decade. With Lamar’s help, Dixon had even made a presentation to NFL owners at an annual meeting in 1973, to use a spring league as a developmental league. From that germ of an idea, and a survey of attitudes about sports that showed a strong public interest in football even during the spring, the USFL got off the ground.
With his brothers’ calamity in silver, Lamar was already destined to spend much of the next few years in meetings with lawyers and business analysts. But the sum total of the first players’ strike (with another in the offing), Al Davis’s challenge to the NFL, and Dixon’s start-up of the USFL ensured that there would be plenty of time spent in law offices and courtrooms for football as well. And that wasn’t the end of it—by the end of the ’70s, the NASL had filed suit against the NFL (with Lamar ruefully noting he was paying legal fees on both sides), and World Championship Tennis had gone to court with the Men’s Professional Tennis Council and the International Tennis Federation. Lamar would muse later in the decade that in the ’80s, he seemed to spend most of his waking hours giving depositions.
•
In the midst of these crises on multiple fronts, Lamar’s public face in the 1980s was different. His hair, growing more sparse, was now often parted in the center, combed back. He’d taken to more modern tortoise-shell eyeglasses, with exceedingly large frames. His running kept him slender, but he looked more worried than anything else. Sitting in Dallas for a WCT press conference in 1983, he seemed visibly nervous, sweating, absently tinkering with a piece of paper or a Dr Pepper cup as he answered questions about the WCT’s lawsuit with the International Tennis Federation. He had never been slick in front of the media—it was one of his charms—but for the first time in more than twenty years he seemed visibly uncomfortable.
This was understandable. For the first time in his professional career, his employees could see visible signs of stress. He was not irritable or snappish. He continued to preface all requests to secretary Jean Finn or others with a tentative “Would you mind . . .” or “If you get the chance, could you . . .” But he was quieter than usual, fell even further behind in his correspondence (by the mid-’80s, there were entire offices on the floor that was given over to stacks of Lamar’s ongoing letters), and often looked haggard, even as he continued his health regimen.
“He had a vision there of maybe losing everything he had,” said his longtime financial aide Wayne Henry. “That really bothered Lamar, I think—that everything could get away from him.”
The additional time he spent on the unpleasant matters of the silver crisis—depositions, testimony, long strategic meetings considering arcane tax matters and plausible exit strategies—was a drain on his energy, whereas spending time on the sports he loved had always seemed to give him energy.
In 1983, Lamar hired Thom Meredith, the bright, jovial sports marketing executive who had worked as the director of public relations for WCT for two years, after jobs in the NFL and NASL in the ’70s. As Lamar explained it, he wanted Meredith to serve as his administrative assistant and help with his voluminous correspondence, drafting letters for which Lamar didn’t have time and Jean Finn didn’t have energy.
So Meredith was hired to draft replies to much of Lamar’s correspondence and to field the bizarre queries that had only grown in volume since the Super Bowl win and, again, after his father’s death.
Rich people get plenty of unsolicited mail, as do famous people, and rich famous people get the most of all. And so he replied to people who wrote asking for funds to start educational institutions that “will make us independent of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia;” he replied to people who either claimed to be or claimed to know illegitimate children of his father; to people who were as close to being crazy as made no difference; to people who sent letters on round stationery, with football formations on the bottom and nonsensical lists of educational institutions and pharmaceuticals on the top; to women who either didn’t know or didn’t care about his marital status and wanted to date him; to a man marketing a “synthetic solar power plant;” to a man who claimed to have passed a lie detector test proving that he could take any team in professional sports and raise its winning percentage to 70 percent or more; and to a man who asked for $180 million to build a “movie museum and parking garage” in rural Mississippi.
“Lamar tried to answer every letter he received that was signed,” said Meredith. “Even the cranks. He felt that if someone signed their name, that person deserved a reply.”
Around the office, when Lamar could break free of his obligations with the silver crisis, he moved from one office to another in his work, often sitting up in the largest conference area not being used that day. There he would write out longhand whatever correspondence he had, then hand over the paper and its miniscule longhand script to secretary Jean Finn whom, armed with her magnifying class, would read it and type it up.
