In the hallways of Unity Hunt, the subject was strictly avoided, though for much of the early to mid-’90s, the air was pregnant with it. Lamar’s wife, his children, his closest friends, and financial advisers all chose not to talk about it, though each was aware of the prospect, and most viewed it with trepidation, if not outright dread.
Yet the people who knew Lamar best also knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to go away.
The central promise that the United States Soccer Federation made to FIFA to get the World Cup to the United States for 1994 was that it would, after a decade without a major, first-division club soccer league, rebuild one to start sometime around 1994. In the rush to build the infrastructure to host the World Cup in ’94, the USSF’s vow to start a new league wasn’t forgotten, but it became a lower-priority item.
Mark Abbott, one of the other lawyers at United States Soccer Federation President Alan Rothenberg’s firm in Los Angeles, volunteered to put together a business plan for the new league. Abbott had been a soccer lifer, who’d played the sport in youth leagues growing up in Bloomington, Minnesota, and been a ball boy for the Minnesota Kicks of the NASL. The key to Abbott’s proposal was its vision of the league structure as a single entity. Individual owners would operate the teams, but the contracts that players signed would be with the league, and so the league’s salary cap would be mandated by the league.
On November 14, 1993, while Lamar was in Los Angeles for the Chiefs–Raiders game, he met with Rothenberg to discuss the upcoming World Cup, and Rothenberg left him with a copy of the confidential document, “Major League Soccer, L.P., Business Plan and Confidential Memorandum,” circulating to a few prospective investors.
Just over two weeks later, the day after the Chiefs beat Buffalo to move their record to a division-leading 8–3, Lamar was back in his office in Dallas, completing his detailed review of the prospectus, which he returned.
“Typical of Lamar,” said Rothenberg, “he didn’t just give it a cursory reading. He made an exacting review, with all these notes, and Post-its. It was amazing.” The five-page letter included thirty-five references to Post-it flagged notes inside the proposal, as well as Lamar’s conclusions.
In the main, Lamar gave the sort of fine-grained examination that was the product of thirty-five years of pro sports experience, commenting on the proposed schedule:
The number of regular season games needs to be an even number. It is impossible to have an equitable schedule with an odd number (27 would mean 14 at home and 13 away—or vice versa—which would not be equitable)
Lamar also weighed in on the proposed salaries that were projected to average $70,000 (“I really believe the compensation for a 5-month soccer season should logically be considerably less than this because they can’t produce the revenue to justify these types of salaries”). He stressed the value of the U.S. National Team, and the prospect of annual series with the Mexican and Canadian national teams; he also spoke of the appeal of the Canadian market, suggesting the desirability of at least a couple of Canadian franchises.
One of the tenets of Abbott’s plan was the value of stadiums built expressly for soccer. While Lamar was in favor of this idea, he took issue with the prohibitive cost estimates, both in terms of specific expense (“two service tunnels 400 feet apart connecting to the field—not necessary”) and aesthetics:
. . . as designed—field could be overly wide—looks like the first row is 40 feet outside the soccer touch line, which if I calculate correctly, means the first row would be 73 feet from the football sideline. I appreciate that the design is primarily for soccer, but I can’t envision why 40 feet would be needed for row one to the touch line and this will definitely make the stadium less useful for other events.
Lamar passed a copy of the prospectus and his comments to Clark before returning the material to Abbott, and Clark was struck by the unifying principle that animated Lamar—the search for competitive balance. “Twice there were references to equality of play,” Clark said. “He talks about ‘building a system that gives all teams a chance to be successful,’ which is clearly something he believed in, that ties into revenue sharing in the NFL, ties to a cap in the NFL, which you were getting about this time. Plenty of people may have been of the mindset that we’re better to have a system like the English Premier League or Major League Baseball, or the NASL, where you had the Cosmos. My father was always of the opinion that you have a much stronger league if you’ve got an equal chance to win.”
Lamar was clearly intrigued. “Please don’t take any of these comments negatively,” he wrote to Abbott in conclusion. “My soccer experience is so influenced by the nightmare of the NASL of overpaying foreign players who were no real help in developing young American players—that I can’t see repeating that mistake.” And then, in the end, he emphasized his central point once more: “It’s a game, and the attractiveness of the league will be based on the evenness of competition.”
Through it all, and even after the meeting in Los Angeles later in the fall in which he sat down with Rothenberg, Lamar’s professed position was one of a fan, not a potential investor. “He wasn’t outwardly talking about getting involved,” said Clark. “This was just helping Alan get this thing together, because it was part of what was required for the ’94 World Cup is that we bring back Division I soccer, the deal with FIFA. He was just assisting that.”
