When H. L. Hunt was considering a new financial venture, he would send a couple of assistants out in the field to do extensive research on the industry and its accompanying peculiarities, with orders that they weren’t to return and report to H. L. until they felt they understood the business perfectly. Only then would he decide whether to pursue it.
But Lamar didn’t have any assistants, so he would have to do the field research himself. He showed up at the Hunt Oil offices on Monday, February 16, 1959, and began collecting information systematically—and, consistent with his personality, as unobtrusively as possible. In the coming weeks, he began to look at the entire sports universe with fresh eyes. From his office, he accumulated background information on the prospects of virtually every large city in the United States. On a single sheet of legal paper, he spent weeks meticulously compiling a chart of the strengths and weaknesses of prospective cities, calling the Chamber of Commerce in dozens of big cities. His data on the forty-four potential markets, which ranged in size from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago to Akron, South Bend, and Lubbock, included: a list of the stadium capacity of the stadium in each city, with a notation of whether it was owned by the public or a local college; the city’s proximity to an existing pro team; a classification of whether the market was “virgin territory” (like Dallas and Houston), “semi-virgin territory” (San Diego), had an “existing pro team” (like Los Angeles and New York), or was in a “highly competitive” environment, usually with a college team (South Bend and Columbus); the expected effect of NFL television broadcasts on home games in the new market; population within a 50- and 100-mile radius; and Lamar’s personal rating, ranging from E for excellent (Dallas, Houston, and several other cities) to P for poor, and any remarks on the rating. The first eight cities on Lamar’s ledger were rated excellent, with one exception. By the entry on New Orleans, he noted the city’s persistence of Jim Crow laws, and racial segregation in stadiums and arenas, describing the problem as “major.” Other cities—including Memphis, Atlanta, and Little Rock—carried the same concern.
At the same time he was surveying possible cities for the new league, Lamar was also querying local business leaders to gauge their interest in supporting a new football team in Dallas. The week of March 11, the secretarial pool at Hunt Oil was particularly pressed, typing up 200 letters that Lamar sent out to presidents and CEOs in the community, with a three-page questionnaire. The correspondence to each business began with the note, “I have recently seen a copy of the Dallas–Fort Worth Bi-County Sports Committee Survey, pertaining to bringing Major League Baseball to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. While studying this report, I noted that you were one of the 200 business opinion leaders surveyed. As an aid to help me put together some loose-end ideas I have, I would like to impose on you for a personal survey, the questions of which follow.”
The survey questions began with the caveat, “These questions refer to a professional football team, which would be a Dallas team and play its home games in the Cotton Bowl.”
He opened with a loaded question: “Are you aware that plans are underway to form a new major professional football league with Dallas having a chance to be a member city?” There was no mention, there or elsewhere in the survey, that Lamar was the one planning to launch the new league, and that he would be the owner of the Dallas franchise.
With that decision came the corollary realizations. Lamar knew his days of gambling on football were over. He also needed to improve his public speaking skills. He realized that it would be a costly, improbable venture, but within weeks, he was imbued with an unshakeable belief that his idea was perfectly timed. If Major League Baseball, with sixteen franchises and slumping attendance, was in need of expansion—as Branch Rickey had so persuasively argued—then there was an even greater necessity for expansion in pro football, with just twelve franchises and rising attendance throughout the ’50s.
At some point early on, he shared his plans with his friend Tom Richey. “We would spend long days, with maps on the floor of his home on Orchid Lane,” Richey said. “Lamar would have all this information on different cities, and we would look at what would be the best cities. It felt like we did that for weeks.”
The next step in Lamar’s field research would be another call to NFL commissioner Bert Bell. Lamar phoned Bell on March 15, ostensibly to inquire again about the possibility of an expansion team for the NFL. The two men had spoken by phone the previous year, but it took some time for Bell to recall Hunt. When he did, Bell asked after Davey O’Brien, the TCU star of the ’30s who had played for the Eagles when Bell coached the team, and for a time after his football career worked for H. L. Hunt. When Lamar brought up expansion, Bell reiterated that the league couldn’t consider it until resolving the Cardinals situation, but added that the owners were not at all impressed with Dallas, because of the poor performance of the Texans in 1952, and that their first commitment was to the city of Buffalo. After Lamar pressed further for an appointment with the expansion committee, Bell suggested he call George Halas, then vacationing at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. Lamar called Halas on March 18, but “Papa Bear” was no more accommodating. When Lamar suggested he wanted to visit Halas to “throw my hat in the ring,” Halas dissuaded him and called it a waste of time, adding that “expansion is probably a long way off.”
With that clear indication that the NFL was staying put, Lamar decided to move forward with his idea, and he began to seek out his potential partners for the new league.
His first prospect was Kenneth S. “Bud” Adams, also the son of a Texas oilman and much more in keeping with the traditional stereotype of Texas millionaires. Adams progressed from a burly youth who played football at Kansas to a heavyset adult best known for his distinctive flair in office decoration. In his subterranean office in downtown Houston, next to the tasteful displays of Native American art, Adams had a cage full of rare doves, a lily pond, and an indoor barbecue pit. He had been known as “Jabber” at his college prep school, and his Texas patois was at once cocksure and elusive, wholly unintelligible to some from the North. One of Adams’s peers would later say, “To be honest it took me about two or three years to understand a single word of whatever the hell it was Bud was saying. He always seemed to be talking out the side of his mouth, not so much figuratively as literally.”