What did not end, despite the distractions, was his mastery of minutiae. One time in the early ’80s, Lamar presented WCT director of communications Rod Humphries with an itinerary for a trip the two would be taking from Dallas to Houston, to check out the specs of The Summit for an upcoming WCT tournament. Humphries, knowing Lamar’s attention to detail, noticed that the projected travel time from Houston Hobby to the Summit was three minutes less than the projected travel time for the return.
“Ah, Lamar, look here, you’ve made a mistake,” he said slyly, pointing out the discrepancy.
Lamar peered down at the sheet, then explained that, “No, I checked—at that hour of the day, it will take us a little longer to return to the airport.” And so it did.
•
Soccer was the first to go.
The North American Soccer League’s last chance to save itself might have been the league’s Long Term Strategic Plan, conceived by a committee at the apex of Pelé’s popularity in 1977–78. With Lamar in the group, along with Jim Ruben of Minnesota and Steve Danzansky from Washington, D.C., the committee strongly recommended a policy of slow growth, shoring up the league’s weak links before going forward.
But on the other side of the equation, expansion franchises were going for $3 million, and with sellouts at Giants Stadium, and a national TV contract, new money was lining up for a shot at the NASL.
So the admonitions were ignored. The lure of cash was too strong—especially to many of the franchises that were either barely solvent or struggling. That period of edgy optimism pervaded at the beginning of the 1978 season, as the league grew from eighteen to twenty-four teams, accompanied by rumors that Henry Kissinger would be named the league’s new commissioner (false), and that the new franchise in Colorado, the Caribous, would sport fringed jerseys (true).
In his memoir A Kick in the Grass, Clive Toye recalled a meeting in which it became clear that there was a new order; the conservative suits of previous meetings were no longer common. “Rock stars, their agents and managers, middle-aged men with open shirts, hairy chests, dangling gold medallions and rings to match. Lamar . . . looking around the room, commenting drily: ‘We have a different looking league.’”
There was even a period, in 1977, when the league considered granting an expansion franchise to boxing promoter Don King, who in one of his usual volleys of bombastic rhetoric, argued that the NASL could rescue itself by making King and Muhammad Ali co-owners of a new franchise called the Montreal Shuffle, which would play its games at Montreal’s cavernous Olympic Stadium. “Of course, Don King wanted the NASL to give him the franchise,” said Paul Tagliabue. “So my recollection is that didn’t get very far.”
The subsequent death of the NASL was protracted and agonizing: After the 1977 season, St. Louis, a cornerstone of American soccer even well before the city provided a majority of the starters on the 1950 U.S. World Cup squad that shocked England, couldn’t compete and the franchise sold to a group in Anaheim; an expansion team was awarded to Hawaii and lasted one season, before moving to Tulsa. Only once since its inaugural year in 1967 did the league have the same lineup of teams in consecutive years. At a meeting in 1981, on the verge of a vote to post a bond for the next season, Calgary owner Nelson Skalbania and Edmonton owner Peter Pocklington sat together and conferred long enough to settle on an agreement to merge their two franchises, which they drafted on the back of a pack of cigarettes.
Fifteen seasons of the Tornado in Dallas had yielded a bustling youth soccer scene, but not much of a fan base for professional soccer. Lamar and Bill McNutt had, it seemed, tried everything: They’d recruited the best players they could find from England and South America; they’d launched the first American superstar, Rote; they had spent a small fortune in promotion, had Crazy George in the crowd pounding on drums and Dick Berg’s running promotions from monkeys on the goalpost to dancers on the sidelines in the mid 1970s. Along the way, the team had played in small stadiums, renovated medium-sized ones, and in large ones, and attendance was lower the fifteenth season than it had been in the first. So after the 1981 season, Lamar and Bill McNutt finally surrendered, deciding to merge the Tornado into George Strawbridge’s Tampa Bay Rowdies franchise.
