Around the younger Peterson, Lamar was revived, working alongside someone who brought an entirely fresh perspective to both the game and the business of football, a young man’s maniacal work ethic, and a more recent history of success. The morning of their first draft, before Peterson used the fourth overall pick to select Derrick Thomas, the personable and highly motivated linebacker out of Alabama, Lamar was in the Chiefs’ draft room, laughing with the rest of the men when Peterson said, “Okay, let’s get this right. If we’re drafting this high again, we’re all going to be out of a job.”
The tanned, restless, and ultracompetitive outsider, Peterson took the lofty titles of President, General Manager, and Chief Operating Officer. Despite his economic and marketing experience, Peterson brought a blend of talents uniquely suited to the modern game. After building the Eagles team that went to the Super Bowl under Dick Vermeil, he’d moved to the Philadelphia Stars of the USFL, where he constructed from scratch the team that dominated the league. Previously, most “football people” dealt with football alone and left business concerns to an administrative staff. But Peterson was part of a new breed that, following Tex Schramm’s trail-blazing example with the Cowboys, thrived at both.
The changed mood in Arrowhead was profound, as were the necessary physical alterations—Jack Steadman vacating his regal office inside Arrowhead to take up space at an office in downtown Kansas City, where he could often be seen dining (usually alone) at the bustling Italian Gardens restaurant and adjusting to his time out of the limelight. Lamar had dealt with Steadman on a daily basis for nearly thirty years, and he continued to remain close to him even after the move. But it was now Carl Peterson’s show.
Lamar gave him wide latitude and Peterson used it; he commissioned some market research studies during that spring of 1989 and discovered what Lamar had long sensed but couldn’t quite articulate: The existing fan base was an aging, dispirited lot, insisting not on instant success or playoff spots but rather a sense of credibility. Two demands stood out: Make the team respectable, and don’t change the announcers (radio host Bill Grigsby was a Kansas City staple, and Len Dawson—still doing the nightly newscast at 6 and 10—was the single most beloved athlete in Kansas City sports history).
Rather than making any boasts or empty slogans, Peterson developed a series of TV commercials, shot in gritty black and white, that showed players working out in preparation for the new season, and closed with the phrase, “No Promises, No Excuses.” He also made the rounds, with players, season-ticket sales executives, and other team reps, throughout Kansas and Missouri, but also Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, covering much the same ground Lamar had back in 1963 when he was making his case for the Chiefs to be “not just Kansas City’s team, but mid-America’s team.”
Peterson’s first choice as head coach, his close friend Vermeil, turned him down. He was casting about for other candidates when one of the best coaches in the NFL suddenly became available. Marty Schottenheimer had just led the Browns to their fourth straight playoff season, and his ’88 season was particularly impressive in light of a plague of quarterback injuries. Yet after the season, Browns owner Art Modell and Schottenheimer had clashed over his assistants, and he resigned. Within days, Peterson hired Schottenheimer and began to stabilize that crucial position. Where the Chiefs had been through five coaches over the previous twelve seasons, Schottenheimer would man the helm for the next decade, the longest tenure other than Stram.
The Chiefs had been casting about for nearly two decades, looking for a coach who could return the franchise to its glory days of the 1960s. In Schottenheimer, they found a man who was certainly not slick but who exuded an undeniable authority and got results. His teams were smart, tough, aggressive, and fundamentally sound.
“The best way to realize success in the National Football League,” Schottenheimer said at his introductory press conference, “is to expect it.” There were no moral victories for Schottenheimer. After the Chiefs fought to an epic 10–10 tie with his old team, the Cleveland Browns, missing a victory by two missed field goals by the usually reliable Nick Lowery, the flight back to Kansas City was deathly silent. “I thought Marty was going to throw Nick off the plane,” said one Chiefs staffer. Schottenheimer’s fundamental approach and Teutonic resolve worked as well in Kansas City as it had in Cleveland, and the results were nearly instantaneous: The team went 8-7-1 in 1989, barely missing the playoffs, then went 11–5 in 1990, advancing to the postseason for only the second time in nineteen seasons.
Schottenheimer soon developed an almost reverent affection for Lamar. Like so many others, he was struck by Lamar’s humility. One day, early in his tenure as the Chiefs’ coach, Schottenheimer was sitting in a meeting with Peterson and scouting director Whitey Dovell in Dovell’s office. Without a word, Lamar ducked his head in the door, then sat down on a chair near the door. After a few seconds and a natural break in the conversation, he asked the men, “Pardon me, do you mind if I intrude?” before asking a question about the merits of a particular player the team was scouting.
And like the best football coaches, Schottenheimer didn’t just change the personality of the team but its character as well. His teams did things right, playing sound, bruising defense and conservative, ball-control offense. For the first time since Stram’s heyday, Lamar and Chiefs fans felt the team’s heightened discipline and rectitude were reflected in its onfield performance.
The change in culture on the field was matched by one off the field as well. It wasn’t just the wins in Arrowhead that were different; Peterson helped transform the gameday experience, encouraging tailgating outside the stadium, adding rock music at key intervals (becoming one of the early teams to pump the opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” prior to kickoff), as well as moving the team’s radio contract to an FM rock station that would bring a younger audience, in recognition that both football and rock music were now part of the same modern American mainstream.
