In early October 1959, Lamar received a postcard from Rome, with an aerial view of the crumbling grandeur of the Colosseum, and the note, “Have just contacted local authorities and it may be available for 1960 season. Let me know if you want to put a team here and I will make formal request. Bunker.”
Lamar was spending less time at home and more time traveling, trying to manage the wide-ranging responsibilities involved in forming a new league. But by November he realized he needed to concentrate on his own team.
His first priority was a proper name. That month he called Giles Miller, the man who had been a co-owner of the doomed Dallas Texans who’d played in the Cotton Bowl for part of 1952 before being taken over by the NFL.
“I told him I was considering a team name,” said Lamar. “And I really liked the word ‘Texans’ because it was descriptive of where the team played and there was some history to it. I asked him if he would have any objection to our using the name, in terms of copyright or anything like that. And he said, ‘Heck no! I’ve been having nightmares about that name for seven years, and I’ll be happy to get it off my back.’”
So the franchise had a name. At a league meeting later that fall, the issue of team colors came up. “I had my heart set on Columbia blue,” said Lamar. “It was my favorite color. And in one of the earlier meetings, we didn’t have much to do or think about, and someone said, ‘Well, we’ve got 15 minutes before lunch; why don’t we decide team colors?’ And I said, ‘Okay, good.’ And Bud Adams said, ‘Okay, I’ll speak first—I’d like Columbia blue as my principal color.’ And my jaw almost hit the floor.” Lamar settled on red and gold, a combination he had always liked, and soon set out to find a head coach.
His first few stops were in Norman, Oklahoma, to woo the legendary Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson, who’d already won three national championships and was, at the time, the most respected college coach in the country. Wilkinson had been courted by the pros before, but he recognized Lamar’s wealth and enjoyed the young man’s respectful manners. Lamar had brought Rose Mary up to visit at one point in the fall, further ingratiating himself with Wilkinson.
Lamar offered Wilkinson more than he was making at Oklahoma, but after weeks of talk, the coach balked, sending a telegram to Lamar at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas: “TRIED TO PHONE. DEPTH OF OBLIGATION TOO GREAT TO BREAK AWAY. AM GRATEFUL FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION AND TRUST YOU UNDERSTAND LETTER FOLLOWS BUD.”
On October 30, Lamar flew to New York to talk to Tom Landry, the cerebral assistant for the New York Giants, on a weekend the Giants were home, about to stifle the Green Bay Packers, 20–3. The interview didn’t go well—Landry was even more reticent than Lamar, and was skeptical of the new league. Additionally, he had already been contacted by Clint Murchison, intent on hiring Landry for Dallas’s pending NFL franchise.
A week later, Lamar visited Wilkinson one last time, before finally accepting the coach’s definitive no. Flying back from Norman, in the private plane with his friend Bob Wilkes, Lamar admitted that he “didn’t have a clue” now whom he could hire to be his coach. Wilkes brought up Hank Stram, the well-regarded college assistant who’d worked at Notre Dame, Purdue, and SMU in the ’50s, before moving onto Miami.
Lamar had only met Stram once—in the locker room at SMU, after a Mustang win in 1956—but had heard from others at the school about Stram’s reputation as a bright, innovative thinker. Stram was a plump, prideful, chattering man, a dandy bantam with a prematurely balding pate who had inherited from his father a haberdasher’s attention to detail; he never left home without seeing that his shoes were shined, often sporting one of the hundred or so suits in his closet. Behind the style, the self-regard, and bluster, Stram had demonstrated an uncommon mastery of the technical details of football. The two hit it off almost immediately, a perfectly mismatched pair.
After the initial meeting in Miami in November, Lamar called Stram in December and flew him to Dallas to offer him the job. Stram took a cab downtown from Love Field to meet with Lamar in his offices at the Mercantile Bank Building. Late that afternoon, as Lamar was preparing to drive Stram back to the airport, he first needed to make two more calls before they left. He asked Stram if he would go over to a nearby parking lot and pick up his car, so they could head to Love Field as soon as possible. It was parked several blocks away (the parking lot was both less expensive than the lots closer to the building and offered the added benefit, as Lamar saw it, of exercise walking to and from). When Stram went to pick up the car, he was shocked to find, rather than a Rolls or a Cadillac, Lamar’s eight-year old Oldsmobile 88, with a dent on the outside and the same hole in the seat cushion that for years had caused Rose Mary such embarrassment. On Stram’s way out of the lot, the parking-lot attendant yelled to him, “Don’t forget to tell Mr. Hunt that I still want to buy his car!”
By the fall of 1959, the city of Dallas was mobilizing for the war between the leagues, the teams, and, not incidentally, the two best-known oil families in the community. Among the press, both Hunt and Murchison were well liked, though they cut far different public figures. While Lamar was sincere and polite, Murchison evinced a sharp, wizened wit. A writer for Sports Illustrated asked what he thought of the perception that the NFL’s heavy-handed tactics made Lamar and the AFL the underdog. “I’ll be damned,” Murchison said. “You’re the first person I ever heard call a Hunt an underdog!”
“There was an immediate contrast between them,” said Gary Cartwright, who covered the Texans for the Dallas Times-Herald. “They’re the sons of the two richest guys in Texas, and one—Clint—is so outgoing and urbane, while Lamar looks and acts like the guy next door.”
The Texans took out the lease on the corner of the North Central Expressway and Yale Boulevard, the same spot where Lamar had earlier operated Zima-Bat. They built a movable building for a locker room and auxiliary team facility, housing Stram and his coaching staff along with trainer Wayne Rudy, hired away from SMU. (The Cowboys, for their part, would wind up practicing across the Trinity River at Burnett Field, with its dilapidated locker room, home to a succession of minor-league baseball teams.)
During the fall of ’59 and throughout the first half of 1960, Lamar was often flying to meetings or traveling in Texas for speaking engagements. Though he seemed timid and mortified in his first press conferences, he grew more comfortable in front of a microphone. He was not a natural speaker, but he eventually gained confidence, on the strength of his disarming ability to laugh at himself as well as his persona, which was very much that of a fan who just happened to have the means to buy his own team. He possessed a few lines that he would repeat at every speech, one of them playing off of the widespread belief that George Halas had engineered the NFL’s belated move for a Dallas franchise. “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Lamar would say, “that there’s a team called the Halas Cowboys.” Lamar invariably closed by mentioning that he had a season-ticket order pad in his pocket.