“It wasn’t like they were getting out of the business,” said Bob McNutt, Bill’s son. “They were just going to take a new direction [co-owning the Tampa Bay franchise] that made more sense economically. I mean, my goodness, the amount of money they pumped into that, particularly Mr. Hunt. Their decision came at that point in time when the logic of, You played as a kid, you’ll come buy tickets as an adult, it became evident that that was not happening. When you’re two years out, or three years out, you can always say, ‘They’re going to start coming.’ And they just never started coming.”
By the end of the 1984 season, only two teams—the Minnesota Kicks and Toronto Blizzard—had posted the necessary bond to move into the next season, with even the Cosmos abdicating. Clive Toye, who had been around since the early days, was by now the league president, and he helped preside over the death knell. Lamar sent a consoling note.
It would be hard to know how much money Lamar lost in his time in the North American Soccer League, but suffice to say that while his family (especially Clark and Daniel) grew up loving the sport, and a few friends (like Tom Richey) shared his enthusiasm, most of the people in Lamar’s life did not share his love for the game, disagreed with his commitment to it, and were glad when the NASL went out of business.
The situation in tennis wasn’t much better. The tenth WCT Finals had been held in 1980, opening the new Reunion Arena in downtown Dallas. But a year later, WCT split from the Grand Prix tour, to run its own twenty-two–tournament schedule. The infighting that had marked much of the first decade of the open era returned—the ATP used one set of computer rankings, the WCT used a different computer system, and by the end of 1982, the WCT was crippled by its war with the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council. The MIPTC had outflanked Lamar by making it prohibitively difficult for some of the world’s top players to compete in WCT events.
On January 21, 1983, the WCT filed a complaint in New York federal court, seeking an injunction against the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council, which ran the rival Grand Prix tour. On November 10, the two sides announced a settlement, in which the WCT could operate seven tournaments, again under the aegis of the Grand Prix.
It was a hollow victory. Lamar slashed his staff and reduced the WCT schedule from twenty-two tournaments to only nine, with just five a year later. The WCT would limp along for the rest of the decade, but Lamar had long ago lost the power that he’d once had with the players.
Some observers felt that he could have controlled the entire world of tennis if he’d chosen to be more ruthless in the early ’70s. Others felt the game’s ultimate evolution—in which the players took control of their tour, the way golfers had in the formation of the Professional Golfers Association tour—was inevitable.
“To me, the whole thing was the Establishment versus Lamar,” said Rod Humphries, who worked for nearly a decade for Lamar. “And the players playing the two of them off against each other. And in the end, the players won.”
•
When he hired John Mackovic, Lamar noted that he was looking for someone with “external toughness,” but in Mackovic he found a practitioner who sometimes put expressions of toughness above all else. A trim man with golden-brown hair, not a strand out of place, he was distant from his players, other staffers in the building, even his own coaches.
The Chiefs team that had been built for four straight years before the strike year of 1982 took a major step backward in 1983, going 6–10. In the preseason of 1984, Mackovic handed a list of cuts to Bud Carson, the respected defensive coordinator who’d helped coach the Steeler dynasty of the ’70s. The list included at least three players that Carson had hoped to start for the Chiefs, and from that the disagreement deteriorated. One day in August, the Chiefs’ defensive players showed up for a meeting only to find no coaches in the room. Then Mackovic presented himself and told the players that Carson had quit, news that they greeted with barely concealed derision. Officially, Carson resigned over what he and Mackovic agreed were “professional differences.” As one player put it, “Yeah, well, the ‘difference’ was that Bud didn’t think John knew anything about defensive football.”
Though they improved to an 8–8 record in ’84, they took another tumble in ’85, starting 3–1 before suffering through a seven-game losing skid, culminating in a 31–3 loss to San Francisco. By then, media speculation was rampant and many in the Chiefs’ increasingly alienated fan base were calling for Mackovic’s ouster.