In the Chiefs’ offices, the personality was already changing. When the new vice-president of administration Tim Connolly, one of Peterson’s hires, showed up for his first day of work, there were several people missing from the office. Connolly asked about his staff and was told they were in a Bible study class that met each Monday morning. Connolly found the meeting, walked into the room, and summarily told the attendees that while he respected what they were doing, there were no longer going to be extracurricular meetings on company time.
“It was a dysfunctional place,” said Connolly. “Lamar was unbelievably loyal. There should have been major, major changes long before they happened.”
While the moves could be wrenching, there was also a sense of flinty Eastern professionalism that was transplanted to the Midwest. The dated costumes of ushers were scrapped and replaced. The colt Warpaint was cast aside for the new mascot, KC Wolf. And the cheerleaders’ costumes were updated (at a considerable savings on fabric). Peterson changed the culture without disrespecting the team’s history. The Super Bowl trophy the team won remained on the first-floor lobby outside the elevators, a constant reminder of the team’s past, and its future goal. An organization of former players, the Chiefs Ambassadors, were formed, as a liaison to the past, and another method of community outreach. Watching from Dallas, visiting Kansas City frequently, Lamar loved it all. In place of the queasy sense of worried hope that pervaded much of the past twenty years, he now shared much of Schottenheimer’s quiet, purposeful confidence.
The team’s season-ticket base of 26,000 in 1988 grew within four years to more than 71,000, with a waiting list of 15,000, and the Chiefs would lead the league in attendance six times during the ’90s. By opening day of the 1991 season, when the Chiefs played in front of a sellout crowd of 74,246 in beating the Atlanta Falcons, 14–3, the entire gameday experience at Arrowhead had changed. Arriving with everything from $4.98 disposable burger grills to full pig-on-a-spit roasters, Chiefs fans raised pre-game tailgating to a kind of culinary performance art.
By then, the old guard of Chiefs fans, many who’d parked their cars in residential driveways close to 22nd and Brooklyn in the Municipal Stadium days, had been joined by a new breed, often younger professionals, many of whom lived across the state line in the affluent residential developments of Johnson County, Kansas. What both groups shared was an intense, somewhat thin-skinned pride in their city, the almost quaint notion that it mattered, a great deal, what people thought of the city.
On November 6, 1991, the Chiefs played host to Monday Night Football for the first time in eight years. For a city that had always been self-conscious about its sense of big-league status and had resented being overlooked the previous season, when the Chiefs went to the playoffs, it was a coming-out party. Derrick Thomas, driving to the stadium from I-70 east of the city, came up over the rise and got his first glimpse of the stadium—lights already on in the late afternoon and clouds of barbecue smoke emanating over the hill. “I smelled it before I got there,” Thomas said. “It was amazing.”
Lamar flew in that morning, joined by the regulars Richey and Kemble. He had been particularly excited before that game, reveling in the crowd outside the stadium and the electricity inside. That night, Thomas would terrorize the Bills’ left tackle Will Wolford, and the Arrowhead crowd would rock the stadium, as the Chiefs rolled to a 33–6 win over the defending AFC champions. Lamar, cheering from the open-air suite, provided high-fives to his family and friends. Tony Dungy, then an assistant on the Chiefs’ staff, would call it the loudest crowd he’d ever heard. (When Dungy returned home that night, he had a call from a neighbor exclaiming, “Tony—we never sat down!”)
The confluence of success on the field, confidence in the front office, a terrific stadium experience, and smart marketing were coming together to make Arrowhead the place to be in the 1990s, just as Municipal Stadium had been in the late ’60s. The city was in the throes of a second honeymoon with the Chiefs. What the team meant to the city was no less real for being so ineffable. As Mike Davis, a Kansas City attorney put it, “you’ll never get 100,000 people together because you bought a Van Gogh at the Nelson Gallery. Sports is the principal unifying force in the metro area.”
Outside the stadium on game days, the parking lot became a haven for tailgating and barbecuing, while inside the raucous crowd developed an intimidating reputation, its volume and intensity often marring opposing teams’ on-field communications—with John Elway and the Broncos’ offense whistled for seven false-start penalties in a 1993 Monday night game. The Chiefs and Arrowhead had become a social magnet, the games serving as a cohesive, mobilizing event that occurred with less regularity in disparate modern societies. “Without the Chiefs and the Royals,” said Kansas City Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, “we’d be Omaha . . . Wichita . . . Des Moines.”
As the season-ticket rolls increased, Lamar took an even deeper interest in the profile of the Chiefs fans. He began tracking how many different states they came from. And as the dismay of the ’80s receded, he began to find a renewed sense of sanctuary at Arrowhead. Flying in the night before the game, the family might stop at Stephenson’s Old Apple Farm restaurant, with Lamar always savoring the apple fritters, then head to the stadium. For Norma, the pristine view out of the family’s Arrowhead apartment—of the lit field in an empty stadium—had always evoked for her memories of Eloise at the Plaza. Lamar, if anything, loved it even more. Weather permitting, he’d head down to the field with one of the children to kick the football around. And as the sense of occasion surrounding game days grew in the ’90s, so did the sense of promise on the eve of a big game.
Even in the grim years of the ’70s and ’80s, Lamar would often jog the two miles around the perimeter of the sports complex early in the morning, before the gates opened. He still went through his paces in the ’90s, but now added more leisurely strolls, walking the grounds a couple of hours before kickoff, interacting with fans.