“The great coup that I thought we had is that the Cowboys came out and announced that their ticket prices would mirror the college football ticket prices, which were $3.90, that was SMU,” said Lamar. “We came in at 10 cents above them, at $4, which showed that we were more major league than they considered themselves to be—we were the established highest ticket price in town. There wasn’t a thing in the world they could do about it, once we had said four dollars. They couldn’t go back and say, ‘Well, we’re going to charge four dollars, too.’”
The Spur Club, consisting of businessmen who helped with the season-ticket drive, was formed late in 1959, and held its first function in January at the Memorial Auditorium in Dallas. Later in the year, the team inaugurated the Texan Hostesses, a group of thirty comely women, mostly teachers, hired to help with the summer season-ticket push. That summer, the Texan Hostesses could be seen driving around the city in the new French imports, Renaults, with the team’s emblem on the doors. At a small conference room in the Texan offices, announcer Charlie Jones led the Hostesses, and other members of the sales staff, through the Dale Carnegie course.
“There was a lot of talk about it, but not much wild excitement” said the radio announcer Bill Mercer, who would call the Texans games on KRLD radio in 1960. “It was kind of funny around town. The view was sort of like, These two rich guys. And there was some question about who was going to win. You knew two teams couldn’t make it.”
While the teachers were an effective means to get the attention of the business community, Lamar’s other hires were less assured. The team’s first general manager, the robust sporting goods executive Don Rossi, had no previous experience in pro football, though he’d once been a high school coach and later a college official. “He worked for Spalding,” said Lamar, by way of explanation, “and he was someone who applied for the job, and he was a good-lookin’, athletic-lookin’ guy and, I thought, Why can’t he be general manager?”
“Don didn’t have any experience,” said Bob Halford, the team’s publicity man. “He had been a coach at Jesuit High school in Dallas, and he’d been an on-field official in the Southwest Conference. But Don was like a lot of the rest of them. He just went to Lamar and applied for the job. All of a sudden, he was a general manager.”
For scouting, the team hired Will Walls, a TCU alum and a former New York Giants end. The handsome, shambling Walls managed to look unkempt even in a suit and tie, but he had a good sense for what kind of man could succeed in pro football. With Lamar, Rossi, and Walls, the Texans managed to assemble a representative core of players, including Abner Haynes, a standout running back at North Texas State; Chris Burford, an All-America end from Stanford; and the versatile back from LSU, Johnny Robinson, who had signed contracts with both the NFL’s Lions and, later, the AFL’s Texans, before a judge’s ruling allowed him the choice to come to Dallas.
Before they embarked on their training camp, the Texans held a public tryout. Stram spotted Lamar in running shorts and football cleats, just stretching his legs ahead of the opening of the tryout. He asked Lamar to run a 40-yard dash and timed him in 5.1 seconds. That prompted Stram to come up with a bar to measure the hundreds in attendance. “Now, you receivers and backs,” he said to the throng of hopefuls. “We’re cutting everybody that can’t run faster than the owner.”
•
One of the enduring mysteries of the birth of the Texans is how and why the club wound up holding its training camp 500 miles from Dallas, at the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, New Mexico. Decades later, even Lamar professed not to remember. “I’m sure there were economic reasons,” he said, “But I can’t remember. We didn’t think about going to exotic places, but I don’t know specifically why Roswell was chosen. It may be probably their rate was good.”
Lamar and Stram had agreed that a spartan setting was appropriate, but no one was prepared for the humid, buggy desolation of Roswell. Chris Burford would recall the stifling summer heat and many on the team “spurning the ‘training table’ food of what must have been war surplus fare left in the commissary of the military school kitchen weeks before we arrived, necessitating an evening journey a couple hundred yards across the campus to the Dairy Queen, kitty corner from the dorms, so we could actually get something edible, all the while listening to Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and Eddie Arnold through the jukebox music of ‘The Queen’ and with the primary entertainment being the pinball machines to sustain and fire up our competitive senses.”
The prized rookie Johnny Robinson recalled teammate Marvin Terrell, the guard from Ole Miss, having to adjust to his own biases. “Marvin came up there and they had all these colored guys there. They were all drinking out of this—well, we had oranges in a big tub of ice. Marvin came up there and he was watching all those colored guys, and he was dying. Finally he got down and reached in there and said, ‘I don’t give a God damn, I’m so thirsty I’ll drink after anybody.’ That’s how you break the color line.”
The players survived camp, but they nearly didn’t survive leaving Roswell, aboard a chartered DC-6. With equipment manager Bobby Yarborough loading up the team’s entire equipment inventory in the plane’s cargo hold, the rest of the gear had to be stored in the first few rows of the plane. Smokey Stover, the rangy, well-liked linebacker, was sitting near the front when he heard the captain tell Rossi that the plane was carrying more weight than it should. Rossi told him not to worry, that he would be “personally responsible.”
“I remember thinking, ‘What good is you being ‘personally responsible’ going to be if we all die?’” said Stover. The plane lumbered down the runway and just cleared the trees to the East of the Roswell Army Air Field.
“When the flight landed, the pilot came out of the cockpit, just drenched in sweat,” said Stover, “and said ‘I’m never going to do that again.’”
On July 30, 1960, Lamar prepared to board a commercial plane in Dallas to San Francisco, where the Texans would play their first exhibition game, against the Oakland Raiders. He ran into a friend—the fellow sports fanatic Bill McNutt from Corsicana, whom he had seen at numerous SMU football and basketball games in the ’50s.
“Why are you going to San Francisco?” Lamar asked.
“I’m going to see your football team!” proclaimed McNutt happily. McNutt’s Collin Street Bakery was just then expanding its reach beyond north Texas, as an innovator in telemarketing and mail-order sales, turning the deluxe fruitcake into an annual holiday staple; but he and Lamar hit it off not over business but football—the chain-smoking McNutt had played in college at Vanderbilt, and he was like Lamar in that he thought nothing of traveling halfway across the country to see a game he wanted to watch.