The next day, Lamar released a statement saying, “There is great emotion that goes into the preparation and conduct of a season and we, like the fans, are very deflated at our current status. The Chiefs are struggling at the moment and I’m sure John Mackovic, his assistants, and the 45-man squad want to do everything possible to turn things around in the remaining five games. We are working in that direction as a total organization. I do not believe in votes of confidence in the middle of a season. They inevitably are distorted or misinterpreted and we would prefer to wait and evaluate the season as a whole.”
Later in the season, after the team split its next four games, Lamar called a press conference. There was one game left, at home against the Chargers.
“In many ways, we have been disappointed in the visible community support, as seen through attendance, and we have missed the intangible life that that brings a football team,” he said. “This has been most evident by contrast when we play AFC West opponents on the road.”
He evoked the catcalls of twenty years earlier, when rumors were commonplace that the Chiefs were moving. “The answer then,” he said, “was ‘Baloney!’ Following that 1965 season, which was also very disappointing, everyone—fans included—committed to the project. The result was six consecutive years where the organization produced the fourth best won-loss percentage in pro football, won the AFL twice, and won the Super Bowl. That success, in turn, helped build the greatest sports complex in the world, and at the time the highest season-ticket sale in pro sports history.”
Declaring “we remain committed to John and his staff,” Lamar also moved to take some of the heat off of Steadman. “So that there is no confusion on the part of our players, coaches, or the public, I want to reiterate that general manager, Jim Schaaf, has direct responsibility for all day-to-day football operations, which includes coaching, scouting, and player personnel.”
Finally, he reiterated his own commitment. “Back to ‘square one,’ and really as a beginning point, I am challenging myself to put it on the line, to be a forceful catalyst to help make this organization the best in pro sports. Just as in the past, a lot of my efforts necessarily have to be on the league level. But, I’ll promise, you are going to see the Kansas City Chiefs back in a position of prominence. Because of what it says on the stock certificate, as well as the number of years I’ve spent in pro football, I have the advantage of not needing accolades or job security. Nevertheless, I assure you, from a career standpoint—I have no matter of greater importance.”
The ’86 team started strong, with a competent offense (with quarterback Bill Kenney beating out the uneven Blackledge as starter), a stout defense, and an absolutely maniacal special teams group, paced by special teams coordinator Frank “Crash” Gansz, the Chiefs marched to a 7–3 start, before a three-game losing streak, punctuated by a galling 17–14 loss to a rebuilding Buffalo team that would finish 4–12 under their new coach, Marv Levy.
Just days after that loss, with the team standing at 8–6 and its playoff hopes diminishing, Lamar had already considered sacking Mackovic. Weighing the pluses and minuses of his coach, Lamar gave Mackovic credit for being “bright” and having “high ideals regarding make-up of squad.” But he gave him minuses for being “uncommunicative to a fault (with everybody),” “lacking in single-mindedness of purpose toward winning,” being “unable to instill great loyalty in associates,” and having “unrealistic appraisal of sense of accomplishments (wanting contract extension last year).” Writing to Steadman on December 11, Lamar offered, “I do not believe John has what we need. His people skills (lack of communication ability) is such a flaw that I can’t see his being able to consistently lead.”
His two solutions were very old and very new: The first was George Allen, and the second was special-teams coach Frank Gansz. “He has never been a head coach,” wrote Lamar, “but in my 27 years’ experience he strikes me as the best head coach ‘prospect’ I’ve seen. He is a born leader of men. Charismatic, etc. An outstanding person.”
But the Chiefs won the next week, to go to 9–6, and then traveled to Pittsburgh, on December 21, where they needed a win to make the playoffs. The game would go down in Chiefs lore as one of the team’s greatest, and unlikeliest, victories. With Kenney out due to an injury and the Chiefs’ offense sputtering in the face of the Steelers’ defense, it was left to the Chiefs’ defense and specialty teams to make the difference, and they did, accounting for two blocked kicks and all three touchdowns in a 24–19 victory that sent the Chiefs to the playoffs for the first time in fifteen seasons.
While Christmas was unusually sweet, the bubble burst three days later, when the New York Jets trounced Kansas City, 35–15, in a playoff win that was seldom in doubt.