And his focus returned to its previous levels of acuity. His reading was voracious and no error was too small to correct. Prior to a Chiefs–Broncos game in 1992, the Dallas Morning News ran a small note in the midst of a capsulized game preview noting that Elway had thrown 24 touchdowns and 10 interceptions in his career against Kansas City. A day later, Lamar wrote Morning News sports editor Dave Smith to note “the Elway touchdown and interception numbers were reversed in the News’ ‘Preview’ . . . I know these numbers seem strange, especially since the Chiefs have such a hard time beating Elway . . . No reply needed—just wanted to make sure y’all had the numbers correct for the future.”
Over more than a year during 1990 and ’91, Lamar began pulling some old files and memorabilia from his early days in the AFL, and bringing them to Kansas City during game weekends to sort through them. By the middle of 1991, he had covered the floor of one room of the apartment with pictures, decals, old pennants, and pages from game programs, all the while sifting through additional boxes of pictures and files of old programs. He’d decided that he wanted to assemble a collage celebrating the franchise’s 30-year history. By the time he finished it, the “30-year history wall” had become the “31-year history wall,” required a graphic designer for consultation, and contained two banks of video screens with highlights of the team’s greatest triumphs. Lamar invited all the team’s employees for a small ceremony at the unveiling, featuring brief remarks from a Chiefs player from each decade of the team’s history. “Hundreds of memos went back and forth on that project,” said Chiefs PR director Bob Moore. It was one of Lamar’s scrapbooks writ large, and was put on display in the foyer of the Chiefs’ indoor practice facility, where a new generation of players could get a sense of the team’s history.
Maybe it was being rid of the silver crisis and all its accompanying worries. Maybe it was being re-energized by Peterson and the ascendant football team. For whatever reason, Lamar—who always cared passionately about the team—seemed more fully engaged than he had been for decades.
At the end of the 1992 season, the mother of Chiefs’ defensive back Kevin Ross died. In the days leading up to the team’s playoff game, Ross returned to Camden, New Jersey, to attend the funeral. He was in the back, waiting for the ceremony to start, when one of the pallbearers came to him and said, “Hey, Kevin, guess who’s here? Your owner.”
As Ross walked out he saw, in the back of the church, Lamar, who had flown out unannounced, rented a car, and come to the memorial service.
“I will never forget that as long as I live,” said Ross. Afterward, as Lamar and Ross embraced, he emphasized to Ross that he was in the thoughts of everyone in his “Chiefs family.” And then he was on his way.
The same was true of past Chiefs’ greats as well. When Buck Buchanan was dying of cancer, Lamar came to his south Kansas City home and sat in the kitchen, answering the phones for three days, then traveling with Buchanan’s widow, Georgia, to find a burial plot. (His penchant for symmetry existed in all matters; he picked out matching headstones for Buck and Georgia.)
•
By 1989, Lamar was in his late fifties, even as he had a young son who was only a teenager. Those in the family noticed a kinship between Daniel Hunt and his father. Just as Lamar had been the youngest of a big, boisterous family and had grown up after that family’s most formative events, so it was with Daniel. Quiet, arguably more sensitive than his siblings (just as Lamar had been), Daniel showed an affinity for art, scouting out the family’s Sotheby’s catalogs when they’d arrive in the mail. By Daniel’s eleventh birthday, Lamar was bragging to friends about walking into the Chicago Art Institute and hearing Daniel correctly spot, from across the room, a painting he’d never seen before as a Van Gogh.
By the summer of 1989, after two years in the internship program at Goldman Sachs, Clark had returned to Dallas and began working for Unity Hunt as well. Working around his father for the first time, he quickly noticed one thing: Given the choice, Lamar would spend “about 120 percent” of his time on the sports field.
But Clark, resolute, serious, purposeful, athletic, was every bit his father’s son. He was welcomed by many of Lamar’s aides because, though he shared his father’s love of sports, he was also more practical and far more sophisticated about money.
With both Lamar, Jr., and Sharron, Lamar continued to make a concerted effort to include them in work and play, both business projects and family vacations. When Lamar, Jr., got married in 1981 and Sharron in 1987, Lamar constructed elaborate collages of their lives—from young pictures swimming, vacations, school photos, old notes—in a monument to be displayed at the wedding receptions.
Lamar, Jr., was the one family member who actually moved to Kansas City, playing in the Kansas City Symphony. Sharron had been the most rebellious, going through a slow maturation process and a failed marriage in the 1980s. Even as she recognized his loving intent, his only daughter felt as though she couldn’t truly reach out to her father.
“A lot of the dialogue with my dad was very superficial, unfortunately,” Sharron said. “He wasn’t a person that would go very deep with me on stuff. And if I would try to draw him out sometimes, he would globalize the answer. He would deflect. He didn’t get in depth on stuff.”
By the early ’90s, Sharron needed for Lamar to get deep. Living in Florida, where her first marriage had ended, she’d begun another relationship that had ended poorly, and felt herself cut adrift. In May of 1991, she decided she was ready to move back to Dallas, and she asked Lamar to come help her. He flew out and they drove a U-Haul and her car from Jacksonville back to Dallas.