Before this first game in franchise history, which the Texans won on a touchdown catch by Chris Burford, McNutt took a sequence of pictures scanning the interior of Kezar Stadium (the Raiders had yet to secure their own facility in Oakland), showing Lamar standing in front of an acre of empty seats. The crowd, announced at 13,000, might have been half that amount. But the adventure had started. There would be plenty of friends and acquaintances around Lamar, but McNutt—along with Kemble, Richey, Rupe, and a handful of others—remained in the inner circle. Lamar’s life had changed drastically over the previous year, and the people with whom he felt the most comfortable were the same ones he knew best before he became a public figure.
After preseason games in Oakland, Boston, Tulsa, Abilene, and Little Rock, the Texans returned home to Dallas for their final preseason game, a charity benefit in the tradition of the Salesmanship Club exhibition games that were an annual staple at the Cotton Bowl in the 1950s. Over 50,000 fans showed up to greet the new team, which ran on the field wearing white pants, red jerseys with white numerals trimmed in gold, and red helmets, with the silhouette of the state of Texas on the sides in white and a gold star, approximating Dallas’s location, inside the state. They won again, to go to 7–0 on the preseason.
Five days later, Lamar received a note from his stepmother, Ruth. “Because your dad may never tell you this,” she wrote, “I just want you to know that he is very proud of you. Last Friday night it started raining before we reached Fair Park, but that didn’t slow us down, and throughout the entire evening he literally beamed. He does realize that what you have accomplished is remarkable. He may be a man of very few words but he surely does recognize that you are wonderful. Everyone is so proud of you, Lamar, and let me just thank you again for always being so sweet to us. Affectionately, Ruth.”
The Texans played their first regular-season game in Los Angeles against the Chargers, in front of just 17,724 fans in the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum. Behind the runs of Abner Haynes, Dallas took a 20–7 halftime lead. As the teams were coming off the field at the half, Lamar fell into step with Stram and said, “Boy, I hope we don’t beat them too bad. I don’t want to make them look bad in their home opener.” As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he felt a sense of unease. It was well founded: The Chargers rallied to win the opener, 21–20. “I learned at that first game that you do not ever let up in pro football,” he said later. “You do not ever feel sorry for your opponent; you play ’til the game is over, and whatever the score is, it is.”
The home opener against the Chargers two weeks later drew 42,000, though a large portion were the thousands of boys in the end zone general admission areas, brought in as part of the Optimists’ Club ‘Friend of the Boy’ Day. In the two-team town, the Texans would never drew as many fans for a game again, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The promotion ideas, many of them from Lamar himself, were numerous. “He was always outwardly calm,” said Bob Halford, the team’s first publicity director. “But he could get excited about the smallest idea, and would be off and running.”
For $1, children junior-high age and younger could get a Huddle Club membership, entitling them to free admission to all games, an official Texan T-shirt, and a “contract” with the team. Adult shoppers at Wrigleys Supermarkets in Dallas making a $10 purchase could buy one Texan ticket at face value and get another one free. On September 30, the Cowboys played a home game on Friday, and that week, for their home game two days later against the New York Titans, the Texans offered high school students free admission “if you present the torn ticket stub from any high school game you have attended this week.”
It was also “Friend of the Barber Day,” offering free admission “to all Dallas and Fort Worth barbers—wear your smock for free entry.” This was Lamar’s idea. “After all,” he reasoned, “who talks to more people than a barber?” The crowd was announced at 37,500, though by some estimates at least half of those were high school students, and people granted entry wearing cook’s aprons, lab coats, even women in their husbands’ white dress shirts.
The initial novelty quickly wore off and soon the team was struggling to draw 20,000 fans. “One of the most discouraging moments for me was after the Texas–Oklahoma game, which is always a sellout in Dallas,” said Lamar. “We played the next day, had eight All-Americans on our team, and obviously had superior personnel to either Oklahoma or Texas. We drew only nine thousand, and you had to start asking yourself where you were going.”
As the crowds diminished for both the Texans and the Cowboys, the two teams moved even more aggressively to ingratiate themselves to the press.
“We’d sit around and talk about it: Who was going to give you the best Christmas present?” said Dan Jenkins, who was writing a column for the Dallas Times-Herald at the time. “The two PR guys were Larry Karl at the Cowboys and Bob Halford at the Texans, and all they wanted to do was take you to lunch and dinner every fucking day. They’d give you binoculars and typewriters and . . . they’d almost offer you a car. It got to be a joke among sportswriters. The teams would say, ‘Okay, here’s the deal: You’re on the team plane, we’re going to New York. We’ll pay for everything we do, or we’ll give $200 a day per diem.’ And they’d ask Sam Blair or whoever, ‘Which do you want?’ And they’d always say, ‘Both.’ Bob was pretty much a march-to-the-sound-of-the-drummer type guy. Whereas Tex and Clint gave Larry Karl carte blanche. He’d buy you a fucking airplane.”
Though much of Dallas was still segregated, the Texans’ best player—and soon their most popular one—was Abner Haynes, the rookie who’d integrated the football team at North Texas State in the late 1950s, and whose surging runs became the team’s surest selling point. The members of the Huddle Club made him a favorite, and, after one Texans game, even the PA announcer singled him out, saying over the Cotton Bowl loudspeakers, “Be careful on your drive out of Fair Park, ladies and gentlemen. The life you save may be Abner Haynes’s.”
But in the 1960 season, it wasn’t the signing of Haynes, and it wasn’t the pending lawsuit with the NFL that would shape the course of Lamar’s career. Instead, it was the decision he made in late September to fire general manager Don Rossi.
Rossi had been assured and affable during the luncheons and radio interviews of the first half of 1960, helping to drum up awareness of and support for the Texans. But as the season began and decisions were being made, his lack of football experience showed.
“Don Rossi didn’t know come here from seven,” said Hunt Oil landman Mack Rankin. “He was a total incompetent.”