Lamar and Adams had never met, but Bunker Hunt knew Adams from their time at Culver Military Academy. Lamar asked his older brother to call to see if Adams would have dinner with Lamar in Houston. Bunker called, relayed the invitation, and Adams said he would be glad to do so, then asked if Bunker knew what was on Lamar’s mind. “I don’t tell Lamar my business,” Bunker explained. “And he doesn’t tell me his business.”
Lamar called the next day, polite but brief on the phone, asking Adams if he could meet his flight later that week at Houston Hobby Airport. On a balmy Texas evening in March 1959, Adams picked up Lamar in his Cadillac, and took him to the Charcoal Inn, a steakhouse he owned in Houston.
After some discussion about Bud’s relationship with Bunker, Lamar and Bud spoke about their respective high school careers, the brilliance of Rice’s Tommy Lewis, the best college games they’d seen, even their favorite uniforms. Lamar was cordial, but seemed slightly nervous to Adams, who wondered to himself about the younger man’s agenda. After dinner, Adams drove Lamar back to Houston’s Hobby Airport to catch his return flight to Dallas. As Adams pulled up to the airport terminal, Lamar finally confided the reason for his visit.
“You tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals, right?”
Adams, eyebrows raised—they hadn’t discussed either man’s pro football aspirations during the entire visit—allowed that he had.
“So did I,” said Lamar. “I didn’t have much luck—and you didn’t either from what I understand.” They shared a laugh about Walter Wolfner and his stubbornness. Then, grabbing the handle of his attaché case on the passenger floorboard, Lamar said, “Bud, I’m thinking of starting a new football league. If I do, would you be interested in owning a team?”
Adams’ face brightened, and he replied, “Hell, yeah!”
Lamar explained he’d be in touch in the weeks ahead, the two men shook hands, and then he got out of his car and headed to his gate.
With that brief exchange, Lamar had set his course. Throughout the spring and into the summer, he continued collecting information, exchanging correspondence and building a dossier on the most attractive cities for a new league. Though the brothers shared equally in Penrod Drilling, they each spent the great majority of their time on their own deals—and Lamar was by far the least active brother in the daily running of the organization. When he disappeared for a game, or to explore a new city, no one asked. “No one noticed,” said Hunt Oil landman Mack Rankin. “And if they had noticed, they wouldn’t have cared.”
•
In 1959, the headquarters of the National Football League were not in New York City. They were not even in Philadelphia, where they’d been located since 1946. Instead they were located across the street from the Philadelphia city limits, in the bucolic neighborhood of Bala-Cynwyd (pronounced ba-luh kin-wid). Reporters covering pro football in the 1950s often had exchanges like this when they phoned the NFL offices:
“Hello,” a voice would say, “National Football League.”
“Yes, I’d like to speak with Commissioner Bell, please.”
“Speaking.”
In the five-man office, with no secretary and no receptionist, Commissioner Bert Bell often answered the phones. Bell still bore vestiges of his old self, the playboy raconteur of the 1920s with slicked-back hair, by now silver, and an estimable paunch, neatly draped in blue serge suits during the fall and winter, and tan gabardine in the summer months. His voice was a thing of wonder, a deep, growling baritone that projected through office walls and over static-filled phone lines. Bell was a voluble man of motion, generally heard before seen. And since 1946, he’d been the one-man soul of pro football, championing the game to the public and to Congress, riding herd on the cantankerous and often divided owners, running the game with a concussive voice and near absolute authority.
On June 2, Lamar flew to Philadelphia for a lunch with Bell, and they went to one of Bell’s favorite restaurants, the Tavern in Narberth, along with one of Bell’s sons, Bert, Jr., and the Eagles’ president Joe Donoghue. After plenty of small talk, Lamar finally mentioned that he was still interested in bringing an expansion franchise to Dallas. Again, Bell told him that the NFL wouldn’t consider expansion until the league solved its “Chicago problem” and achieved a greater measure of competitive balance. “My dad told him they weren’t ready for expansion,” said Bert Bell, Jr. “He wanted the bottom teams to win three or four games, same amount of games, before they were ready for expansion.”
After the meal, Bell called Lamar over to the corner of the restaurant and said, less vexed than perplexed, “What in the world did you come up here for? What in the world do you want?” Lamar steadfastly repeated his interest in expansion and Bell reiterated, “The owners are not interested in any kind of expansion, they have no expansion plans, and it’s just a lost cause as far as Dallas is concerned.” Then Bell added, “As far as I am concerned, I don’t believe they will ever vote to expand.”