“Dad, of course, starts planning,” said Sharron. “He says, ‘We are going to trade drivers every 75 miles, because it breaks it up.’ So he would drive my little car, and I would drive the truck. Then he draws up one of his little schemes—you know, the stopping points. So he calculated that we could stop in Tallahassee and get a motel room and watch part of the Bulls playoff game. So we timed it where we stopped in Tallahassee at a motel, and they didn’t want to rent us a room, but the manager, of course, recognized Dad, and said, ‘Come in my office and watch the game.’ So we ordered burgers in from the restaurant there and watched part of the Bulls game. When you have a rock star for a father, you can go into a motel in Tallahassee and the guy is going to know who he is.”
Two years later, Sharron married again, more happily this time; her husband, David Munson, was also from a well-to-do family. And by then, she had come closer to making her peace with her father’s strengths and weaknesses. “I felt closer to him in some ways,” she said. “He was a hard person to get close to, though. If you asked him something he wasn’t comfortable with, he just wasn’t going to answer. If it was painful or difficult for him to respond, he just wouldn’t respond to me about stuff.”
•
Just as Lamar was emerging from his daunting decade of the ’80s, one of his most cherished loves—American soccer—was also revived. Back in 1983, the United States had pushed hard to be the host of the 1986 World Cup (Colombia, originally chosen to host, had withdrawn from the role in 1982) but had lost out to Mexico. A year later, when the NASL died, the sport as a commercial property was left for dead.
But nearly two decades of zealotry and youth soccer had bred a solid network, and on July 4, 1988, the United States was awarded the host nation’s role for the 1994 World Cup. At the time, even Lamar thought it was “a bit crazy” that a country that had proved itself so apathetic toward soccer might actually be hosting the world’s biggest sports event. But he had remained an avid fan, not just for the World Cup, but also amateur events, like the Dallas Cup and SMU’s soccer games, as Clark starred on a team that would reach the NCAA quarterfinals in both his junior and senior seasons (and Lamar would miss a half-dozen Chiefs games—more than he’d missed in the team’s entire history before—to watch his son play soccer).
On November 19, 1989, when UCLA grad Paul Caligiuri scored a goal to lift the Americans over Trinidad and Tobago, the USA qualified for its first world cup in forty years. Lamar, after flying back from the gripping 10–10 Chiefs tie with Cleveland, saw the goal in his living room.
As soon as FIFA announced the schedule for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Lamar began surveying his schedule, to see how many games he, Norma, and Dan could attend (Clark and other family and friends were coming later). On one legal pad, he began making an elaborate chart, calculating how many games—and museums and antique stores—they could take in, while getting to the maximum number of stadiums.
In addition to the McNutts, 1990 would mark Buzz and Dorothy Kemble’s first World Cup visit, and knowing Kemble to be a soccer agnostic, Lamar worked hard to make sure he would see the best the game had to offer. Two months before the tournament began, he composed a four-page handwritten note preparing Buzz for the quarterfinal he was slated to see at Stadio Artemio Franchi. He’d ordered them the Category 3 tickets, explaining, “I do not believe there is a significant difference in where one sits at a soccer game . . . these prices are all pretty well shocking as it is!”
“It is very difficult to theorize on who the opponents will be in this game,” he wrote, “except by looking at the ‘seedings’ which would indicate it might be Brazil vs. Belgium. If so y’all will be seeing the #1 most attractive style of play over the last 25 years or so (Brazil).”
Lamar, Norma, and Dan left for Italy on American Flight 66 (flying coach, per Lamar’s custom), taking the overnight flight to Madrid and then making a connection in Milan. They attended eight different games over the fortnight of the group phase. Once the single-elimination portion of the tournament began, the itinerary became even more ambitious. June 24 began in Turin, as they watched a matchup of former champions, with Argentina eliminating Brazil, 1–0. As the game ended, they raced for the rental car and drove the 90 miles on the A4 to Milan, for West Germany’s 2–1 win over the Netherlands, in the rematch of the ’74 final. Two days later, the Hunts and McNutts were in Verona, for Yugoslavia’s 2–1 upset of Spain in extra time, then headed south to make the kickoff for England’s showdown against Belgium, won by the English on David Platt’s late volley in the 119th minute, just seconds before the game was to go to penalty kicks.
Years later, Daniel would tell Bob McNutt that that he loved traveling to World Cups because on those trips, his father was just a fan—still avid, still fascinated with stadiums and fans and contacts, but without a financial and administrative stake in the proceedings.
They were at Stadio San Paolo for Argentina’s semi-final elimination of host Italy, with Diego Maradona converting the telling penalty kick. Lamar and his group were sitting near his old NASL comrade Clive Toye. “He was sitting a row behind me and to my right,” said Toye. “And in front of him was this well-known Argie character, seen at so many games, thumping away madly and loudly on this bloody great drum. Not quite the same as sitting in the best seats in the house.”
A day later, on July 4 in Stadio delle Alpi in Turin, the Hunts and McNutts watched the rematch of the ’66 final, with West Germany eliminating England on penalty kicks. Even the stultifying final between West Germany and Argentina, which featured another red card for the defending champs, and the Germans winning on a late penalty kick, offered a sense of gravity and occasion, as Lamar watched Franz Beckenbauer—who had captained the West Germans to the Cup in 1974 before coming to NASL to play for the Cosmos—now managing the world champions.