There were more problems. There was grumbling over rumors that Rossi had brought a mistress with him to the team’s training camp in New Mexico, and though Lamar never publicly disclosed it, there were also allegations of financial improprieties. “Rossi was an idiot,” said the Times-Herald’s Gary Cartwright. “I remember that there was a lady friend, but Rossi was just totally incompetent. I can’t imagine why he was hired in the first place.”
By the end of the season’s first month, Lamar had grown alarmed about the team’s expenses, which had spiraled far beyond his original estimates. Attendance was lower than expected, player expenses were far higher than he’d originally forecast, and the team’s costs—from Will Walls’s scouting budget to Wayne Rudy’s training supplies to the numerous items requisitioned by Stram—continued to escalate. The question was less about financial wherewithal, which Lamar certainly had, than business soundness. Part of his decision to start a new league was his belief that it could be run prudently as a business. But the hemorrhaging losses in the first season were casting doubt on that notion.
Lamar needed someone he could trust. While he was pleased with Stram’s handling of the team, and confident the Texans’ talent was competitive with the rest of the league, the team as a business proposition was foundering. This wasn’t the oil business, where Hunt Oil had thousands of employees steeped in a company tradition of frugality and fiscal soundness. And it wasn’t Zima-Bat, run by Lamar with a few employees and partners, all of whom were personal friends. No, running a football team, if it was to be done properly, was going to require a true businessman. In his mind, Lamar didn’t need a football man who could josh with cronies all day. He needed someone who could be tough on his behalf. This time, he knew exactly whom to hire.
•
The Hunt Oil accountant Jack Steadman was in Monroe, Louisiana, when he got a call from an unusually direct Lamar late one weeknight in the fall of 1960.
“Jack, I need your help here in Dallas,” Lamar said. “I’m about to fire my general manager and I wonder if you can get here in the morning.”
Jack Steadman, 6-foot-5, 250 pounds, with big feet and an erect bearing, was many things that Don Rossi had not been: He was a straight-arrow, tee-totaling family man who tithed at his Baptist church, studied his Bible, and sang in the church choir.
While Steadman was a product of the new school of accounting (“people think it’s about numbers,” he would say for the rest of his life, “but accounting is just a way to manage and analyze business information”), his corporate approach belonged to a much older tradition of the fiercely loyal company man. He would represent his bosses with bulldog tenacity to both the outside world and, whenever necessary, to others inside the company as well. He had developed a reputation as an uncompromising worker, as well as a worker with paper-thin skin, sensitive to any slights. Mostly, he was smart, loyal, and tough.
After driving all night to get to Dallas, Steadman displayed some of the maddeningly intractable resolve—the same quality would save Lamar millions of dollars in the decades ahead—when he negotiated his contract. Already receiving a raise from $12,000 to $15,000 to move from Penrod Drilling to the Texans, with an assurance from Lamar that if the team failed, he could have his old job back, Steadman argued for an additional $500 per year to offset the $500 he was giving up by leaving his post as choir director of the Ross Avenue Baptist Church in Dallas. Lamar made the announcement at a press conference in early November.
Inevitably, Steadman’s attention to cost-control would run afoul of Stram’s quest to build a first-class football team. Steadman had anticipated as much and brought it up to Lamar before taking the job. “I said to Lamar, ‘I’m not the football guy,’” Steadman said. “‘If Hank wants to deal with you, that’s fine. But when it comes to cost control, he needs to report to me. And you need to tell him that.’ And Lamar agreed to that. But Lamar never told him.”
Stram soon was complaining about having to fill out extra paperwork and explain himself to Steadman, but Lamar reassured him that he would have everything he needed to field a winning football team.
With Steadman handling expenses as the general manager, the financial picture, though still grim, began to stabilize, and Lamar turned his attention to the myriad small details that captivated him. “He walked into my office one day, and told me that the AFL and NFL standings in our game program the previous week were an eighth of an inch off center,” said Bob Halford, who examined the page and discovered Lamar was right. “He would never interfere with Hank Stram’s coaching, but he worries about every tiny detail that might affect the image of the league.”
After two tough late-November losses on the East Coast, the Texans returned home and closed their season with a three-game winning streak, finishing 8–6. But the last three home games were all sparsely attended, and even with Steadman’s help, the team lost nearly $750,000 in its first season.
The problems were felt around the league. The Los Angeles Chargers were drawing so poorly at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum that their AFL title game match-up with Houston was moved to the high school stadium in Houston, Jeppesen Stadium, where the Oilers played their games. The Broncos first ownership group, led by Bob Howsam, lasted just the first year. “We weren’t prepared to lose that kind of money, because we didn’t have it,” he said. The team was sold to a consortium including Cal Kunz and Alan and Gerry Phipps, and remained in Denver. Finances were dire throughout the league, particularly in Oakland and Boston, but the other owners remained, though in some cases just barely. It was around this time that the legendary quote from H. L. Hunt was first reported. Some thought Sid Ziff of the Los Angeles Mirror wrote about it first after cornering H. L. getting off a plane in Los Angeles and asking him if he was concerned about Lamar, who had reportedly lost a million dollars in his first year in pro football. “At that rate,” H. L. replied, “he can only last another 150 years.”
It was a great line. The only problem was the lack of concrete proof that H. L. Hunt ever actually said it. In the end it didn’t matter—it was repeated often, like a mantra about the AFL’s staying power—and if it provided some reassurance to those involved, all the better. But Lamar was convinced his father never uttered the words. “My dad would never say something like that,” he said. “And the numbers were overly flattering anyway.”
Back in Dallas, Will Walls was relieved of his duties after this first season with the Texans. Walls was a legendary figure in scouting circles, as much for his prodigious appetites and hard-headed nature as for his sharp eye for talent. “He was a great scout, when you could find him,” said Mack Rankin. “He would go away and disappear for a week, and be drunk in a motel room. So I think it was about then that Lamar decided he needed some help.”