But the aftermath of the game brought up an even greater schism, as Gansz resigned—he’d felt that he would be given a greater role in coaching and claimed Mackovic reneged on the promise—and then, in a nearly unprecedented development, a group of players asked for a meeting with Lamar.
“I started getting calls, from Deron Cherry, from Bill Maas, from others,” said kicker Nick Lowery, the team’s player representative. “So I called Lamar and I said, ‘I think we need to talk.’”
Lamar traveled to Kansas City and, along with Steadman, met Lowery and several of his teammates at Lowery’s house. “There was definitely a lot of dislike in the locker room for John,” said one longtime Chief. “He talked a great game. He talked so much about the relationship with the players. But it wasn’t really there.”
It was highly unusual for players to have input on the hiring and firing of coaches, but the Chiefs’ players expressed their support for Gansz as well as their opposition to Mackovic. It was what Lamar needed to hear to convince him to make a decision he’d been considering for months. As Steadman would put it later, talking to Lowery, “this was just the last snowflake in a long blizzard.” By the end of the day, Lamar had fired Mackovic.
“The chemistry of an organization is an intangible that is crucial to its success,” he said in a statement announcing the firing. “My evaluation is that our football team is lacking that ingredient. There is no perfect formula for becoming the best in pro football. We’d all like to think we have the right answers. In this case, I have to make a judgment, and I have reluctantly concluded that a coaching change is necessary at this time.”
It was a calculated risk, and one that Lamar was quite certain would backfire on him if the team didn’t win. In little more than a decade, he’d gone from owning a franchise with only one head coach to being the owner of a team whose leadership seemed in more or less constant flux. And he knew the game well enough to know that if Gansz wasn’t the right man, he would be the one blamed for it.
”The thing that people really didn’t understand about Lamar,” said his friend Tom Richey, “was how much he hated to lose. He was gracious and always a good sport, but it just ate at him.”
Against the backdrop of the Chiefs travails, Lamar was still dealing with the fallout from the silver crisis. But inside the house, “it was just never discussed,” said Clark. Lamar didn’t want the children to worry, so he more or less ignored it when the topic came up.
In the ’80s, Clark Hunt had graduated from high school at St. Mark’s in Dallas, a star in both soccer and football, and followed his father to SMU (though he would wind up in the athletic fraternity, Phi Delta Gamma, rather than his father’s Kappa Sigma). Clark had spent a week with the SMU football team before deciding he was far better suited for a career as a soccer player. Once he got back into soccer shape, he was a three-year starter for Coach Schellas Hyndman at SMU. He graduated as the valedictorian of the class; Lamar, beaming, said he got his smarts from Norma, and his pride in Clark’s accomplishment was enough to assuage the pain of the school’s fall from grace, and the 1987 “death penalty” for repeated recruiting violations that shut down the football program for two full seasons.
In 1987, Lamar and Norma had sold the Gaywood mansion for an estimated $12 million to Gene Phillips, the CEO of the financial services company Southmark, and moved to a smaller, though still impressive, home in Highland Park, on Arcady, across the street from the Dallas Country Club. It was a more manageable property—Clark was out of the house by then, and Daniel was already eleven years old—and significantly less expensive.
But there were still grave doubts about whether Lamar could emerge from the ordeal with his holdings intact. The most pronounced threat was the trial by the Peruvian mining company Minpeco against the Hunt brothers, asking for treble damages of nearly a billion dollars.
Though Lamar was ostensibly standing trial along with his brothers, he was represented by his Kansas City lawyer, Jim Seigfreid. Seigfreid had made a nervy ploy early on, calling the judge, U.S. District Judge Morris E. Lasker, and explaining that he would like him to meet Lamar personally. In a private meeting in Lasker’s chambers, Seigfreid and Lamar showed up, sat down, and chatted. Siegfreid explained the unusual nature of how the Hunt brothers did business—each essentially a separate, autonomous partner, though they split the costs of the company’s overhead equally—and argued that while Lamar was in the wrong, he had gone along unwittingly.