It was leaving the final on that day in Italy that Lamar articulated what almost every American in attendance had been thinking: “Can you believe, in four years, this is going to be in America?”
It was a month after Italy 1990 when Lamar finally surrendered to the inevitable, and shut down World Championship Tennis. The enterprise, so essential to the growth of the professional game in the late ’60s and early ’70s, had become marginalized early in the ’80s, and withered steadily through the rest of the decade. It was not so much a failure of marketing as it was a function of time.
“He fulfilled a crucial role,” said Mike Davies, “but then the players took over, and the role didn’t need to be filled any longer.”
The announcement came in August 1990, when Lamar and Al Hill, Jr., called a press conference after the Tournament of Champions at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills. There was no combativeness or resentment at the press conference, only Lamar and Al’s agreement that the time had come. “The decision to terminate operations was a business judgment based on the realities of the economics in sports marketing,” said Al, “as well as the difficult circumstances of an independent company operating a group of high-quality tennis tournaments on a financially viable basis.”
For weeks after the announcement, the letters poured in—from Cliff Drysdale and John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe and Rod Laver, Stan Smith and other pros—all expressing regret about Lamar’s departure from the tennis scene. Arthur Ashe offered a note of caution (“A friend of mine used to say that ‘Some people can’t stand prosperity.’ Pro tennis may come to that if it doesn’t watch out”). Frew McMillan congratulated Lamar on the WCT imprimatur that became the template for the modern tennis tournament (“Stylish, with grace and handsomely rewarding. They were the role models which successors have rarely equaled”). Stan Smith wrote that he “will always consider you and you[r] organization as the founders of our modern professional game.”
Perhaps it was the fact that after more than a decade of uncertainty, he was able to return to his passions. Maybe it was the optimism from the first season of the Peterson-Schottenheimer regime. For whatever reason, Lamar seemed less gutted about the demise of WCT than he had about the end of the Tornado and, later, the NASL.
For Adams and Wayne Henry and those in the inner circle, the measure was necessary to stop the financial bleeding. Although Al, Jr., recalled some modest profits, the perspective was less rosy from where Wayne Henry sat. “I don’t remember a profitable year,” said Henry. “I don’t want to dispute what Al said. But it was the prize money and the appearance fees and all the player contracts, that was why it never really made any money.”
The tennis world had turned its back on Lamar, but it wouldn’t take long for that to change. In 1993, he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, an honor that left him, in his words, “flattered, honored, and flabbergasted, if those words go together.”
•
For the NFL, 1993 was a watershed year. It brought about the long-awaited Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and its players, one that had been years in the making. “My father was so glad that period in the league’s history was over,” said Clark, “and he recognized how important the salary cap was in terms of competitive balance.”
At the end of the ’92 season, after a stifling 17–0 playoff loss to San Diego, the Chiefs were again wrestling with the same problem they’d faced since Len Dawson grew old: They were without a first-class quarterback and hadn’t been able to develop one through the draft. But the prospect of free agency and the salary cap meant that player movement would be accelerated, that football GMs would become more active, like their baseball counterparts.
In San Francisco, the 49ers had been harboring two all-pro caliber quarterbacks in Joe Montana, with four Super Bowl rings already to his credit, and the talented understudy Steve Young, who seemed more than ready to take over for the aging Montana. The advent of the salary cap meant that, even if they’d wanted to, the 49ers couldn’t keep both. And in the spring of 1993, Peterson called Lamar to tell him that the team might have a shot to trade for the already legendary Montana. The window of opportunity was dangerously small: Montana was already thirty-six, and he’d missed all of the 1992 season with an elbow injury. But reports were that he was healed, and the prospect of bringing Montana’s quarterbacking magic to Kansas City was irresistible.
The trade, when executed, prompted an unprecedented outpouring of anticipation and excitement in Kansas City. Montana was back on the cover of Sports Illustrated, next to the headline, “Kansas City, Here I Come,” and the team announced it would install the West Coast offense in 1993, to maximize Montana’s value.
It led to a season for the Chiefs that was unlike any that had ever preceded it. For the first time since the early 1970s, they were one of football’s marquee teams, among the national leaders in merchandise sales, prime-time TV appearances, training-camp visitors, and road-game attendance. The offseason trade for Montana and the free-agent signing of outcast Raiders star Marcus Allen further cemented their reputation as a potential Super Bowl team.
As the Chiefs were marching to their first division title in twenty-two seasons, Lamar made even more midweek trips to Kansas City, to work on ticket marketing campaigns and to finalize plans for the Chiefs’ pavilion, a gathering spot for banquets and other functions.
The week before Christmas, the Chiefs rallied after a sluggish performance against San Diego, pulling out a 28–24 win. The following Sunday, they sat Montana in a 30–10 loss to the Vikings, but they clinched the division title anyway.
On January 8, 1994, Arrowhead played host to just its second home playoff game, with Montana rallying the Chiefs late against the Pittsburgh Steelers, tying the game on a late drive that featured a fourth-down touchdown pass to Tim Barnett. Next, they traveled to Houston to face the Oilers, the hottest team in football with an eleven-game win streak. As Lamar sat in the Astrodome, next to Norma and Tom Richey, he watched Montana and Allen, and the Derrick Thomas–inspired defense rise up to sack Warren Moon nine times, forcing five fumbles, as the Chiefs rallied from a 10–0 deficit to win 28–20. The Chiefs had won three league titles in the AFL years, but since the merger they had yet to play for a conference championship, which since 1986 had carried Lamar’s name.