With two leagues competing for players, the job now required more than the ability to discern players’ talents. Early in 1961, Lamar replaced Walls by hiring Don Klosterman away from the Chargers, and made him the team’s head talent scout (two decades later, the same job would be known in football circles as “director of player personnel”). Klosterman, the magnanimous former quarterback from Loyola Marymount (whose skiing accident in the ’50s ended his playing career), was a movable feast, a witty, nattily dressed charmer who was also a sublime raconteur in the occasional dark art of player signing. Sitting with the announcer Howard Cosell in a Beverly Hills lounge once, Klosterman called to a friend, “Hey, come over here and help me listen to Cosell.” But Klosterman was more than good company; he was a great scout and, in the parlance of sales, a consummate closer.
“He had a Rolodex that wouldn’t stop, and he knew everybody in the country,” said Gary Cartwright. “That was a turning point for the franchise.”
In the cat-and-mouse game of player recruitment, the self-proclaimed “Duke of Bel-Air” was an expert at coercion. But not the only one. Lamar also called on the Hunt Oil landmen Mack Rankin and Jim Beavers. They had both grown up in the small east Texas town of Gladewater, gone into the military, and come out with a sense of confidence and what passed for worldliness. They could talk to people and were unquestionably loyal and skilled at earning trust quickly. Rankin possessed a homespun charm and an earthy sense of humor. They had one other key quality. They understood sports. They didn’t need coaching—they knew they would need to ingratiate themselves to young athletes, and do whatever it took to sign young players to an AFL contract before they signed with the National Football League. It wasn’t a twelve-month-a-year job, but it was fulltime when they were on it. Rankin once spent a night in a rental car, in December 1960, waiting outside of the apartment of Fred Arbanas, whom the Texans selected in the 1961 draft, to make sure an NFL scout didn’t abscond with Arbanas in the middle of the night. Rankin helped sign Ohio State’s huge All-American lineman Jim Tyrer, as well as SMU’s Jerry Mays. Rankin lost a few too—TCU’s Bob Lilly signed with the Cowboys, and the University of Texas standout Joe Don Looney wound up with the Giants—but most of the players he recruited signed with the Texans.
Rankin proved a good complement to Lamar’s polite reserve. Sitting up in the hotel in San Francisco, the week leading up to the East–West Shrine game, Lamar was up much of the night talking to Texas Tech All-America E. J. Holub about the different elements of his contract, the oil business, the ranch on which E. J. grew up, and the state of college football in the Western Athletic Conference. At one point, Rankin pulled Lamar aside and promised that if he would only leave, he and Beavers could close the deal. “Lamar kept bringin’ up shit,” said Rankin. “Lamar wanted to help, he wanted to work. But he was not a natural salesman.” The moment when the talking stops and the deal gets made—that was not a turn Lamar was comfortable making.
As the team prepared its publicity campaign for 1961, Lamar sprung for a $75,000 four-color glossy brochure mailing. Though much of Dallas remained racially segregated in both attitude and fact, Abner Haynes’s success proved that at least a portion of the city’s fans would embrace a black star. On the Texans’ foldout promotional poster, Haynes was front and center, larger than any other player, silhouetted with the red state of Texas in the background. His was the picture on the team’s schedule card, and he was a co-captain, alongside running back Jack Spikes, in the Texans’ Huddle Club.
Many of Lamar’s college teammates and fraternity brothers belonged to the Spur Club—and Lamar himself sold 110 season tickets in 1960, to earn the right to wear the red blazer with the spur and Texans emblem on the breast pocket. Even as the Texans were struggling to find a broad following, the monthly luncheons—catering to the most fiercely loyal and involved fans—were well attended. At one luncheon, middle linebacker Sherrill “Psycho” Headrick bolted out to the dance floor to do The Twist, prompting eight supporters to get up and join in, with each winning a free ticket to the Texans’ first home game of the fall.
Right before another luncheon, emcee Roger Blackmar called for the invocation and saw two different pastors rise from their seats. As Blackmar looked on helplessly, realizing that somehow the Texans had double-booked for the event, Lamar stood up at the dais and quickly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to flip a coin, to see who will kick and who will receive.” After the laughter subsided that’s what happened: One minister gave the invocation, the other the benediction. “Lamar was always thinking football,” said Blackmar.
In public, the 1961 season—which featured a bright 3–1 start, then a brutal six-game losing skid, was more of the same. Lamar remained the earnest, optimistic champion of football in Dallas and the American Football League. The mantra “Go Texan!—Go American!” was stamped on all Texans’ merchandise and stationery. He continued attending SMU games whenever he could on Saturdays and joined the Texans’ staff for their weekly bowling outings on Monday nights.
But behind the public cheer, his marriage was falling apart. Rose Mary blanched at the high-profile, high-pressure role of being the wife of a public figure, choosing more often to stay home with Lamar, Jr., who was just starting his first year in kindergarten, and the three-year-old Sharron.
Lamar and Rose Mary had both grown up sheltered, having things their way. Though their early married life hadn’t been idyllic, they had managed, finding a rough equilibrium. But the strain of raising two children wore on Rose Mary, as did Lamar’s hectic schedule. Chris Burford and his wife were invited to the Hunts for dinner one night in 1961, and Burford didn’t notice Rose Mary’s poise or beauty, only her frazzled state. “She just seemed very fragile,” he said.
They groped for a way to rescue the relationship; Rose Mary was pregnant again in 1961, but miscarried that September. She was still carrying the dead fetus that October, when they were joined by two other couples for a flight to Buffalo. “We went out to Buffalo that fall, and she was just hounding him on the plane,” said one friend. “Lamar was a gentleman, he wasn’t going to make a scene, but you could tell that it tore him up.”
In the hotel room near Niagara Falls, where the group stopped Friday night, a bereft Lamar, searching to find the words, said, “I don’t think I love you anymore.” It was all he could muster in the way of an explanation. Back home, the days and evenings were terse, largely mute. Lamar occupied himself with the children when he was home, and the two grew further apart.
“You did not talk about feelings in those days,” said Rose Mary. “If you had them, you certainly didn’t discuss them.”
Finally, late in the fall of 1961, Lamar packed up a few things and moved out. He called his sister Caroline and asked if he could move into her house for a few weeks. It was one of the rare instances when he confided in a family member about a serious personal matter. “I’m a happy person,” he told Caroline. “But I don’t feel happy when I go home.”