And then, as the trial played out, he worked to see that Lamar never testified. The verdict of guilty was handed down in August 20, 1988, with Bunker and Herbert found guilty on all charges, and Lamar ruled guilty on all charges save—significantly—racketeering, since it was determined he had not acted in concert with his brothers.
Still, it was a dire scene outside the court room, and in many family members minds the end of the Hunt dynasty as they’d known it. After consoling his brothers, Lamar adjourned with his own advisers, and the first question came from Steadman: “What do you want to save?”
Both Bunker and Herbert wound up filing for personal bankruptcy to avoid paying the judgment. But Seigfreid had persuaded Lamar that doing so guaranteed nothing but further litigation. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it,” Lamar said at one point, “but let’s try.”
In this, they succeeded. In a 10-minute public hearing on October 20, 1988, Lasker allowed for Lamar to settle his portion of the Minpeco suit, and he vacated the judgment against him. Afterward, Seigfreid handed Minpeco’s lawyers a check in the amount of $17 million. It had been a long and torturous process, but now Lamar was through with it. He had already decided what he needed to do next. Seigfreid had given him a way to survive the lawsuit.
And over the previous year, Jack Steadman—finally—had given him a way to rescue the football franchise.
•
Frank Gansz was a handsome, inspirational figure, beloved by players. But even he couldn’t avoid the same fate that had befallen Levy five years earlier. On September 21, 1987—just two games into his tenure as the Chiefs’ new head coach—the NFL Players Association went on strike again, and pro football faced its second ruinous work stoppage of the decade.
By this time, Lamar had grown resolute. He wasn’t one for poisonous rhetoric, and he continued talking publicly about hoping that the two sides could find common ground. But he belonged to a majority of owners who felt the league needed to continue playing games, with replacement players.
The third week’s schedule was cancelled, and then the replacements came in. Some teams had hedged their bets, lining up replacement players knowing that the day could come. But the Chiefs under Gansz didn’t have that kind of preparation. They took the players they could get, and promptly lost all three replacement games.
For the second time in six years, a promising season would dissipate in the acrimony of labor unrest. “I think everyone felt good about the direction we were going,” said Gary Heise, the Chiefs public relations director at the time. “We had the excitement of a new head coach, the players were excited going into the season. The strike had a huge, huge impact. I believe many of the players came back with a different mentality.”
The team lost seven straight after the strike was over—they were 1–10 when they shocked Detroit on Thanksgiving Day at the Silverdome. Lamar knew there was no way—after firing Levy following a strike year, and the quick hook for Mackovic, after a playoff year—that the Chiefs could contemplate another coaching change, but the time had come for a sea change, and Steadman recognized it before needing to be told.
On Christmas Eve 1987, Steadman drafted a memo to Lamar. “Because our 1987 season has been such a disaster,” he wrote, “I have spent a lot of time studying and thinking about our total Chiefs operations.” After analyzing the 1987 season, the difficulties with the strike and with Gansz, he concluded, “The change I am proposing is a very difficult one for me because it affects Jim, who has been one of our most dedicated and loyal employees. It could also affect my status with the Chiefs, depending upon what it will take to hire a top football executive, who we are confident has the experience and knowledge necessary to turn our football operations around.”
What Steadman was proposing was “the hiring of a vice president of football operations who will have full authority over our entire scouting, coaching, and field operations . . .”
Steadman allowed as how some candidates might only be willing to come to the team as president, “In which case I would have no problem moving full time to Hunt Midwest, which is demanding more and more of my time anyway.”
Steadman’s first candidate was Dick Vermeil. His second was the aging George Allen, and his third was USFL executive Carl Peterson, “an ex-coach who has a reputation of being an outstanding talent evaluator, was with a winning program with Vermeil and the Eagles, and did the best job in the USFL with the Philadelphia Stars.”
In conclusion, Steadman was blunt. “Frankly, you are tired of losing, I’m tired of losing, the public is tired of losing, and in my opinion, the only way that we have a chance of regaining public confidence and support is to change the way we run our football operations.”