Lamar by now had asked the NFL on three separate occasions about expansion and been told in no uncertain terms on three separate occasions that such a thing was impossible, at least in the foreseeable future. With that, he quickened his own pace and started touring the country to visit prospective owners he’d only corresponded with in the past. On June 20 and 21, he saw Bob Howsam in Denver and an ownership group in Minneapolis, headed by former Minneapolis Lakers owner Max Winter. Howsam’s Denver Bears had increased the capacity of Mile High Stadium from 17,500 to 25,600, in hopes of attracting an NFL team. In Minneapolis–St. Paul, Winter and his partnership proved eager to join the venture. “We Folks here in Minnesota have been trying to get a franchise for some time,” wrote Ole Haugsrud later, “but it seems as though the National League does not care to move or expand.” As he went from city to city, meeting with investors, Lamar did not have a formal prospectus. “The only thing I had on paper was my football map of America,” he said. “The NFL was concentrated in the north and east, with only two teams out of that area, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. To the NFL, having a team in Washington was having a team in the South.”
Feeling he needed a franchise in Los Angeles and New York, Lamar began casting about for prospects in those cities. Through friend and former tennis star Gene Mako, he was introduced to Barron Hilton, son of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who agreed to consider a Los Angeles franchise.
But New York still beckoned. It seemed clear that any new league that was to be taken seriously needed a franchise in New York. In his meetings with Branch Rickey to discuss the Continental League the previous fall, Lamar had also been introduced to Bill Shea, the lawyer (and onetime owner, in the ’40s, of the NFL’s Boston Yanks) who had teamed up with Rickey to launch the league. In late June, Lamar invited Shea to dinner.
Lamar’s friend Tom Richey had just been transferred from Dallas to the home office of Life magazine, in the Rockefeller Center in New York. Lamar called him that morning, and invited him to come along. “I recall the real purpose of the meeting was twofold,” said Richey. “To see what obstacles Shea was having starting the new baseball league and to see if it was feasible to start a football franchise in New York. Another purpose was to see if Bill Shea would like to be a principal owner or could he recommend ownership.”
They met at the fabled 21, on West 52nd Street, and Shea arrived in a blue suit, with a white shirt and a silver tie. Lamar spent much of the dinner in his usual mode of polite, persistent inquiry, asking Shea about his own difficulties, budgets, venues, and the challenges that might be faced in promoting a team in a city as large as New York.
The dinner started cordially, with Shea bringing Lamar and Tom up to date on his own efforts with the Continental League. But then Lamar shared that he was contemplating starting a football league of his own, and inquired if Shea would have any interest in owning the New York franchise. Shea most certainly did not. At that point, in Richey’s memory, the tone of the evening soured. “Shea was adamant that a new football league was too tough a venture with too many factions involved,” said Richey, who viewed Shea’s tone the rest of the meal as being one of “guarded condescension.” When Lamar asked if he could think of any possible New York owners, Shea half-heartedly mentioned the ebullient national broadcaster Harry Wismer, a small minority partner in the Detroit Lions, as someone who might enjoy the attention and challenge of a new franchise in a new league. But Shea emphasized that the venture was fraught, and implied strongly that if Shea himself—with all his experience and connections—was struggling to start a new baseball league, the callow novice Lamar would never get a new football league launched. At the end of dinner, after Lamar thanked Shea for his time and they parted, Lamar and Tom walked together up Fifth Avenue toward the southeast corner of Central Park.
Lamar was in an unusually reflective and talkative mood, and close to midnight, he and Tom sat down on a park bench just inside Central Park and began discussing the situation. They rambled around topics old and new, touching on the challenge that Lamar faced, their days at The Hill, the times when they would visit each other before football seasons. Hours later, they were still there on the bench, reflecting on the challenges of going forward. At that point, Tom reminded Lamar of his words in the night during their preseason training in 1949: that no matter what he did with his life, he would always be H. L. Hunt’s son.
Richey was emboldened—he knew his friend well enough to press him in the way many others didn’t, and at one point he proclaimed “Lamar, if you don’t follow through with this decision and make a name for yourself—’cause this is your big chance to be your own man—I’m not sure I want to be your friend!”
It was a dare more than an ultimatum, and Lamar understood it as such. He also understood, at least in theory, if he went ahead and launched the league, his life would change in ways that he couldn’t begin to grasp. At the meal, Shea had alluded to his hectic schedule drumming up support for the Continental League. Lamar already sensed the strain in his marriage to Rose Mary, as his travel had increased to drum up support for the football venture, and she’d grown more anxious and homebound.
By the time they got up from the park bench, it was past the middle of the night in New York City. The first hint of dawn was appearing over the Hudson to the East. Lamar stood up and said, quietly but firmly, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.” He said goodbye to Richey, who caught a bus to his apartment on Second Avenue, and he walked alone to his midtown Manhattan hotel. For nearly six months, he’d been flirting with the idea. He was now, despite Shea’s stern warning, ready to go through with it.
Lamar’s next step would be characteristic of the reticence that would later be seen, by his detractors, as a sign of deviousness, and by his friends as proof of his modest demeanor and methodical business style. Lamar himself would later admit, “I possibly have an indirect way of finding things out.” Intent on moving forward, but still not ready to make any announcements, Lamar instead went back to Bert Bell, this time through an emissary. He called up Davey O’Brien; the former TCU star was a staunch businessman, longtime FBI agent, friend of H. L.’s, and a Dallas legend. Lamar asked O’Brien if he could hire him to travel to Philadelphia and make a request on his behalf. He wanted O’Brien to tell Bell that a group of investors was going to launch a new football league, and to ask Bell if he would agree to be the commissioner of the new league. “I was at least intelligent enough to know that I did not want to start a war,” Lamar would say later.