After a few weeks with Caroline and, later, with Al and Margaret, Lamar wound up in the apartment complex that he and his brothers owned on Bahama Drive. It had been a popular spot, with tenants including Dallas Times-Herald columnists Blackie Sherrod and Dan Jenkins, Don Klosterman and his wife, and several of the Texans players. Jenkins was impressed at once with his affability and his naïvete, best exemplified by the week Lamar got his first car with power windows.
“So he came over to the apartment one night,” Jenkins said. “He wanted to show me his new car. Knocked on the door, came in, we talked a while, then he said, ‘Come see my new car.’ Went outside and, I forgot what kind of car it was, but he said, ‘Watch this!’ He pushed the button and the window came down. I said, ‘Lamar, everybody on the sports staff at the Herald has one of those!’”
Slowly, the word got around that Lamar and Rose Mary had separated. One of their friends, Al Flannes, said the couple never recovered from the emotional toll of Rose Mary’s miscarriage. But there were signs that the problems went deeper. “He had a hard time being intimate,” Rose Mary said. “He needs a real relationship that is very going and coming and happy and loud and lots of people and all that. And I had two babies at home, and he just didn’t want me to stay home with them.”
On the field, the 1961 season turned irrevocably on November 3, 1961, a chilly Friday night in Boston, when the Texans, storming from behind, moved close to the Patriots’ goal line with time running out. On the last play of the game, Cotton Davidson spotted Chris Burford on a look-in pattern in the end zone, but the ball was deflected by a Patriots fan who’d run onto the field during the play. Somehow, the referees hadn’t seen the intruder and ignored Davidson’s apoplectic protest. Stram grew incensed two days later when he saw the evidence on the coaches film, but Lamar asked him not to say anything to the press. Lamar was as furious as Stram, but he also knew that publicly pointing out the egregious nature of the error would only underscore the AFL’s reputation as a second-class league. Instead, he wrote a note to Joe Foss’s office:
Our coaches are highly critical of the officials who did not see this spectator join the Patriot [defensive] backfield just before the ball was snapped. It is hard to visualize why they didn’t see him but my position is, unfortunately, they just didn’t. The whole point of this letter is that I feel you should demand that the Patriots construct a wire fence (as was done in Houston) to keep fans off the field. To say that our coaches, players, and staff feel we were cheated of a fair opportunity to win this game would be an understatement; however, the solution is not with officials or newspaper protests, but rather an edict from you that the Patriots correct this problem.
It was an early instance, the first of many, when Lamar put the interests and reputation of the league above his concerns for his own team. It mystified Stram, who knew just how competitive Lamar was, but couldn’t fully appreciate how much Lamar felt responsible for the league as a whole.
The season ended at 6–8, as the Texans won three of their last four and Lamar ignored fans calling for Stram’s firing. But Lamar was growing profoundly concerned over the fate of the league as a whole, as well as the long-term prospects for the Texans, who had lost $735,000 in 1960 and another half-million in 1961. Jack Steadman sat down with Lamar after the 1961 season and told him that the prospects were grim. The team was not making significant inroads into the Dallas market—season ticket sales had declined, despite the best efforts of the Spur Club and the Texan Hostesses—and the battle between the Texans and the AFL’s Cowboys for the loyalty of Dallas football fans was being fought to an expensive stalemate. By the end of ’61, there was a pall over much of the AFL. When the league convened for its annual meetings on January 8 at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego, the mood was decidedly gloomy.
Lamar showed up at the El Cortez just in time to hear Harry Wismer being paged in the lobby. He’d seen the ruse before and knew that very shortly Wismer would emerge from near the banks of pay phones to accept the call (which he’d surreptitiously placed to himself), then talk loudly for a few minutes about some real or imagined deal. Lamar remembered when he was thrilled to have Wismer join the league, but he’d grown weary of the man’s bluster and heavy drinking.
The first day’s session was contentious. The Chargers’ Sid Gillman continued to press Bud Adams and the Oilers to end the segregated seating at Jeppeson Field in Houston, while Adams assured the owners that when the team moved into a new stadium there would be no segregated seating.
Jay Michaels of MCA—the talent agency that was helping the AFL with its TV negotiations—gave the report on the ABC-TV deal, noting that the AFL’s rating suffered in its second year, for which he cited a range of factors including “the poor press received by the Titans in New York City,” thus prompting yet another testy exchange with Wismer.
At one point, the owners in executive session went around the room and revealed their operating losses from the previous season. “How can anyone be proud to have lost a million dollars?” exclaimed the Raiders’ Wayne Valley. “I propose that we rename this league ‘The Foolish Club,’ because that’s what we are.” Everyone laughed, ruefully, at the time. But it was Lamar who seized on the phrase and began using it in the Christmas cards he sent out to the other AFL owners.
The best news of the meeting was Cal Kunz’s announcement that the Broncos were changing their team colors to orange and white for the 1962 season and doing away with the vertically striped brown-and-yellow socks, which prompted unanimous, sustained applause.
After the league meetings, Steadman sent Lamar a memo in which he mentioned that he was being pressured by family members over the team’s losses. The tax laws were such that if a new enterprise didn’t show a profit by the fifth year, it would be considered a hobby, and all previous tax breaks would be reversed. “I know you do not want to leave Dallas, nor do I,” he said, “but the Cowboys have the NFL behind them, and it doesn’t matter to the League whether they are successful or not. But you are the Founder of the AFL and you need to have a successful franchise and continue as the leader for the League. Dallas is not big enough to support two pro football teams. We cannot continue to tell the other owners that the League will be successful unless we take action to make the Texans a successful franchise. We need to find a city that wants us and where we can build our operation without local competition.” Lamar did not respond immediately, but from that point on, the question of the Texans long-term survival in Dallas became a question that preoccupied him.