The change would not come for another twelve months, after the Chiefs posted their second consecutive four-win season under Gansz, a miserable 4-11-1 campaign most noteworthy for the protracted fallout of a Kansas City Star investigation into inconsistencies between Gansz’s talk about his time as a pilot in the Air Force and his actual résumé. By this time, the criticism in Kansas City had grown so intense that Heise compared Gansz’s media appearances that year as being “almost like walking to a torture chamber.”
For fifteen years, Lamar had resembled a general always fighting the last war. In place of the resplendent trappings and vanity of Stram, he had hired the resolutely down-to-earth, even humble, Wiggin. To escape from the vague generalities and bland rah-rah of Wiggin, he’d hired the cerebral, detail-oriented Levy. Judging Levy to be too graying and methodical, he’d hired the tough, imperious Mackovic, only to find him distant and at times cold to both player and staff. That brought about the hiring of the non-stop emotionalism of Gansz. And now, after two seasons—during which Lamar spent much of the time defending Gansz, defending Steadman, and defending Jim Schaaf—the time for incremental change was over.
Steadman fell on his sword December 8, announcing his resignation at the same time that it was announced that Jim Schaaf would not return as general manager.
The loyalty of Steadman’s gesture cannot be underestimated. In 1960, it was Steadman who helped stanch the flow of red ink with the nascent Texans; in 1963, it was Steadman who’d moved his family to Kansas City, to represent the franchise on a daily basis. From 1967 to 1972, it was Steadman who had run interference for the protracted efforts to win approval for and build Arrowhead. And throughout all that time, he had cheerfully (too cheerfully for some) played bad cop to Lamar’s good cop.
Those closest to Lamar felt that unless Steadman had offered to leave, Lamar never would have fired him. “Loyalty is not something he took lightly,” said one longtime Chiefs executive. “After what he and Jack had been through together—after all the flak Jack had taken, some of it for Lamar, and some of it just because of the way Jack was—there is no way he would have fired him, even as bad as it had gotten.”
And it had gotten increasingly bad. On ESPN, the rapidly growing cable channel whose Sunday night highlights package was becoming a staple for NFL fans—Lamar included—announcer Chris Berman had spent almost two full years referring to the bumbling team from Kansas City as “the Chefs.” Lamar was never one to curse out a TV set, but every bit of lost respect, every investigative piece about Gansz’s war record, every empty seat at his beloved Arrowhead, weighed on him.
“I just got tired of losing,” he said.
On December 4, as the Chiefs were winning for just the fourth game of the season, a 38–34 victory over the New York Jets, a figure sat nearly alone in one of the empty luxury boxes, watching the dismal but now familiar sight of the half-empty Arrowhead Stadium, with just 30,059 fans in attendance.
Carl Peterson—who preferred tailored suits and mirrored shades—did not look like anyone’s traditional picture of a football general manager. But beneath the polished exterior, he was a brainy football lifer, who’d received his doctorate in kinesthesiology from UCLA and worked first as an assistant coach and later as the personnel director with his close friend Dick Vermeil on the Eagles teams of the 1970s. A few years later, in the United States Football League, Peterson built the Philadelphia Stars into the league’s dominant power, going to all three championship games and winning the last two. After the USFL folded, Peterson went into business in Philadelphia and waited for the right NFL offer to come. By the end of 1988, Lamar was desperate for winning, and ready for a seismic change.
On December 19, the day after the Chiefs’ seventeenth non-playoff season in eighteen years and a season in which the Chiefs’ eight home games had been played in front of more than a quarter-million empty seats, Lamar introduced Peterson as the new president, general manager, and chief operating officer of the team. With Peterson’s new job—he would occupy Steadman’s old office—Steadman moved to the Hunt Midwest offices downtown, where he became the Chiefs’ chairman of the board.