It wasn’t lost on anyone in his inner circle that the sixty-two-year-old patriarch, working for two years as an unpaid volunteer coordinator of the Dallas Host Committee effort, was having a terrific time. Those closest to him noticed both his absorption into soccer and his punishing schedule. Like a lot of executives nearing retirement age, Lamar felt a sense of urgency to increase his output, to get more done while he had the time.
By late 1993, when the new executive assistant Susie Stephens was hired to help the ailing Jean Finn with Lamar’s workload of correspondence, Lamar had three different offices on the nineteenth floor stacked with papers. “At one time, on a daily basis, he would exercise and walk and that sort of thing,” said Stephens. “But it seems like, as he got older, all he did was work. It was like he didn’t want to take any time at all away from his work time.”
“He stopped doing the yearly assessments at the Cooper Clinic,” said Lamar, Jr. “He used to love that—it was the greatest thing in the world; he’d train to get in shape for the physical. When soccer started up again, though, all that changed. And then it turns into pursuing the MLS, and he got completely off regular exercise.”
All that would seem significant later. For the time being, in the mid-1990s, Lamar’s friends and associates merely marveled at his otherworldly reserves of energy.
•
As he mulled a return to soccer in the summer of ’95, Lamar made his annual trip to River Falls, Wisconsin, where the Chiefs had based their training camp since 1991. Just as he had in the ’60s at William Jewell, Lamar came to River Falls and stayed in the dorm for a few nights, watching practice, pointedly not interrupting the coaches, and taking notes, ranging from the entirely personal (he would keep his own running list of which players he thought would make the team and which would be cut) to the practical, like sending memos to his staff, with ideas about better ways to reach the growing throng of Chiefs fans who would show up in Wisconsin to watch their team.
He would “scout” his team like any other fan, talking up to his friends (but never the coaching staff) the merits of some rookie or free agent. With Joe Montana retiring after the ’94 season, expectations were low heading into ’95. Peterson had signed another 49er quarterback, the little-known Steve Bono, to replace Montana. Conventional wisdom had the Chiefs, absent Montana, falling to last place in the AFC West. But six years into Schottenheimer’s regime, he and Peterson had built a franchise that was bigger than any one player. From the first month of the season, the team’s chemistry felt special. After going on the road to beat Seattle in their opener, the Chiefs battled the New York Giants, with Bono leading a late rally after an ineffective game and the Chiefs winning in overtime. A week later, against the arch-rival Raiders, James Hasty, the newly signed free agent, picked off a pass in overtime and returned it for a touchdown, sparking a massive, celebratory dogpile in the west end zone.
By the sixth game of the season, a Monday Nighter against San Diego, when the Chiefs won their third home overtime game of the season—Tamarick Vanover taking a punt 86 yards to the same end zone where Hasty had finished off the Giants—Arrowhead was becoming known as “the loudest outdoor stadium in football” and the site of an inimitable gameday experience.
On that Monday night, walking out of Arrowhead with Norma, Lamar was stopped by an ebullient, red-bedecked Chiefs fan, who pressed a five-dollar bill into his hand and told him, “Mr. Hunt, you are not charging enough for the entertainment you’re providing! I want to give you some more money.” At first, Lamar cheerfully demurred, but the fan insisted, and Lamar finally relented. He was delighted by the gesture, and flashed the bill with the story to friends and family over the next week.
The Chiefs had the best defense in the AFC; they had a 13–3 record, and to open the playoffs, they drew the lightly regarded Indianapolis Colts, who’d qualified on the last week of the season, with a 9–7 record.
But game day dawned a bitter 11 degrees, with a wind-chill of minus 9. Bono, who had played so well during the season, was horribly ineffective, going 11-for-25 and throwing three interceptions. The Colts took a 10–7 lead in the third quarter, and kicker Lin Elliott missed his second field goal of the day to begin the fourth. With the defense playing heroically, the Chiefs got the ball back, but after Bono’s third interception of the day, Schottenheimer sent in backup Rich Gannon who marched the Chiefs down the field, only to have Elliott’s third field goal attempt of the day—from 42 yards out—miss.
After a season of promise, the frigid crowd and Lamar went home deflated.
“It was horrible,” said Tom Richey. “So quiet up in that suite. Lamar was always very good in those situations—he’d go down and console the players. But you saw how much it got to him later.”
Later in the evening, sitting in Peterson’s office, Lamar would ask the same question: “Is there anything I can do to help?” Peterson did what he’d been in the habit of doing since his days in Philadelphia: He ordered every member of the coaching staff out of the office for a week, to get some distance and perspective on the season.
Lamar would do the same and then, invariably, return to Kansas City in late January or February, curious but never prying, eager to sit in and hear the talk on the team’s draft plans.