The 1962 season dawned with some new hope. Stram, who had coached quarterback Len Dawson at Purdue as a collegian, saw him in 1961, and told him he still felt he could be a terrific quarterback. Dawson had played five years in the NFL, mostly on the bench, and watched his skills and confidence erode during that time. Stram told Dawson that if he could ever get out of his NFL contract, the Texans would sign him. After his second season on the bench in Cleveland, Dawson asked Paul Brown for his release and Brown agreed to do it. Right before the ’62 training camp, Dawson signed with the Texans.
“After a while, I had serious doubts of my ability,” said Dawson. “In five years in the NFL, I never played two games in a row. I never started and finished a game. I had to ask myself why. One conclusion was that I wasn’t good enough.” Shocked in the early weeks of training camp by Dawson’s sloppy fundamentals, Stram overhauled his quarterback’s footwork, throwing motion, and follow-through. He restored Dawson’s confidence and by the time the Texans began the ’62 season, Dawson had supplanted Cotton Davidson as the team’s starter.
Days before the season began, Lamar—ever sensitive to the league as a whole—engaged in his single instance of owner meddling. To the Oakland Raiders, who were struggling to stay in business and bereft of a quality quarterback, Lamar traded two-year-starter Davidson (who had been the MVP of the league’s 1961 All-Star Game) for the Raiders’ first-round choice in the ’63 draft. After making the trade, Lamar asked Steadman to give Stram the news.
Stram, “absolutely furious” at the time, even briefly considered quitting over the deal, and wouldn’t speak to Lamar for days. Lamar fretted for the rest of the season, though he was convinced it was the right deal both for the league and for the team. Stram had been prepared to carry three quarterbacks on the team—Dawson, Davidson, and rookie Eddie Wilson—virtually unprecedented in the days of the thirty-six-man roster. Besides being a veteran backup, Davidson was one of the league’s better punters and, in his absence, the punting job went to Wilson, who was one of the league’s worst—finishing last in the league with an average of just 36.0 yards per punt. But the team, with Dawson at the controls and Abner Haynes radiant in the backfield, proved an offensive revelation, averaging nearly 28 points a game, and jumping out to a 6–1 start.
Yet even with the on-field success, the Texans’ gate wasn’t improving. The announced figures were largely fiction, and it would be years before Lamar realized how bad things were. “We averaged 10,100 paid per game, and the Cowboys averaged 9,900 paid per game. So, what a hollow victory that was. Both of us were going straight to the poorhouse with the attendance we drew, and we did it with a 3,000-season-ticket sale and every kind of promotion we could think of.”
Quietly, Lamar and Steadman continued discussing the possibility of moving the franchise. As late as October 18, Steadman had grown more cautious, urging Lamar to stay in Dallas and possibly sell shares in the franchise to help offset his losses, reasoning that a new market would not solve the team’s problems. “I feel our chances here are as good if not better,” Steadman wrote. “Our biggest competitor is television rather than the Cowboys, although they are a factor, and we cannot get away from television. I would have to see a large season-ticket sale with a big stadium at a low rental plus concessions before I would be in favor of a move.”
For much of the fall, the only candidate was the city of New Orleans. The city was starved for pro football, and Lamar already had a connection, with the glib, well-connected insurance salesman named David Dixon. Dixon had offered to serve as a broker, though in this he had already faltered. He had originally hoped to persuade the board of directors at Tulane University to grant the team the right to play in Tulane Stadium, the site of the Sugar Bowl, but he couldn’t gain provisional approval for the use of the stadium. By the time he met with Lamar and Steadman, at Steadman’s house in Dallas on the evening of Friday, November 9, Dixon was talking about having the team play in a high school stadium at New Orleans City Park until other arrangements could be made.
At the dinner meeting at Steadman’s house, Dixon produced a typed agreement that night, which guaranteed that he’d find a place for the team to play in New Orleans in 1963, in exchange for a one-fourth interest in the team. Growing concerned that Lamar might actually sign the document, Steadman animatedly—and perhaps heavy-handedly—interceded, insisting, “Lamar, we need to discuss this first.” Over Dixon’s protestations, Lamar finally consented to think about it for a few days rather than agree to anything on the spot.
Later in the weekend, Lamar confided in Mack Rankin, whose area included Lafayette and New Orleans, and who probably knew more oilmen in Louisiana than in Texas.
“Lamar, you’re gonna make the biggest mistake of your life,” warned Rankin. “Everything down there is a payoff. You have not ever paid off one nickel in your life, to anybody for anything, other than it wasn’t above-the-table business transaction. And you’re gonna end up down there, and the first thing that’s gonna happen to you is you’re not going to pay off the police, you’re gonna get out there and there’s not gonna be any traffic control in the place. The next thing you know, the concession people, you haven’t paid off them, and you’re going to get to the game and you’re not gonna have any concessions. It’s gonna be one thing right after another one. Besides that, you’re gonna be hounded by every politician down there to pay ’em off, but you’re gonna want to get improvements to the stadium, or do this or that or whatever. You’re gonna have to pay somebody off to get it done. You’re making a terrible mistake.”
Lamar looked pained. And then he gently admitted the rest of the deal. “I’d also be giving Dave Dixon a quarter-interest in the club.”
Rankin, already forceful, turned apoplectic.
“Jesus Christ! This guy is nothing but a goddamn promoter!” said Rankin. “Doesn’t have a nickel in the deal. All he did is he went out and made a deal with Tulane and got a five-year option for a lease on the stadium. Lamar, this is just exactly what I’m telling you about, what you’d have to deal with down there. You’d have to give him a 25 percent interest in the team, and he don’t have to put up any money. Now you tell me if that’s a good deal?”
Though he didn’t commit to anything that week, Lamar was not optimistic about his choices, and was pretty sure he’d need to move the franchise somewhere prior to the next season. Meanwhile, with Dawson en route to AFL Player of the Year honors, Haynes about to set a pro single season record for touchdowns, and Kansas fullback Curtis McClinton sweeping to the AFL Rookie of the Year award, the youthful Texans were about to win their first Western Division title. Though the Broncos began sharply, Dallas defeated them on the road on November 18, with Dawson hitting Tommy Brooker on a 92-yard pass play to break open a close game. A week later they clinched their first division title and a chance to play their home-state rivals in Houston for the 1962 AFL title. But first there would be the final home game at the Cotton Bowl, against the San Diego Chargers. With the Western Division title wrapped up, the advance ticket sale was even lower. While having dinner in Dallas the night before the game, Lamar and Chargers’ owner Barron Hilton joked about locking the gates and just watching the game themselves, from opposite sides of an empty stadium. The next day, though, Lamar thought better of it, and the Texans faced the Chargers in front of another small crowd, announced—inevitably—at 10,000.