O’Brien was instructed not to name anyone involved, not even Lamar. Before he left for Philadelphia, Lamar gave him a typewritten summary of talking points, including the directive, “Give position as a representative of a group which has formed to make a 2nd league. From the start indicate that your position is one of a non-associated party who is acting whatever way you wish to describe.” Lamar also noted, “Point out that they are a group which is not going into this thing out of any vision of financial gain, but rather out of a love of football; however, they are not going into it on a charity basis.” In outlining the broad contours of the new league’s proposed structure, he added “Two divisions—with the winners meeting in a championship game. After several years of building their player strength, they feel it would be a natural for their champion to meet the NFL champion for an overall championship.”
The outcome of the mission was predictable. O’Brien visited and was greeted warmly by his old coach, but Bell declined the offer to be the commissioner of the new league, though he wished them luck and, as O’Brien was leaving, added, “Incidentally, tell that young friend of yours in Dallas that he can come to me for advice any time.”
Lamar was at Love Field, waiting for O’Brien when his flight returned. “He told me about the meeting he had with Bert Bell, and that he was representing a group of people in Texas,” Lamar said. “And, in fact, Davey O’Brien wouldn’t have known who the other people were because I was very close-mouthed. I didn’t tell him I’d gone to see Bud Adams, but I told him there was a group. I guess that in my own mind, you know, this will be good to at least see what kind of reaction we’ll get, and I was naïve enough to think that in baseball there were two leagues and one commissioner, so why shouldn’t there be in football? And he told Davey, who was a dear friend, that it just wasn’t practical for him to do.”
It seemed as though the visit accomplished little, but its immense importance became clear a few weeks later, on July 26, when Bell himself phoned O’Brien and explained that he was due to testify before Congress, part of the NFL’s long and as-yet fruitless efforts to gain legislation that would provide the sport with the same antitrust exemptions as baseball. The Subcommittee on Anti-Trust Monopoly, part of the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. Senate, was sure to ask him about expansion, Bell explained. He wanted O’Brien to ask Lamar if it might be okay to mention the proposed new league.
“And I thought about it,” said Lamar, “and never dreamed how positive it would be, but it seemed like it could be a very positive thing. So I told Davey, ‘Yes, he can mention this.’ And I wasn’t going to ask anybody—Bud Adams didn’t know Bob Howsam existed, Howsam didn’t know any of the others existed. So I said, ‘Yep, okay, you have my permission.’” Even then, Lamar had O’Brien instruct Bell not to mention any names at all.
So on July 28, while Bell amused a subcommittee with his free-flowing dissertation on the state of pro football, Lamar sat silently in the back of Room 318 of the Senate office building, listening. As Lamar would later put it, “I sat in the back and got to hear the actual birth of the American Football League, as told by Bert Bell.”
He couldn’t have asked for a better salesman.
“The more football there is and the more advertisement of pro football, the better off we are,” Bell told the committee. “We are in favor of the new league.” He added that he considered the years of the NFL’s rancorous war with the All-American Football Conference in the late ’40s as “a great thing for pro football. Every newspaper was arguing who was the best and they would keep it in the papers.” Michigan Senator Philip Hart interrupted Bell to point out that many of the owners didn’t consider the AAFC’s challenge a great thing for the sport at the time. “I know,” Bell replied. “But I can’t help what the owners think. I know what it did. I will tell you this is great and I have talked it over with every owner and not one of them has an objection to it, not one of them.” (In fact, Bell hadn’t spoken to any of the other NFL owners about the new league before speaking to Congress, but he did call George Halas the day after the speech, telling him that he thought the league was nebulous and might never get off the ground.)
That same evening after Bell’s testimony, Lamar and O’Brien visited the Commissioner at Bell’s summer home in Margate, New Jersey, arriving after 10 o’clock and sitting for a wide-ranging discussion until almost 2 in the morning. Bell was jovial and helpful, repeated that he was too busy with other things to entertain the thought of running a new league, but peppered Lamar with helpful advice. He pointedly urged the new league to go with eight teams in the first season, rather than six, on the grounds that eight was necessary for scheduling purposes, and it also allowed a league to plausibly split into two divisions, bringing about a useful rationale for a championship game at the end of the season. “All of you will enjoy this,” Bell told Hunt at one point, “and all of the owners will get to become good friends down through the years. However, there is one thing that will separate you: when you start to fight over players.” Lamar thanked him for advice and promised to stay in touch.
“I really liked Bert Bell,” he said. “I really thought we could all get along.” He would later characterize this opinion as “one of the more naïve thoughts in the history of American sports.”
After returning to Dallas, Lamar called Bud Adams, who was ebullient, praising the Bell announcement as “great publicity.”
“Bud, I think it’s probably time for us to announce this. Would you mind if I came down to Houston—would you step forward with me?”