•
Throughout the mid-’90s, as the Chiefs’ fortunes began to rise and the value of the franchise continued to increase, Lamar worked with Jack Steadman and the rest of his business team at figuring out how to best set up a succession plan. He’d seen other NFL families that had to give up their franchise, which were now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, after the passing of their patriarch.
The succession plan, devised by Steadman and Lamar’s lawyer, Jim Seig-freid, called for each of his four children to eventually own 24.5 percent of the team, for Norma to have 1 percent and for Lamar to retain 1 percent. The neat mathematical equation meant that the gift taxes that each child would face—while still severe—would allow them to move forward, knowing the club would remain in the family.
It also, in a way, provided the financial stability that emboldened Lamar to undertake one final grand gamble, which began in earnest in 1995.
“It really wasn’t until after the World Cup,” said Clark Hunt, “which was so successful, that I think caused another lightbulb to go off in my dad’s head to say, ‘Hey, I think it might be time to give it another go.’”
Lamar had passed along the start-up prospectus to Clark, who since returning from his time at Goldman Sachs had become his most trusted adviser. But in this instance, he was undeniably on his own. In the conference room on the nineteenth floor of the Thanksgiving Tower, where he took his papers and files so he could spread out, he summoned Clark and broached the subject. “I remember sitting there with him,” said Clark. “Instead of talking about this from a theoretical standpoint, he started talking about it as something that maybe we should think about getting involved with.” Clark, Norma, and even the youngest, soccer-loving Daniel, were all reticent, none more so than Clark.
Clark had grown up playing the sport and loving it; soccer was in his DNA in the same way that his father grew up unabashedly in love with football. But like so many other members of his family and associates, Clark had “grave reservations” about the venture. His father had been keeping a break-neck schedule, was still working his way out of the calamitous losses of the ’80s.
“Having recognized what a bad financial ordeal the NASL had been for him,” Clark said, “and after a bad financial decade for him, he was back in good shape financially.”
Among his other closest business associates—Jack Steadman and Carl Peterson in Kansas City, Bill Adams and Wayne Henry in Dallas—there was a unanimity against getting back into soccer.
But it was also clear, to everyone from Clark and Norma to his new secretary, Susie Stephens, that the prospect of returning to soccer was energizing to Lamar.
“He was really pumped,” said Wayne Henry. “It was something he really wanted. When Lamar made up his mind about something, it was very difficult to get him to think differently. There were times when we made decisions to do things when he was the only one at the table comfortable with doing the thing under consideration.”
Peterson disliked the prospect of having another tenant share Arrowhead, crowding the schedule, disrupting the unique daily flow of a football team’s schedule. But he also realized his boss was an unabashed lover of the beautiful game.
“I can remember Carl being very . . . thoughtful . . . in his discussion with my father about it, because I think he could tell that my dad was set on doing it,” said Clark. “And Jack was seeing it through a different lens, which is we’ve just spent ten years putting the struggles of the North American Soccer League and World Championship Tennis, the silver crisis, behind us. Do you really want to do this again, financially?”
In the fall of 1994, Lamar called a meeting of Hunt Sports to outline what he was considering. “I can remember going into a meeting, sitting down, and all of us—all of us—pleading don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this,” said Lamar, Jr. “You know, he would listen, he wouldn’t fight back much, he wouldn’t participate in the heat of the exchange. And then he’d go do what he wanted to do. And that was kind of how he was.”
Lamar responded the way he usually did when confronted with united opposition to a decision that he felt was right. He smiled, he told his friends and employees that he appreciated their opinion, but he remained resolute, and announced that the project would move forward. Concluding the discussion that day, Lamar said, “I think we agree that the time is right to go ahead.”
Norma had loved the game for decades but fairly dreaded seeing her husband returning to the business. When he told her he’d decided on it, she merely sighed, smiled wanly, and asked, “Haven’t we done this before?”
It would took more than a year of negotiation, but Lamar finally signed on as an “investor-operator” for the 1996 launch of Major League Soccer, joined by Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the Denver mogul Philip Anschutz, among others.
“The biggest issue we tackled was getting the costs to what we felt were sustainable for a start-up league,” said Clark. “Of course, soccer-specific stadiums got junked at this point because there wasn’t enough money in the budget to tackle that. The other thing we were struggling with was getting enough franchises.”
The consensus was that the league should begin with ten teams, but without enough owners to sign on, three of the MLS franchises were designated “league-run” franchises. To make it work, Lamar took on two franchises—one in Kansas City, where the team would play at Arrowhead, and another in Columbus, Ohio, in which the city’s mayor, Gregory Lashutka, guaranteed 10,000 season tickets for an MLS team.