“We didn’t have to say anything that week,” said Marty Schottenheimer. “Everybody knew what we were playing for.”
Montana was at the apex of his rock-star status, and so the entire week before the game, Lamar and the team faced a media blitz unmatched by any game since Super Bowl IV. Kansas City was giddy. Never mind Red Friday; the city was bedecked in red throughout the week. Radio stations were playing the novelty song “The Schottenheimer Polka,” and Montana sightings were being reported on radio and TV.
When the game started, though, it was a reminder of how crucial home-field advantage could be. Buffalo gashed the Chiefs defensive line early, setting up Jim Kelly for an early touchdown pass to Andre Reed. In the last minute of the first half, the Chiefs trailed 20–6, but were driving for a score to narrow the margin to a touchdown. On second down and goal at the Bills’ 5, Montana found running back Kimble Anders free over the middle, and hit him in stride near the end zone. But the sure-handed Anders bobbled the ball, and it was intercepted by Buffalo’s Henry Jones.
Lamar had seen thousands of football games in his life, and he knew what the turn of events meant. But he put on a brave face at halftime, visited briefly with Ralph Wilson, and then went back to the second half. Three plays into the third quarter, Montana was knocked out of the game, sustaining a concussion, and the Chiefs—nearly a quarter-century since their last Super Bowl—were to be denied again, as Buffalo eased to a 30–13 win.
And just that quickly, the months of momentum and excitement and promise dissipated.
“Always in the locker room, win or lose, Mr. Hunt would come down and say something to each player,” said Kevin Ross. “But this time, I walked over to him, and I apologized, and gave him a hug. It was the only time I ever saw him cry.”
As the team boarded the plane for the flight back to Kansas City, somber and defeated, Marty and Pat Schottenheimer sat in their usual spot in the front of the team charter. Before the plane took off, Lamar reached out and touched Schottenheimer’s shoulder and said, “Don’t worry—we beat them worse at our place than they beat us at their place.”
“I didn’t know whether to punch Lamar in the face or kiss him on the mouth,” said Schottenheimer. “But I appreciated what he was trying to do.”
•
By the early 1990s, Jean Finn was working on thirty years as Lamar’s secretary, executive assistant, personal banker, chief of staff, and gatekeeper. “She did not let anybody speak directly to Lamar that wasn’t absolutely necessary,” said one Hunt staffer. “You had to go through Jean; even his children spoke to Jean. And she made the decision whether they could speak to him or not.” Norma would breeze straight through to the office, of course, and after returning to work for the company, Clark often strode right in. But almost everyone else went through Jean Finn.
In the midst of the broad range of responsibilities, she also continued doing the small jobs she’d begun for Lamar decades earlier. One of her duties was to keep track of how the original AFL franchises were doing since the merger. “If we are doing good, I tell somebody about it,” Lamar said. “If we aren’t, then I wait and let somebody ask me first.”
Like Norma and the children, and many of his closest advisers, Finn had grown protective of Lamar, and she was often suspicious of and standoffish to newcomers. But she’d learned not to lecture him. Many afternoons in the early ’90s, after putting in five to six hours of work, Lamar would emerge from a conference room with his weathered satchel, stop by Jean’s desk to pick up tickets and cash, and rush out to meet Norma and catch a plane. If he did that two or three times a week, it usually meant that it was spring, and the Bulls were in the playoffs.
One of the pleasures of the late 1980s that kept Lamar going through the endless court cases and meetings with the IRS was the rise of his basketball team. The Bulls, for which Lamar continued to be silent minority partner, had fallen on hard times by the mid-’80s. In a league in which it was much, much easier for a team to make the playoffs than in the NFL, the team went through a period of seven seasons where they qualified for the postseason just once.
Then, on June 19, 1984, they selected Michael Jordan of North Carolina with the third pick in the NBA draft, and the franchise’s fortunes were transformed. It didn’t come instantly, but with Jordan leading the league in scoring, Lamar started to travel to Chicago occasionally. By the time the Bulls reached the finals for the first time, against the Lakers in 1991, Lamar was out from under the bonds of the silver crisis. That year, when the Bulls won their first title, the spring was dominated with frequent trips to Chicago.
Carl Peterson remembered a game when Lamar invited him and his new wife, Lori, to see a game with him and Norma. They were joined by Daniel but had only four tickets together on courtside. Carl volunteered to take the odd ticket, but Lamar wouldn’t hear of it. He said he’d go up first and they could change at halftime. But of course he didn’t tell anyone else where his upper-deck seats were. And he didn’t come down at the half. “It became clear to me that he was just as happy up there in the nosebleed seats as he would have been at courtside,” said Peterson.
As the Bulls titles piled up in the early ’90s, even Bulls executive Steve Schanwald noticed that Lamar had never actually met Michael Jordan. There were opportunities to do so—quiet afternoon shootarounds, or jubilant locker rooms—but Lamar was always aware of streaks, and, after the second title in 1992, he grew superstitious and decided he didn’t want to wreck another streak.