Adams enthusiastically agreed, and Lamar suggested they make the announcement the following Monday morning, August 3. His reasons were clear in his own mind: “’Cause I didn’t want to be the only guy, the only idiot in the world identified with this thing, so I flew down and Bud and I had the press conference.”
On the day after his twenty-seventh birthday, Lamar joined Adams in Adams’s Houston office to announce the start of the American Football League. He was unusually nervous at the announcement, prompting one writer covering the event to whisper to a colleague, “Wait ’til Papa Bear gets ahold of this guy—he’s going to eat him alive.”
But now Lamar was in it, and there was nothing to do but move forward.
•
The news hit suddenly around the country. Up until Bell’s announcement, Lamar hadn’t even mentioned the names of the other investors to any of his potential partners.
In addition to Lamar in Dallas, Adams in Houston, Howsam’s group in Denver, the ownership group in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Lamar soon met with the announcer Harry Wismer in New York, who was enthusiastic about joining.
In Los Angeles, Barron Hilton had been receptive after Mako introduced him to Lamar. The younger Hilton had grown up around football (after his father and mother divorced, his mother had been remarried to Mack Saxon, the longtime coach at Texas School of Mines), and as a teenager sat on the bench for some of Saxon’s games. Lamar first met with Hilton at the offices of the new Carte Blanche credit card company in the summer of ’59, and they hit it off. “He immediately struck me a dignified and honorable man, with an affable manner,” said Hilton. “During our meeting, I could sense Lamar’s determination.” Within weeks, Hilton signed on to own the new league’s Los Angeles franchise.
Lamar’s office, where previously months had gone by without the presence of any outside visitors, was suddenly a beehive of activity. There was plenty of talk about the venture around the building, but no word from H. L. Hunt. “My dad would never tell me not to do something,” said Lamar. “But I knew he thought I was crazy, because he made a particular point of offering me the advice of others.”
H. L. finally summoned Lamar to his office and asked him to sit down. The elder Hunt explained that he was going to place a call to Jim Breuil, a business associate who had, in the ’40s, owned an interest in the Buffalo franchise in the All-America Football Conference. H. L. knew about the financial troubles of the AAFC and was undoubtedly hoping that Breuil could provide a dose of reality for his son.
When they got on the phone together, Breuil did confirm that he’d lost money in the venture, but he also was very enthusiastic. “You’ll have a great time,” he said to Lamar, as H. L. sat behind his desk, frowning.
“I don’t think my father was expecting that,” said Lamar later.
H. L. was not the only one with doubts about the pro game. Al Hill, as well, looked down on the professional game. “My dad did not like pro football,” said Al Hill, Jr. “He loved college football; he thought it was honest, hearty, and healthy. But dad thought that players in the pros were a bunch of thugs.”
H. L. drafted one of his assistants, George Cunyus, to “go out and help Lamar, and get him out of it if you can, but if not, keep him out of trouble.” Cunyus would report back to H. L. that Lamar’s dedication to the start-up was unswerving, but he did help Lamar by drafting the new league’s constitution, bylaws, and player contracts.
If much of the family thought Lamar was wasting his time and money, at least Bunker Hunt was excited. The week after the announcement, he walked into Lamar’s office and said, “Hey, Lamar, I’d like to invest in your team.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Lamar. “But I prefer to go this one alone.”
Bunker looked quizzically at his brother for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Okay.” And then he left.
It was a rare moment when Lamar asserted himself with one of his older brothers. “If it was going to bust, I didn’t want to be saddled by having led somebody down a path,” Lamar said, “and I just felt like it was my baby, and if it was going to fail, I wanted it to fail. I’m not averse to having partners at all, but that was one I felt it was the thing to do, to just stay with the 100% ownership.”
(“Not that it mattered,” said one friend. “Bunker would tell Lamar what to do all the time anyway. Bunker acted like he owned part of the team.”)
Preoccupied with his vision of the new league as part of a tandem—“like the American League and National League in baseball”—Lamar wanted to call the new league the American Football League. There had been other, aborted AFLs in the past, but none made enough of a dent on the American sports fans’ consciousness to pose a problem. Lamar tried out the idea on Harry Wismer, who was instantly effusive. “That’s great!” he said. “Let’s go with it! That’s fantastic, kid. Congratulations!”
Wismer was equally enthusiastic about Lamar’s idea to adopt Branch Rickey’s revenue-sharing plan from the Continental League. In doing this, the new league established a bedrock principle that would, in time, change the way American sports leagues did business.
“Harry was the guy, theoretically, who had the most to lose,” said Lamar. “Not that anybody had anything to lose at that point, ’cause we weren’t—we really didn’t have a league yet, they hadn’t committed. But everybody else said, ‘It’s all right.’ Minneapolis and Dallas and Houston, they all would have shared, but when it came to the bigger cities, I remember that Harry very clearly accepted that.”