Around the offices of Unity Hunt, the joke was “Lamar has solved his estate-planning issues.”
As Abbott had envisioned, the league purchased and managed all player contracts, but licensed teams would invest $5 million to be “investor-operators.”
The only things as unwieldy as that euphemism were the team names themselves, rolled out in October 1995. On the rising tide of legitimate soccer fandom in the United States, the league chose to emphasize nicknames that sounded canned, stilted, and self-consciously edgy, as though MTV were starting a sports league.
The names and logos had been conceived by apparel manufacturers Nike and Adidas, who had contracted to supply the league’s uniforms. The San Jose team was named the Clash; the Tampa Bay club was called the Fusion. Dallas was the Burn. The Columbus franchise run by Lamar would be called the Columbus Crew, with a marketing campaign that was a natural (“the hardest working team in American sports”). But Kansas City, Lamar’s second home, a city keenly self-conscious of living down its past, a city that stridently wanted to distance itself from all vestiges of its no-longer-apt reputation as a cowtown . . . Kansas City’s new soccer team was given the nickname of “Wiz.”
The response was swift and severe. A research study conducted for the franchise by the Kansas City media research firm VML, held in January of 1996, included several dire points about the initial response to the name. In the survey, 54 percent of respondents had a negative response to the team’s name. When listing conclusions, the marketing firm noted “WIZ name is a marketing disadvantage (team nicknames should at least reach indifference in a name; high percentage of [market] holds strong dislike for name”).
The Wiz name had been the brainchild of the marketing arm of Adidas, but Lamar went along reluctantly. “I think Lamar’s love of musical theater got him in trouble there,” said Norma. “I think he saw My Fair Lady on Broadway five times.” It proved to be a concession the entire family would come to regret. “It was just an all-around bad idea to let the apparel companies name the franchise,” said Clark.
Very early in the first season, the team’s lawyers were contacted by the New York organization “Everybody Loves the Wiz,” an electronics firm. The name was a titanic negative but also indicative of Lamar’s naïvete. When a reporter asked him years later if he had been aware, when the name was unveiled, that “wiz” was slang for urination, Lamar sheepishly admitted that he had not been.
Lamar and the family were in San Jose for the first game in league history, on April 6, 1996, in front of a sellout crowd of 32,000 at Spartan Stadium. A week later, at Arrowhead, the Kansas City Wiz debuted, with multi-colored uniforms including blue shoulders and sleeves, a gold stripe, three thick red strips per the Adidas logo, and a smaller blue and green stripe. The team’s star was Preki, who had been a star for the Tacoma Stars and St. Louis Storm in the Major Indoor Soccer League of the ’80s. The original plan treated the Wiz as a new company, which contracted with Arrowhead and the Chiefs to use their facilities.
The first season, fresh off the success of the ’94 World Cup, had been positive. “I remember we were all very excited about the attendance levels, because so many of the franchises came out of the gates very strong, and the attendance was really above what we projected,” said Clark Hunt. “And the financial results were either in line or perhaps better than what we’d projected. So there was a little bit of feeling of euphoria. Still a loss, because of all the start-up costs. But the attendance numbers were really encouraging. They didn’t last, but they were encouraging.”
The team—the nickname had mercifully been changed from “Wiz” to “Wizards” after the first season—practiced on the same fields where the Chiefs once practiced, behind the old Chiefs’ offices in Swope Park, with coach Ron Newman (returning to the fold after coaching Lamar’s Dallas Tornado twenty years earlier) occasionally being allowed to bring his team to Arrowhead for game practice, though both Peterson and Schottenheimer, while mostly cordial to the soccer interlopers, were fiercely protective of the venue.
Arrowhead was, even then, some twenty-five years after its opening, among the most beautiful stadiums in all the world, and when packed to the last row of the upper deck for a Chiefs game, the atmosphere could be mesmerizing. But for soccer, with the top level cordoned off, and only 15,000–20,000 fans in the lower bowl, the stadium lacked both intimacy and atmosphere. And once again, Lamar found himself trying to explain away his inability to replicate the unique culture of soccer in a stadium ill-suited for those purposes. The lower bowl seated about 33,000, and with often less than half of that section filled, the effect was baleful. “It felt empty,” said Clark Hunt.
As in Dallas in the ’70s, there had been a small contingent of soccer true believers who began following the team, at both home and away games, forming a spirited supporters group. But not enough. The numbers went down in 1997 and were even worse in 1998. “We ultimately made the mistake of having the league-run franchises,” said Clark. “First of all, the league appointed very capable executives to run each franchise, but it was not the same thing as having a dedicated owner with a personal stake in the team working 20 hours a day to try and make the franchise work. Secondly, it was a huge financial drain. Every franchise was losing money, and then you had to add up the additional losses of the league-run clubs and divide it among the remaining owners.”