“He absolutely would not do that,” said Norma. “The boys would think, ‘Oh, this is my chance’—if Dad would just go over there with me and say something like—totally unlike him—‘I was one of the original owners of the Chicago Bulls.’ But he wasn’t even about to do that. That was a true superstition with him. Because otherwise he would have loved meeting Michael Jordan, I know.”
When Schanwald offered again to make the introductions one evening, as the Bulls were chasing a third straight title, Lamar demurred. “I wouldn’t want to jinx him, or me,” he said, half-jokingly. But only half.
Though he no longer had tennis to occupy his time after August 1992, Lamar found another avenue for work. He had accepted the calling to be a full-time unpaid volunteer chair of the Dallas organizing host committee, along with Jim Graham.
Lamar had worked diligently on Kansas City’s behalf to be one of the host cities for the ’94 World Cup, but Kansas City was passed over in favor of other cities (the lack of direct international flights from Europe was a big problem), one of them being Dallas.
Graham had met Lamar in Italy in 1990, while he was working, as president of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Board, to represent the Dallas Bid Committee. After Dallas was named one of the nine cities to host World Cup games for ’94, Mayor Annette Strauss asked the two men to co-chair the committee. They were instantly faced with the timeless problem of all host committees: A whisper of a budget, the governing body FIFA trying to off-load as many expenses as possible on the city government, and—in this case—a city government that was mostly ignorant of, if not outright hostile to, the effort.
“Nobody at Dallas City Hall knew what it was,” said Graham.
The key point of the preparation was a 27-hour-long negotiation at Graham’s office, with Hunt and Graham representing the Dallas host committee; FIFA, trying to deflect as many expenses as possible; and the City of Dallas, intent on doing the same.
For a magazine profile highlighting the Dallas effort, Lamar said, “My interest in the game today is primarily as a volunteer, and as a parent,” citing Daniel’s games at St. Mark’s. But Lamar was too excited to be coy. When the reporter asked him how many games he’d see during the World Cup, he laughed and said, “If I told you how many games I’m going to, you’d think I was a lunatic!”
Bob McNutt, Bill’s son and one of the only people that Lamar allowed to call him “Mr. Hunt,” had made a suggestion before the ’94 World Cup. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he suggested, “if we found a way to get to all nine venues?”
Lamar was captivated with the idea, and he freed up time in his schedule. The World Cup in ’94 would again involve intricate planning. On the weekend of June 18–19, they met at 5:30 a.m. to fly from Love Field to Pontiac Airport in Detroit, where they caught a van to the Silverdome. It was the group stage game, with the USA facing Switzerland. The Silverdome was the only domed stadium used for the World Cup. Per FIFA rules, it meant that the stadium had to cover its artificial turf with trays of natural grass. When the Silverdome crew did so, they created a massive greenhouse effect and, on a summer day that was already hot, inside the non–air-conditioned stadium, the Hunt “traveling squad” of nine was subjected to the same sweltering conditions. Clark would remember the day feeling like “a moist oven.” Dan Hunt, eighteen years old, was concerned about Bill McNutt—smoking all the while—succumbing to the heat. After the game, Lamar speculated that it would be “another hundred years” before anyone of Swiss extraction came to the States again. Lamar’s group, wringing wet, got out of the dome and caught their charter from Detroit to Teterboro airport in New York, and arrived by van in the first half of the Italy–Ireland match at a teeming Meadowlands, then flew on to Washington, D.C. for a late dinner at the Prime Rib, before catching games at RFK Stadium the next two days.
One stop in ’94 was in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where the Patriots’ new owner, Robert Kraft, was also a soccer fan. As a member of the NFL’s finance committee, Lamar had interviewed Kraft when he was applying to buy the Patriots earlier that year. Since then, the two had developed a friendship. At one of their first meetings, Lamar had congratulated Kraft on “the greatest logo in all of sports,” the lobster with an extended claw holding a tennis racket that was the emblem for the Boston Lobsters, of the 1970s era World Team Tennis.
Kraft had noticed Lamar’s quiet authority at NFL meetings, but at the World Cup he first had a sense of his relationship with fans.
“We had the old Foxboro stadium,” Kraft said. “And we had 5,000 chair seats, with backs, and the rest was like a high school stadium, just metal benches. So we saved him seats, and he came to my office, and we had all the fancy folks from FIFA and everything. And we said, ‘We’ve got these seats for you,’ but no, he wanted to sit in the end zone with the real fans, which were the traveling foreigners.”
This would be noted over and over by the soccer community. Everyone else on the World Cup Steering Committee wanted Category 1 seats, the premium midfield boxes. Though Lamar ordered Category 1 on a few special occasions, he was more than happy with Category 2 and Category 3 seats. Lamar’s frugality certainly factored into the equation, but there was also his attraction to the supporters’ culture at international soccer matches, which was somewhat muted among the dignitaries and other VIPs in the Category 1 seats.