Little else was decided at that point. The first meeting of the new league was held August 14, 1959, in the Imperial South Suite on the twentieth floor of the Chicago Hilton. For most of the men, it was the first time they’d ever met. There were only six franchises—Dallas, Houston, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Los Angeles, and New York. They were all sportsmen in the classic sense of being wealthy fanatics, and they adjourned early so all in attendance could make it to Soldier’s Field to watch the College All-Star Game. A week later, they met again in Los Angeles, at the Beverly Hilton, and there, the league officially voted to call itself the American Football League.
Though Lamar had originally thought he’d have to go through the first year with six teams, it quickly became apparent that there was enough interest to field eight. Willard Rhodes, a grocery executive from the Pacific Northwest, had contacted him about placing a franchise in Seattle. Ralph Wilson, an insurance salesman in Detroit, called Lamar after reading about the new league in the New York Times; he was interested in bringing a franchise to Miami.
Both men were stymied by stadium problems. Lamar had known that venues would be important, but he hadn’t anticipated how much of an impediment colleges would be. In both cities, the universities that occupied the stadiums—the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Miami—were determined not to let pro teams play.
“We didn’t have places like New Orleans available to us,” said Lamar. “Because that was Tulane Stadium, and it was a college stadium, and they didn’t want a pro team there. We were told that you couldn’t get into the Orange Bowl in Miami, even though it was a city-owned stadium. Atlanta had no stadium, but there was a group that came forward, and they were willing, but we couldn’t get into Georgia Tech, and they were willing to try to put a tinker-toy stadium together, and we danced around them.”
A minority partner in the Detroit Lions who’d built his Sundays around football games, whether watching the Lions at Tiger Stadium, or joining his friends and family in front of the TV when the team was out of town, Wilson visited Lamar in Dallas and came away impressed. “He wasn’t a man that had to have gala things,” said Wilson. “He had a very small office, and he showed us around. At that time, the Hunt family was probably the richest family in the world.” Though all efforts to get a team in Miami were stymied, Lamar was impressed with Wilson. “There was a genuineness to Ralph,” he once said. “You didn’t have a feeling there was any con in him at all. You felt like this was a first-class guy.”
Rhodes would eventually drop out, the Seattle stadium situation proving intractable. But Lamar was keen to keep Wilson in the league and, later in the fall, encouraged him to consider Buffalo. After a meeting with civic leaders, Wilson signed on. That made for seven solid franchises, and the future looked hopeful.
All that changed on Saturday afternoon, August 29. Lamar was cutting the hedges outside the house at Orchid Lane, when Rose Mary came to the front door and told them there was an Associated Press reporter calling for him. When Lamar got on the phone, he got the gist of the news of the day: At a press conference before the Steelers–Bears preseason game in Houston, George Halas and Art Rooney had announced that the NFL would be expanding, and the cities the NFL was targeting would be Dallas and Houston, with plans to award franchises the following January and begin competition in 1961 (the timetable was later moved up to 1960 for the Dallas franchise, so it could start at the same time and in direct competition with Lamar’s AFL entry).
The man in line for the Dallas NFL franchise was Clint Murchison, Jr., like Lamar, a son of an oil millionaire. The diminutive, sharp-tongued Murchison had played football in high school, then went to college at Duke and later graduated from MIT with a master’s in mechanical engineering.
When greeted with the news that afternoon, Lamar remained outwardly calm, asking the reporter if he could have a few minutes to compose a reply. After writing out a statement while sitting on his bed, he phoned back and read his response. “Everybody has been knocking on their door for years and they’ve turned everybody down. It is obvious what they are trying to do, and it can get them into trouble . . . They’re trying to knock out Dallas and Houston, but this doesn’t change our plans at all and we’re moving ahead. We’ll be adding our seventh and eighth teams this fall.”
He then got off the phone and sat down on the couch, visibly shaken. “He was just stunned,” said Rose Mary. “Crushed. But he came right back and it made him all the more determined. Every time he’d get a little bit down, he’d get more involved, and become a better speaker, and work harder.”
Lamar called Bell the following Monday, but the Commissioner protested that the matter was largely out of his hands. “What can I do?” Bell said. “They want to expand. How can I stop them?” Bell remained reassuring both privately (he sent Bud Adams a copy of the NFL bylaws, to help the AFL construct its constitution) and in public. “There are plenty of players,” he told a reporter in September. “There are 250 kids graduating from college every year with pro football ability. We keep about five per team, a total of sixty. That leaves 190 unemployed in football.”
But with the prospect of the NFL coming into the AFL’s two anchor cities, many more observers thought that Lamar’s quest had gone from daring to foolhardy. To some, continuing with the new league seemed pointless if the NFL were coming to those cities anyway. “If Adams and Lamar Hunt insist on war, then they themselves and the cities they represent will be the losers,” wrote the Houston Post’s Jack Gallagher the week after the Halas and Rooney announcement. “From here it would appear that the wisest move the AFL can make at this time is to disband.”
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Even as the announcement by Rooney and Halas indicated that the NFL was hoping to smother the new league before it could start, the older league kept sending emissaries to informally negotiate a truce that would have instantly brought Lamar and Adams what they’d wanted in the first place: franchises in the NFL.