The Wizards had an additional problem. They did not feel particularly welcome at Arrowhead. Peterson, focused on the Chiefs being a competitive, commercial, and artistic success, was not eager to have another tenant inside Arrowhead, or soccer markings on the football field, or another team practicing on it. John Wagner, heading the Hunts’ soccer efforts in Dallas, noticed that there seemed to be no special relationship between the Chiefs and Wizards. “Wasn’t it amazing that we couldn’t get anything done?” said Wagner. “It was like they were dealing with a completely unrelated company.” Even outside of Arrowhead, the tension was becoming apparent. “It was clear that Carl didn’t care about [soccer] at all,” said MLS commissioner Doug Logan.
By 1998, the Wizards’ ticket base was dropping, and the team was dealing with diminishing returns. A preseason mailing of 21,000 pieces netted a grand total of thirty-eight adult and seventeen youth ticket orders, resulting in a loss of $8,000. In the halls and cubicles of Arrowhead, where many of the team’s administrators were stationed, staffers wondered how long it could go on.
After the disappointment of ending the 1996 season with a three-game losing streak that knocked them out of the playoffs for the first time in six seasons, the Chiefs bounced back in 1997, adding wide receiver Andre Rison to the team, in one of the club’s richest free-agent signings in history, and replacing Bono with yet another former 49er, the gangly Michigan quarterback Elvis Grbac. The result was perhaps Schottenheimer’s best team, which scored more points and allowed even fewer than the ’95 squad.
The season was marked by a wire-to-wire race with the Denver Broncos, and Schottenheimer’s nemesis, John Elway. In the regular season, Kansas City won a crucial game at home, with Pete Stoyanovich connecting on a 52-yard field goal as time expired, lifting the Chiefs to a 24–22 win and into a tie for first place in the AFC West.
But in the Chiefs opening playoff game, with the two best teams in the AFC playing again at Arrowhead, Elway got the measure of Schottenheimer once more, prevailing 14–10. In the locker room, there was the anguished stillness that greets the end of any promising football season, of strong men weighing the yield of six months of intense, daily effort and sacrifice. But deeper in the bowels of Arrowhead, in the coaches’ offices, there was a scene that Lamar would later describe as one of “profound sadness.” Wives weeping, coaches looking distraught and shocked, unwilling to accept that a season’s work was over. And, in the center of it all, Marty Schottenheimer, absolutely devastated.
Walking into that, weighing the anguish his coach felt, Lamar knew that Marty was feeling all the worse for what he had failed to provide.
On the Hunt plane home that night, there was an almost stifling quiet. “Lamar wasn’t a bad loser,” said his friend Tom Richey. “But he was a hard loser.” On that trip, the family and friends sat quietly in their seats, while Lamar, crushed and alone, stared out the window into the darkness.
It was the second time in three years the Chiefs had lost a home playoff game. They had been to the playoffs seven of eight years in the decade, and they’d come up short again. At the press conference, Schottenheimer had looked beseechingly out at the Kansas City media and asked, “Guys, what am I doing wrong?”
“What made it so hard,” said one longtime Chiefs employee, “is that Marty and Carl and everyone, really, wanted so bad to win one for Lamar. And you knew Lamar appreciated that, but he just wanted them to win one for themselves. He felt so bad for Marty.”
•
While Kansas City had been a logical place for Lamar to launch his venture into soccer, Columbus, Ohio, was entirely different—a city in which he had no history, whose stadium problem was even worse than Kansas City’s. While the Wizards were playing in front of 60,000–70,000 empty seats at Arrowhead, they were at least keeping their rent in the family. The Crew played their games at the fabled, and enormous, Ohio Stadium, the 93,000-seat stadium on the campus of Ohio State University, known as the Horseshoe. In addition to the vast seas of empty seats, the quality of play suffered, as the field was just 59 yards wide, a full 11 yards shy of world standards.
In 1997, Ohio State announced that it would begin extensive renovations on Ohio Stadium in 1999. After the 1998 season, the Crew would have to leave the stadium for at least two years. Thus began a race against time, as Lamar searched for a way to find a new home for the Crew, so he wouldn’t have to move the team out of Columbus, either temporarily (while Ohio Stadium was being refurbished) or permanently.
On May 6, 1997, the voters of Columbus rejected Issue One, which would have built a downtown sports complex, including a hockey arena designed to bring an NHL expansion team to Columbus, and a soccer stadium for the Crew. Lamar was the most prominent among a group of investors in the former effort, though the defeat of Issue One seemed to abort the city’s hockey prospects altogether, and left Lamar still desperately seeking a permanent soccer facility.