A broad confluence of events worked in the favor of the 1962 AFL Championship Game, making it a watershed moment in AFL—and pro football—history. The game was going to be played at the site of the Eastern Conference champion, which meant that Houston’s cozy Jeppeson Stadium would be packed. The AFL had successfully gambled that the game wouldn’t be challenged by a divisional playoff game in the NFL (the older league allowed for a week in the schedule between the end of the season and the championship game, to allow for any tiebreaking playoffs, like the one the Giants used to beat the Browns in 1958). So there were no other pro football games being played that weekend.
For the writers covering the AFL title game, there was a bonus: The fourth annual Bluebonnet Bowl, played in Houston’s Rice Stadium the day before, featured Missouri against Georgia Tech, and brought in more writers from the Midwest and Southeast, who could piggyback the two games in a single weekend trip.
As December 23, 1962, rose chilly and overcast in Houston, weather was dreadful all up and down the East Coast. And the television competition that Sunday was spectacularly bad: Among the scant offerings were several holiday-themed shows, including the NBC Opera presentation of Menotti’s Amahi and the Night Visitors, Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, reruns of Ozzie and Harriet, and game shows.
Lamar, Lamar, Jr., Bunker, Herbert, and some friends were in the corner of one end zone, about fifteen rows back. In truth, Lamar’d had the option of a few seats in a covered area near the press box but chose to be able to sit with a larger group among the fans. “You see the man in the Western suit who’s up there and warm?” he joked to Tom Richey. “He’s the Oilers owner. The Texans owner is down here with everyone else.”
He was delighted by it, and by the 37,981 that were hemmed into the permanent bleachers and temporary seating at Jeppeson Stadium. The Texans scored early, Haynes catching a pass from Dawson near the sideline and running untouched to the end zone. By halftime, it was 17–0, Dallas. Lamar was hopeful but still guarded, while the rest of the traveling party was beaming in anticipation of a championship. But a blue norther blew in during halftime, and by the time the second half began, it was much colder, with winds in excess of 25 miles per hour. George Blanda and the Oilers worked their way back, as Lamar’s pocket of friends and family grew increasingly worried. Houston had a field-goal opportunity to win the game near the end of the fourth quarter, but the Texans’ Sherrill Headrick blocked it to keep the game tied at 17. A late long pass fell incomplete and the fourth quarter ended in a tie.
Lamar, in the stands, realized the gravity of the moment—it would be only the second overtime game in the history of professional football, and the first since that seminal 1958 NFL title game that he’d watched, transfixed, from his hotel room in Houston. But there was a more urgent concern: Lamar, Jr., needed to go to the bathroom, so Lamar took him quickly as the two sides rested for a moment and prepared for the coin flip to begin sudden-death overtime.
He couldn’t have known that he’d missed a piece of history. In the moments before the coin toss to begin sudden-death overtime, Stram had advised Haynes that if he won the coin toss, he should take the brisk wind. The Texans did win the toss, but when given the choice by the game referee, Haynes replied, “We’ll kick to the clock.” By declaring first that his team would kick, Haynes inadvertently surrendered the choice of which goal to defend to Houston. The Oilers, already receiving, chose to have the wind at their backs. On the sidelines, a frustrated Stram shook off the error and reassured Haynes.
But as Lamar and Lamar, Jr., returned to their seats just a few minutes later, everyone in his group was looking out at the field, in various stages of frustration and bewilderment, while an apoplectic Bunker was hurling epithets at Abner Haynes.
“Get him out of there!” said Bunker, fiery with anger. “What the hell is going on?!”
“I don’t know,” replied Lamar evenly, as he arrived at his seat and looked back out onto the field. “But 50 million people are watching.”
With the wind at their backs, the Oilers threatened throughout the quarter. One drive was ended by Johnny Robinson’s interception, the Texans’ fifth of the day. But late in the quarter, with the Oilers moving into field-goal position, another crucial play swung the momentum. Reserve defensive end Bill Hull picked off George Blanda’s short pass and returned it to midfield. As the sixth quarter began, the Texans finally had the wind at their backs, and began moving the ball. Dawson hit Jack Spikes for a first down on a key third-and-7 play. Then Spikes ran for 19 yards to move the Texans within the Houston 20. Four plays later, Tommy Brooker kicked a 32-yard field goal that ended what was then the longest pro football game ever played, at 77 minutes, 54 seconds.
Entering the locker room, Lamar was overcome with nervous energy. He reached up to an overhanging water pipe and did three quick, joyous chin-ups, then punctuated that with a war whoop. Later, he even took a brief sip of champagne.
“I’ve never seen a team fight for a win like this one did today,” said a proud, champagne-drenched Stram in the locker room. “None of us will ever forget it.” The game became an instant classic, watched by 56 million Americans on ABC. In the Washington Post, columnist Shirley Povich wrote, “The AFL was born at the age of three, so magnificent was this game.”
Lamar had put a terrific team on the field in 1962, and the nucleus of his AFL champions—the youngest team in pro football—promised to be a perennial contender for years to come. But the team had lost money even in its championship season. Looking at the Texans’ own financial numbers and the Cowboys’ slow, but steady emergence, Lamar was convinced that the franchise would continue losing money and, in fact, might never succeed in Dallas. He would have to move.
He kept all this to himself, as he walked into the Hunt Oil offices on Christmas Eve morning, accepting congratulations for the previous day’s big win from almost everyone he saw along the way.
It was a light day with a skeleton crew, and most of the messages on his desk were from friends and business associates offering their congratulations and Christmas wishes.
But there was another message, classified as confidential and extremely urgent: “Please call Mayor H. Roe Bartle in Kansas City.”