In September, the Rams’ co-owner Ed Pauley, Jr., had invited Lamar and Barron Hilton to a private meeting at the Beverly Hilton. “Mr. Pauley’s pitch seemed to be centered around telling us how sure the American Football League was to fail,” said Lamar, “and how I would end up supporting all the teams, and that he and his dad felt it could be worked out so that Bud Adams and I could get an NFL franchise. In fact, they were convinced then that I was supporting all the teams. It was just an ad-lib. Everybody was being their own commissioner, everybody had their own idea. But he was primarily pointing out that Bud Adams and I could get a franchise in Dallas and Houston and they would take Barron into the Rams ownership and the American Football League would fold up its tent.” But Lamar was steadfast, saying he’d already given his word to his fellow AFL owners and couldn’t renege on them.
Then, on October 11, while attending an Eagles–Steelers game, Bert Bell died of a massive heart attack. His death left a vacuum at the center of the NFL. The prospect of the AFL had made conditions highly unstable within the universe of pro football. Now, it seemed, the back-channel offers only increased.
There were numerous informal gambits from NFL owners, secret offers to take in Lamar, or Lamar and Adams, or even those two and two other franchises. One phone call came from George Halas himself. Lamar asked the Hunt Oil landman Mack Rankin to come in and listen to the call on his speakerphone, so he’d have a witness. Politely explaining to Halas that he couldn’t accept the offer of an expansion franchise now, Lamar then weathered a full-blown Halas harangue: “Do you know how much goddamn money this is going to cost us?!,” the Bears’ owner demanded, before cursing Lamar for his stubbornness.
The talks were revived again in late October, when the NFL’s expansion plans in Houston were hurt by Rice University’s announcement that it wouldn’t allow its stadium to be used by any pro teams.
But Lamar was steadfast, and by mid-November, he had lined up the AFL’s eighth franchise. The team would be placed in Boston, with an ownership group led by Billy Sullivan, a former Notre Dame football publicity director. Sullivan joined just in time to attend the league meeting in Minneapolis the weekend of November 21–22 for the first AFL draft. “I talked to Billy Sullivan maybe five times, maybe seven times over a several-week period,” said Lamar. “And he was a charming, loquacious guy—this was all on the telephone. Bill was not a guy that had any money to speak of, although he was a president of a fuel oil supply company. But he was a great talker, and he convinced me that he could put together a ten-person group and they put up this $25,000 check, and they would be at our draft meeting, in late November.”
It was to be a big event: The Chicago Cardinals had agreed to play two of their home games in 1959 in Minneapolis, and that Sunday was to be the second one. Since Minneapolis was one of the AFL’s flagship cities, the new league’s owners planned to upstage the NFL’s presence with their own meeting and a series of announcements coming from their first college draft.
That Sunday evening, on the eve of the draft, as the owners sat in a banquet room at the Cedric Adams Hotel waiting to begin their regularly scheduled evening meeting, Harry Wismer burst in the door, visibly agitated, carrying a newspaper under his arm. Someone asked Wismer if he was ready for dinner.
“Yes!” he shouted, slamming the paper on the conference table. “And this is the last supper!” Pointing to Max Winter of the Minneapolis group, he added, “And he’s Judas!”
In this instance, the flighty Wismer’s outrage seemed justified. The headline of the next day’s edition of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune read “MINNESOTA TO GET NFL FRANCHISE” and detailed the secret negotiations by Halas of convincing the Minneapolis group to bolt the AFL in favor of the NFL.
While Max Winter fumbled for a response to Wismer’s rant, Lamar gathered his bearings and tried to survey the damage done. While the Minneapolis group had not been the very first to join the new league, they were considered a crucial franchise in the upper Midwest and had played a vital role in the league’s early formation, and their apparent abdication to the NFL, expertly engineered behind the scenes by Halas, was a major blow to the AFL, and a victory for the older league, which seemed likely to approve expansion to Dallas and Minneapolis–St. Paul at its annual meetings in January.
The Minnesota franchise went ahead and participated in the first AFL draft the next day, though it was a draft more in name than in fact. Concerned that some franchises would have a heavy advantage over others if the draft were conducted by normal means, the league went instead to a thirty-three-round blind draw. “And the theory was,” said Lamar, “we recognized it would be terribly unfair if some teams had a huge advantage in scouting. After all, Billy Sullivan and Boston had only been in the league for about three days. We didn’t want to get off to a start where it was that unbalanced.”
Each team was granted a “territorial selection,” a chance to designate the one college player they most wanted to have a shot at signing (Dallas’s was the SMU quarterback Don Meredith; Houston took LSU’s Heisman winner Billy Cannon). Then, for the rest of the draft, the three of the league’s personnel men (some teams hadn’t even gotten around to hiring scouts yet) put together a list of the best seniors at each position in the country, and separated them into groups of eight. For each flight of eight quarterbacks and centers, the owner of each team would reach into an envelope and grab a name.
It would be more than a month before the Minneapolis franchise formally withdrew its membership, pledging its allegiance for the rest of the year, at least publicly, to the AFL.
A week later, Lamar traveled to Chicago to sign Joe Foss, the legendary World War II flying ace, to be the AFL’s first commissioner. Foss, the former governor of South Dakota, had attended just two pro football games in his life, but he retained a high profile, boundless energy, and the willingness to talk enthusiastically and at length about the prospects of the new league.