“We didn’t really have a Plan B,” Lamar said. Moving quickly into action, Lamar and general manager Jamey Rootes began casting about for a community that would help build a stadium. That lead them to the nearby city of Dublin, Ohio, located just north of the stadium. A financing plan was proffered, and the Crew started making plans. But typical of the naïvete that occasionally plagued Lamar, he thought the agreement was done. In fact, it had to be put on the ballot in a referendum. In February of 1998, Lamar flew in for one final push. On the evening of February 10, Lamar and Rootes were up in Dublin when the returns from the voter referendum came in—the voters had narrowly rejected the proposal.
Rootes was driving Lamar back to his hotel in downtown Columbus. The car was mostly quiet as they drove back, and they decided to stop at a McDonald’s, as they hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. Throughout the silent drive, Rootes was contemplating whether it was more likely that his boss would try to move the franchise, or give up and fold it altogether.
They walked into the McDonald’s and, after placing their order, Rootes went to get condiments. As he sat down, he looked around for Lamar. He finally saw him over by a wall, looking intently at a large map of Columbus.
He walked over and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m just trying to figure out,” said Lamar calmly, “where else we can build this soccer stadium.”
Providentially, just a few days later, an opportunity arose, with land from the Ohio State Fairgrounds offered at no charge. The Ohio State Fairgrounds was, in retrospect, an ideal site. “I feel kind of dumb we didn’t find it earlier,” said Lamar, “because I think it’s the best of all sites.”
The parking lot and access roads were already in place. The land could be had for free. But there was one large catch: There would be no funding support for the stadium itself.
At that point, Lamar told Clark, “I’m going to make the financial commitment and get it done. I have to do this for the Crew to succeed.”
That meant Lamar was going to commit to pay the entire cost of the building effort, something in the neighborhood of $25 million. (It would eventually be $30 million.) It would be the first soccer-specific stadium of its kind in American history. And the only question, in the minds of many, is whether the league would still be around when it opened.
“He had the deal cut at this point with the Ohio Exposition Center,” said Clark. “And he wasn’t worried about the timing, which in retrospect, he should have much more worried about, though that came a little bit later, once we got into the design phase.”
And Clark’s reaction to his father going even further out on the MLS limb?
“I was concerned,” he said. “I’ll phrase it that way. I was concerned. But he was determined to get the stadium built. He had the vision to recognize that soccer-specific stadiums would be the linchpin for the long-term success of the league.”
It wasn’t as though Lamar was exclusively interested in soccer during this period, though it often seemed that way. In fact, he continued casting about for other sports interests, but none of the other efforts came to fruition. There was a modest bid for the Kansas City Royals in 1998 that was turned down by the team’s board of directors, who’d set a $75 million asking price. Lamar’s bid, in partnership with the utility Western Resources, was for $25 million up front, and another $27 million, contingent on improvements to Kauffman Stadium. The board rejected the bid and, two years later, longtime Wal-Mart CEO David Glass (a member of the board himself) bought the team for $96 million.
Over the same period, the effort to bring an NHL franchise to Columbus wound up in the courts. After Issue One failed in 1997, John H. McConnell, head of the steel company Worthington Industries and part of the investor group that included Lamar, cut a side deal for an NHL expansion team that left Lamar out of the equation entirely. Lawsuits and countersuits ensued, leading to little more than more legal fees for Lamar. “He wasn’t pleased about the hockey situation,” said one longtime aide. “But he also didn’t obsess about it the way he did with football and soccer.”
The spring and summer of 1998 marked another absurdly busy period for Lamar. He was flying to games in both Kansas City and Columbus, and was back in Kansas City for the ’98 NFL Draft. On June 9, before leaving for the World Cup, Lamar signed a twenty-five-year lease for the Crew at the Ohio Exposition Center, for a stadium that he still needed to build.
The summer of 1998 marked the third year of existence for MLS, and the first time the league would have to deal with a World Cup season. It was a desultory showing for the American team—which was eliminated in the group phase, without so much as a draw—but a festive time for Lamar and Norma, who made it to all ten venues and stayed in their all-time favorite hotel, the Hotel du Cap d’Antibes in the south of France.
On July 7 at Marseille, they saw the rematch of the ’94 classic between the Netherlands and Brazil, with Brazil advancing on penalty kicks. They were in Paris for the emotional final, with the French hoisting their first World Cup, outplaying Brazil. Lamar was too good a sport to feel too bad about his team losing, and, after the match, he and Norma and the family strolled down the Champs-Élysées, with a million jubilant French.