The firing of Gansz, Steadman’s departure from Arrowhead, and Peterson’s arrival marked a symbolic end to Lamar’s most trying decade. Norma noticed a more relaxed figure by that Christmas. On January 1, 1989, Lamar made his annual weigh-in, the source of year-long competitions that he had with Buzz Kemble, and registered a deceptive 180¾, which he noted with scrupulous honesty in his personal log was not entirely accurate “(sick – 188 real wt)”.
But he’d done more than just survive. He had managed to remain outwardly upbeat through much of the discouraging decade. In disposition and worldview, Lamar fit William James’ definition of someone blessed with healthy-mindedness: “I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong.”
No one saw this more clearly than Norma. “He was such a positive person that he was always looking to the future and thinking positively about the next thing he was going to do,” she said. “He just really remained in a good mindset about almost everything. He was really amazing. So I didn’t feel that he felt in turmoil. He always believed that the sun was going to come up tomorrow. He was the ultimate Scarlett O’Hara.”
Three months later, on April 4, 1989, he settled the last of his silver-related lawsuits. It was now time to separate his financial interests from his brothers, and Lamar did so by forming the umbrella company Unity Hunt. In contrast to the six-letter words beginning with P, he chose Unity to symbolize himself and his four children. Having witnessed the tension between H. L.’s families, Lamar was determined that Lamar, Jr., Sharron, Clark, and Daniel would feel equally loved, equally cared for, and on equal financial footing. The company would handle all of Lamar’s interests. One of the keys to staying out of bankruptcy was his decision, at Steadman and Seigfreid’s behest, to sell Hunt Midwest (the real-estate, amusement park, and mining interests based in Kansas City) to the four children, transferring that asset to the next generation, while at the same time generating the cash out of their trusts to help him pay off his settlement in the Minpeco case.
The president and CEO of the new company was Jim Holland, a serious-minded engineer by trade who had developed a specialty in running conglomerates. Though Holland had a background in football (he had once worked for Bud Adams’s KSA Industries), at Unity Hunt his focus was on the conventional business side, so that Lamar could focus on sports.
It would be an oversimplification to say that the money he made from his family’s oil properties had allowed him to be adventuresome in sports for three decades, and that now the sports ventures would have to fund themselves. But there would be less margin for error in the future, and more pressure on his sporting properties to perform. He’d made one other important decision during the decade, deciding to hold on to his stake in the Chicago Bulls, despite some of his advisers urging him to sell what had been a traditional money-loser.
“He didn’t have the freedom to do some things that he’d been able to do in the past,” said his financial assistant Wayne Henry. “Tennis was still going then, though soccer was over. He still had the Chiefs. We had lost Penrod Drilling [and would later sell Placid Oil] . . . and those had been throwing off some cash. The realization was that we were going to have some crunches.”
Coming out of “the silver crisis”—the family would refer to the ordeal by those words for decades to come—Lamar was humbled, shaken, and considerably less wealthy, but unbowed. Paul Harvey, on his nationally syndicated show, said “Some people say the Hunt Brothers have lost their shirts; they’re just loosening their neckties.” It was a little more severe than that, especially for Bunker and Herbert, but as Lamar emerged from the long decade, he could look forward to a life that was substantially similar to the one he had enjoyed prior to the silver calamity.
In spite of Lamar’s unsinkable equanimity, the trial inevitably left scars. Margaret, particularly, was furious at Herbert and Bunker for what she viewed as an obviously foolish ploy. Norma, always protective of Lamar, was similarly disappointed in his brothers. “She blames them for what happened to Lamar,” said Jim Seigfreid. “And I’ve got to agree with her in many respects. He got sucked in on it.”
But through it all—the torched decade of embarrassing headlines, bankruptcy threats, lawsuits, two players’ strikes, countless depositions, the demise of soccer, and the marginalization of tennis—Lamar had never lost that sense of belief that a better time was just around the corner. And now, less than three weeks after finalizing the silver fallout, he felt himself turning that corner. On April 22, he flew to Kansas City, so he could spend the weekend at Arrowhead, for the 1989 NFL Draft, intently watching Carl Peterson begin to rebuild his football team.