Foss agreed to move down to Dallas, where the league offices were located, though he also maintained his residence in South Dakota. “He was kind of a transient person,” said Lamar. “He just flew everywhere.”
Lamar dispatched the Hunt Oil accountant Jack Steadman to set up the AFL office and books of accounting, in a small, three-room office in the Southland building in downtown Dallas. Foss brought his secretary, Maxine Eisenberg, from South Dakota. The league hired Milt Woodard, an executive of the Western Golf Association, as the league president; Foss’s friend Thurlo McCrady, a former coach, as the director of officials; and Dallas sportswriter Al Ward as the league’s publicity man.
As the new year dawned—with Lamar and Rose Mary joining the rest of the Hunts for Lamar’s twenty-second straight Cotton Bowl game, watching Ernie Davis leading the national champion Syracuse team past Texas, 23–14, someone in the group pointed out to Lamar that some of these players might be playing for his team the following fall.
After that respite, the parade of seemingly endless details continued. The Minnesota group finally conceded the obvious—they had sided with the NFL—and they dropped out, leaving the AFL with an urgent problem, since the new league now needed an eighth team.
With Foss in tow, the AFL established its official football, choosing Wilson rival Spalding, to be the manufacturer. The company introduced the new “JV-5,” which was a quarter-inch longer and a quarter-inch narrower than the official NFL game ball, making it easier to pass, though that was not the main rationale. “Spalding was going to give us the balls for free, so we didn’t care about if it was an eighth of an inch longer,” said Lamar.
At one meeting, someone mentioned Bill Veeck’s innovation of putting player’s names on the backs of their jerseys, and that was approved as well. The most debate came over whether the AFL should adapt college football’s new option of running or passing for two points rather than kicking one on the conversion following the touchdown. Lamar was originally opposed.
“I didn’t think we should do anything different than what the NFL did,” he said. “I didn’t want us to have five downs, or have it be fifteen yards for a first down, not that anybody suggested that, but Canadian football had three downs and the one-point rouge. So I was opposed to it, and the vote was 4–3. And now you say, ‘Why was it 4–3?’ Well, we only had seven teams at the time. We had lost Minnesota, and were still looking for Oakland, but now we’re in January 1960, and we were still making up rules and things like that.”
It would be two more months before the AFL would find an eighth franchise, and the choice of Oakland was one of necessity, since Los Angeles owner Barron Hilton was threatening to drop out if he didn’t have a natural geographic rival on the West Coast.
“He was out there all alone in Los Angeles,” said Lamar. “And it suddenly dawned on him, ‘Wow, we’ve got to have a rivalry.’ The biggest rivalry in football, attendance-wise, was the Rams and 49ers; they drew huge crowds, of 100,000 or more to watch those games. So we focused on Oakland, which obviously had no stadium to play in, and an ownership group put together including Oakland and San Francisco people, over Atlanta. But Atlanta didn’t really have a stadium either. It was kind of a hollow contest.”
The Oakland ownership group was led by Chet Soda, an ebullient Oakland businessman fond of calling everyone he met “Señor.” At the press conference announcing the new team, Soda showed up with a beatific smile and distributed sombreros to many in the press corps, before announcing that the winner of the name-the-team contest was “the Oakland Señors.” This prompted perhaps the most animated public display shown toward the team all year, as the nickname was roundly panned. Within a few weeks, the club relented, opting for the nickname the Raiders instead.
In late January, the NFL held a torturously long annual meeting in Miami Beach, stuck in a seven-day deadlock in its quest to name a new commissioner. The league finally settled on an unlikely and little-known compromise choice, Pete Rozelle, the thirty-three-year-old general manager of the Los Angeles Rams. Lamar had met Rozelle in passing at his meeting with Ed Pauley the previous fall. Though Rozelle was more polished, the two men had developed an affinity, as both were by far the youngest men in their respective circles. At the end of that meeting, the inevitable occurred: An expansion franchise for Dallas was awarded to Clint Murchison, Jr.—which would begin play in 1960, rather than ’61—and another was awarded to the Minneapolis–St. Paul group that had defected from the AFL.
It was difficult to know, even in retrospect, what convinced Lamar to persevere through that year from the summer of 1959 through the summer of 1960. His most trusted elders, his father and Al Hill, both doubted his judgment and the venture in its entirety. George Halas, a man whose exploits he’d grown up listening to and rooting for in his library in Mount Vernon, had rebuffed him, ignored him, then attempted to induce him into taking what he’d wanted all along, cursed him when refused to do so, and then questioned his motives after the fact. His upstart venture had seemed doomed on a number of occasions; yet after standing firm with his new partners throughout much of 1959, one of his closest allies—the Minneapolis group—betrayed him, throwing the entire venture into doubt. And through it all, Lamar Hunt stood there, undaunted, holding tenaciously onto his dream.
At one point that long fall, he was asked by a newspaper reporter if the business was more personal to him because he’d started the league.
“I can’t separate what part of pro football is business and what part is personal with me,” he said. “I just know that it is very important that I succeed.”