Lamar was sixty-six years old, absurdly active, traveling more than a hundred thousand miles a year by air. His life was, even for a calm, positive man who was fit and active, unusually stressful.
After the end of the World Cup, Lamar and Norma stayed over a few extra days in Paris. One day, after a lengthy lunch at another Michelin-rated restaurant, they went on yet another antique shopping foray. That day, walking on a Paris street, he became suddenly, violently ill. After pausing to regain his bearings, he rushed back to the hotel with Norma, both sensing it meant trouble. She demanded he see his doctor at once when they returned to Dallas, and Lamar consented to do so.
The news, once they returned to the States, was not good. The initial diagnosis, confirmed after a biopsy, was that Lamar was suffering from an advanced case of prostate cancer and had perhaps as little as two months to live. Lamar and Norma left the doctor’s office and drove home. Both were shocked, but she was initially livid at the coldly pessimistic forecast.
“The first diagnosis was so negative,” said Norma. “I just thought, you have to give him some kind of hope.”
Within days, and after dozens of phone calls, Lamar was in Houston, at the office of Dr. Christopher Logothetis, prostate cancer research chief at M.D. Anderson in Houston. In this instance, Lamar hit it off with the Greek-American Logothetis, the men’s natural optimism feeding off each other. After another battery of tests, Logothetis was much more positive, telling Lamar, “If you do what I ask, we can get you twenty years.”
It was exactly what Lamar needed to hear. He now discreetly passed on the news to his children, adding the rosiest possible prognosis. And then he did what anyone who knew him by then could have predicted. He continued working, told no one, and moved on with it. He had a stadium to build. At the end of the year, he took a two-week vacation in the Caribbean, taking a break to return for the Cotton Bowl.
“He didn’t change much at all,” said Sharron. “Still ate hamburgers at lunch. Still kept his schedule, still traveling.”
The news finally came out in January, before the annual trip to the Super Bowl, where Lamar’s appearance would have prompted the talk anyway.
Shortly before then, he told a few of his employees about the prognosis. In Columbus, he walked into general manager Jamey Rootes’s office to give him the news and, in the next breath, assure him it was nothing at all to worry about.
“It was kind of a contrast,” said Rootes. “So, you get this news and then—nothing noticeable changes.”
He’d take his chemotherapy treatments, wearing down deeper into each cycle, but, almost without fail, he would leave the clinic in Dallas and return to the office in the afternoon, sapped and sickened, but getting back to work nonetheless.
When feeling particularly bad, he’d consent to trips to see Dr. Logothetis at M.D. Anderson, but even then, he flew commercial, loyally taking Southwest’s service to Houston Hobby.
“I don’t think he fully comprehended it, what he was facing,” said Susie Stephens. “Because by that time he was so heavily involved in his soccer. His soccer teams were going, he was building his soccer-specific stadium. I mean, soccer became his lifeline. That was it. And it was just an annoyance to him to be bothered with all this other stuff.”
It had been a difficult autumn. In Kansas City, the Chiefs were imploding. In the tenth year of Schottenheimer’s tenure, the squad was talented but lacked the unity of a typical Schottenheimer team, and still seemed haunted by previous playoff setbacks. In a Monday night game at home against Denver, Derrick Thomas became unhinged, incurring three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in a single drive. After the game, Peterson—aghast at the performance—apologized to Lamar, as did Thomas. The team suspended Thomas for a game, but the year ended on a sour note, and Schottenheimer resigned a few weeks after the end of the season. It had been a glorious decade, but the ’90s would end with the Chiefs still falling shy of their goal to return to the Super Bowl.
Even as the year was ending in disappointment in Kansas City, Lamar was back on the job, visiting the construction site in Columbus with Crew general manager Jamey Rootes and stadium manager Mark McCullers. As the construction crews were excavating the giant boulders underneath, and setting them aside for removal, Lamar walked by one day on a site inspection and stopped.
“I never realized the glaciers came this far south,” he said, seemingly to no one.
Rootes and McCullers looked at him quizzically, and Lamar hastened to explain the distinctive features of the glacial rocks that had been unearthed.
“These are wonderful,” he said. “Don’t carry these away. Let’s use them for landscaping.” Over the weeks ahead, the Crew staff was treated to multiple sketches and renderings of the proposed parking lot, and how the “rock gardens” could be incorporated into the design.
The first shovel dropped August 14, 1998. On May 15, 1999, just 278 days later, Crew Stadium opened. The United States had its first soccer-specific stadium.
That day, with the New England Revolution, owned by Robert Kraft and his family as the opponent, and a full assortment of big and small names in attendance (the boxing announcer Michael Buffer, of “Let’s Get Ready to Rrrrumble” fame, who had been contracted to fire up the crowd at some big Chiefs games, was called in, did his shtick, and fairly mangled a couple of the names in the Crew starting lineup), Columbus beat the New England Revolution, 2–0.