Back in Dallas, on July 9, Lamar eagerly awoke on the morning of the last match of the tournament to be played in Dallas. After breakfast, he and the family drove to Fair Park for a pre-game function under a mammoth tent at Fair Park. Then it was the short walk over to the stadium. Fifty-five years after he’d watched his first Cotton Bowl football game; forty-two years since he’d sat on the bench, and played sparingly, for SMU; thirty-four years since he’d walked on to the field as the owner of the Dallas Texans of the new American Football League; and twenty-four years after he’d watched his Kansas City Chiefs take the field against the Dallas Cowboys as the world champions of professional football, Lamar climbed the bleachers at the refurbished Cotton Bowl to watch Brazil face Holland in the quarterfinal of the World Cup.
The House That Doak Built had been transformed, with more than 10,000 Brazilian fans chanting and singing, and nearly as many Dutch followers, dressed in their trademark orange, swaying in the midday sun.
Lamar remarked to McNutt that both teams were wearing their “change strips”—Brazil in its rarely seen blue jerseys and white shorts, the Netherlands wearing orange shorts and white tops in the Texas heat. After a scoreless first half dotted with real scoring opportunities, the game caught fire in the second half, with Bebeto sending a sharp cross that Romário volleyed into the net just a few minutes after the break, followed 10 minutes later by Bebeto breaking clear, sidestepping the charging Dutch goalkeeper to slot home the second goal that seemed to kill the game. But less than 2 minutes later, Dennis Bergkamp grabbed one back for the Dutch. Then, in the 76th minute, with Holland still calling for a handball, they equalized on a swerving corner headed in by Aron Winter. There in Dallas, where the Tornado had vanquished because of public indifference, the Cotton Bowl was pure bedlam, and fans were watching the best match of the ’94 Cup. Branco’s free kick in the 81st minute, darting around the wall and just inside the far post, put Brazil back up on top and sent the crowd back over the top. Afterward, lingering, still listening to the incessant din of the Brazil fans, watching the distraught Dutch supporters exiting slowly, Lamar was giddy with the moment, telling Richey it had been one of the greatest games—of any sport—to be played at the Cotton Bowl.
Ten days later, he and the family were at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, for a final being seen by half a billion people around the world. Afterward, Lamar and Norma and the family sat in the stands, reveling in Brazil’s win in penalty kicks. It was the completion of a remarkable month of soccer, with every ticket to every game having been sold. And now in a suburb of Los Angeles, the same city where in 1968 he’d staged an exhibition soccer match viewed by 1,200 people, Lamar was one of 104,000 to watch his second-favorite national side, Brazil, win their fourth World Cup.
As the Brazilian captain Dunga held the trophy aloft, Lamar snapped pictures. He could be seen, on the cover of the next week’s issue of Sports Illustrated, on the far right of the frame in a blue dress shirt, with a camera over his face, shooting the same scene from behind as photographer Simon Bruty was shooting from in front.
•
It had already been a good football season, even before it started. After Lamar spent nearly a quarter-century pushing for it, the NFL finally instituted the two-point conversion rule, giving teams the option of running or passing for two points on the conversion after touchdown, instead of just kicking for one. Lamar had pushed for it during the merger committee meetings in the late 1960s but couldn’t convince his NFL counterparts to try it. Now, in 1994, the competition committee voted it in. Lamar was roundly congratulated by the other owners after the announcement.
That fall, Lamar reveled further in the Chiefs’ home-field advantage and relished the aesthetic change that he’d become convinced Arrowhead needed: the move to a natural grass field. The last remnants of the antiseptic Arrowhead were washed away with the carpet (but not before individual pieces of the Arrowhead turf were cut up to be sold as souvenirs). With the tailgating outside, the smart, engaged crowd inside, playing outdoors and on natural grass, the stadium had finally become, in the words of one writer, “the perfect place to watch a football game.”
Lamar thrilled to Joe Montana’s final season as a Chief, including a 24–17 win over his old team the 49ers early in the season, and a stirring Monday night duel in Denver, when he bested the late-game heroics of John Elway with a late drive of his own, and the go-ahead score with 7 seconds left. At the end of the year, the Chiefs once again fell short. They had been to the playoffs for five consecutive years, but they could not quite get over the hump.
Financially, the picture had drastically changed. In 1992, after the team sold out its games for the entire season in the preseason, the NFL’s rich new TV contract came into play, and the team’s local and regional marketing began to bear fruit, Lamar sat down for the annual meeting, in which the Chiefs would report record profits in the history of the division.
“I thought it was going to be this huge deal,” said Tim Connolly. “We’d made more money in one year than the franchise had in 17 years combined. But Lamar didn’t celebrate, and he didn’t gloat—he just smiled and said, ‘Okay,’ and we moved on to the next thing. It’s when I realized, finally, it wasn’t about the money.”
“It wasn’t just that it wasn’t a big deal,” said Peterson. “It was that Jack Steadman was in the room, and Lamar didn’t want to look like he was celebrating at Jack’s expense.”
Not merely financially but also artistically and spiritually, there was every sign indicating that Lamar was back. His Chiefs were succeeding, his twenty-five-year investment into the Bulls was starting to yield dividends both competitively and financially, he was out from under the onerous weight of the lawsuits of the previous decade, as well as the long run of losses from soccer and tennis investments. He was a healthy, engaged, spirited sixty-two-year-old man, and he’d already accomplished more than he could have dreamed of. After the chaos of the ’80s, it seemed entirely understandable that he enjoy the relatively calm prosperity of the ’90s.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Because, in the end, he had one piece of unfinished business, and he had been quietly steeling himself for one more grand challenge.