Lamar, his face orangeish and his head bald after radiation and chemotherapy, was wearing a baseball cap, working his way around the stadium. As he made his tour, finding minor problems and major, he’d pull his small notebook out of his pocket and write down a few more notes in his microscopic hand.
That afternoon, as he sat during the long traffic jam out of the stadium, his mind was already whirring around what was next. The bigger question was whether a stadium could save a league. Attendance was dipping, TV ratings were stuck at the microscopic level, and many of the millions of devout soccer fans in the United States made it almost a point of pride to ignore the league entirely.
Later in the summer, Robert Kraft called Lamar to float an idea that had been on his mind for weeks. Discontent had been growing among the MLS board with commissioner Doug Logan, but there had been no open revolt, and, given the problems the league was facing, there had been no obvious replacement candidate. But now Kraft had one in mind,
“What would you think about Don Garber?” he asked Lamar.
Garber was a shrewd, hard-working executive whom both Kraft and Lamar had been impressed with, for his work—sometimes in vain—for NFL International, the arm of the league that was trying to sell the NFL’s European development league, NFL Europa.
There had been a growing feeling among the owners that MLS had become stagnant, and that at least part of the problem was Logan’s lack of leadership. While Lamar had initial reservations—he didn’t like to help one of his enterprises by hurting another—he was persuaded that Garber was the right man for the job and could do more good running MLS than NFL International.
With both Lamar and Kraft behind the idea, they spoke to Phil Anschutz, the Denver businessman who’d gone to the World Cup in 1994, fallen in love with the sport, and, by 1999, invested in a second team (the Chicago Fire) to go along with his original franchise, the Colorado Rapids.
“There was a cocktail party in the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta,” said Garber. “This was the March NFL league meeting in 1999. Lamar and Bob approached me and said, basically, ‘What do think about being our commissioner?’ By the end of that weekend, I was essentially traded. Over the next few months, I met with Phil Anschutz and Alan Rothenberg.”
Logan had learned of the planned coup while on vacation in Mexico, and he hastened the matter by abruptly resigning.
In a sense, Garber had spent years working on the very task that MLS faced: taking a wildly popular game and importing it to a harsh land that knew little of its culture. Garber, who’d started his NFL career with Properties, the merchandising arm of the league, had been hired by Paul Tagliabue in 1992, to bring more cohesion to the league’s numerous international efforts.
It didn’t take long for Garber to seize on the donut-like paradox that MLS was facing: the most fervent soccer fans in America—the ones who planned their summers around World Cups, who rose early on Saturdays to follow their European teams (whether by satellite or short-wave radio), and who scoured international newsstands for copies of English titles like FourFourTwo and When Saturday Comes—were almost unanimous in their contempt for MLS. The biggest sins, according to the true believers, were not the counterintuitive scheduling or the Second Division level of play, but the casual ways in which the game’s rules had been subverted. Clocks counting down from 45:00, rather than up; shootouts to end draws in the regular season. It all had to go.
Though Garber was no soccer purist, he quickly grasped that the culture that everyone in the league was trying to create couldn’t be attained by a game that was significantly different than the one played in the rest of the world. “It was a mistake, the concept of ‘Americanizing’ soccer,” Garber said. “The core value was lost.”
At MLS Cup ’99, the league made the announcement that its rules would change to more closely conform to the international standard. “We would play the same game as the rest of the world,” was how Mark Abbott put it. “Fans could come and get the authentic soccer experience.”
At one time, Lamar had been among the forefront of those who flirted with new rules, both in the NASL and MLS. But by now, after more than thirty years of watching Americanized soccer mostly shunned by American soccer purists, he was ready to try it the other way. And he was among the first to point out what could be gained by being able to translate “the authentic soccer experience” to the United States.
In a way, this was the missing ingredient that almost all of the NASL and the first four years of MLS had lacked. But if the supporters groups that were springing up—Local 103 in Columbus, The Inferno in Dallas, Section 8 in Chicago, The Cauldron in Kansas City—could make an impression, perhaps that would be a way to bring more casual soccer fans on board.
What Garber noticed in his early talks was Lamar’s consistency and resolve. “He’s so focused,” he said. “When there’s an issue at hand, he does not get distracted by any noise whatsoever. His message was simple: We need to get people who are committed to our clubs, and slowly go about growing our overall fan base. It was all very fundamental—blocking and tackling—Lamar was never up in the clouds. He was not a guy that showed any fear or trepidation or regret. An eternal optimist. It was one of his defining qualities.”
It was a quality he would need in abundance in the years ahead.