On December 26, 1962, Lamar drove to Love Field and boarded a Braniff jet bound for Kansas City. When he arrived at Kansas City Municipal Airport, he claimed his luggage and caught a cab across the Missouri River to the Muehlebach Hotel, where he had reservations under an assumed name. Upon arriving to his third-floor room, he placed a phone call, then took the elevator to the lobby, and exited onto 12th Street, the avenue of mythic nightlife, jazz, and much of Kansas City’s vivid reputation as a town of outlaws and artists.
As Lamar walked to the curb, a blue limousine pulled up. He opened the back door and stepped in.
“Mr. Hunt, it is wonderful to have you visit,” said the 320-pound man with the cigar, extending his hand.
“Thank you, Mayor Bartle,” said Lamar. And with that, the next phase in the undercover courtship of the Dallas Texans by the city of Kansas City began.
Pro football was on the rise across the country. John F. Kennedy was in the White House, the First Family was playing touch football on the lawn in Martha’s Vineyard, and the game had been featured on the cover of Life, Time (“The Sport of the ’60s” read the tagline), and The Saturday Evening Post in the previous year. What H. Roe Bartle and the civic leaders of Kansas City recognized at the time was that pro football was conferring its own big-league status.
If Dallas was convinced it was something special—the business hub of the Southwest, a breed apart for being in Texas—Kansas City, Missouri, in the early 1960s sought respect as a growing, cosmopolitan city. Instead, it was still saddled with its reputation as something of a cow town, and a crooked, nickel-and-dime one at that. In fact, the city had for nearly forty years been on a track of careful urban planning, often with breathtaking results. The Country Club Plaza, designed by J. C. Nichols and modeled after the city of Seville, Spain, was the nation’s oldest shopping district, and its Spanish architecture, the hundreds of fountains and small statues, gave the area a quaint, civilized air. While Kansas City was still butcher for much of the Midwest and had a Ford plant on the east side, it was also less beholden to heavy industry than other Midwestern industrial cities and featured as its number one employer Hallmark Cards.
The city’s predominant characteristic, shared by its mayor—the rotund ball of mellifluous eloquence, H. Roe Bartle—was a mission for self-improvement. Kansas City was earnest about being a major league city. Bartle had risen through the ranks of Kansas City politics with a mix of forcefulness, deal-making, shrewd calculation, and a magnanimous presence. The man who spent many of his nights presiding over a local Boy Scout troop had earned the nickname of “The Chief,” for both his scout work and political accomplishments. Now, late in his political career, he was convinced that bringing a football team to town would clinch Kansas City’s status as a bustling, modern, relevant city.
Bartle had been in Atlanta in the fall of ’62 when he learned that Lamar had visited that city earlier in the year, with an eye to moving the franchise. Typical of his decisive nature, Bartle flew directly to Dallas and presented himself at Lamar’s office, counseling him to consider Kansas City. Lamar demurred at the time, saying he couldn’t risk the public relations disaster of being discovered shopping for a new city while the Texans were still trying to draw fans for the ’62 season. But he said he’d keep it in mind, and Bartle promised him he’d stay in touch. Then the morning after the ’62 championship game, Bartle reached out again.
There were times in his life when Lamar’s penchant for secrecy seemed excessive, even obsessive. But this was one occasion—others would follow in the years ahead—when it was appropriate. From the Christmas Eve phone call in which Bartle renewed his interest to bring the Texans to Kansas City, to Lamar’s visit later in the week, to negotiations in the first part of 1963, the meetings were conducted quietly, urgently, and with a maximum of secrecy. Lamar loved it.
“I was impressed with Mayor Bartle,” Lamar said. “He spoke highly of Kansas City, and I felt he believed what he said even though he said it in a flashy way. We were looking for a home where we would be welcome and he just made me feel that we could do well in Kansas City. I was also impressed with the stadium facilities. I had seen so many bad ones in Boston, Buffalo, and other places.”
When Lamar visited again in January, this time with Steadman, Bartle brought them into his office. From his speakerphone, he called Bill Dauer, head of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, and explained that he had two men in his office whom he couldn’t identify but who represented a pro football team that was considering a move to Kansas City. He wanted to know if Dauer thought the city could support a team. Dauer asked for a few minutes to speak to a friend, and then called back, joined on the line by Ray Evans, former Kansas All-American and head of Traders National Bank. Both were enthusiastic in their response that the city was ready for pro football, and that the community would support a team.
The same day, Bartle took his guests to the Kansas City Club, introducing them to acquaintances as “Mr. Lamar” and “Jack X.” Those curious about the odd name were put off when Bartle confided that “Jack X” was an IRS agent in town exploring cases of income tax evasion. (The ruse was successful because the tall, closemouthed Steadman looked like someone on just such a mission.)
As the furtive negotiations proceeded, Kansas City offered generous terms: A seven-year lease at Municipal Stadium, with the rental for the first two seasons at $1 per year (the Texans had been paying $10,000 per game to rent the Cotton Bowl). In subsequent years, the city would get 5 percent of gross receipts after ticket sales topped $1,100,000, but if they didn’t reach that mark, the $1 per year lease rate would remain in place. The team and the city would share equally in profits from concessions. The city also agreed to install 3,000 more permanent seats—and the option of 11,000 more temporary seats into the stadium—as well as constructing an office building and a practice field for the team. As Lamar and Jack left Kansas City, they had committed to nothing but had the framework for a deal in place.
The Cowboys knew nothing of the Texans’ plans when Steadman called Tex Schramm later in January to set up a private meeting. Steadman told Schramm the team was considering leaving town, and inquired if the Cowboys would like to purchase the temporary locker facility that was built on the grounds of the team’s practice field at North Central Expressway and Yale Boulevard. The Cowboys not only offered to buy the facility, they quietly agreed as well to pay for the Texans’ moving expenses to leave town.
Lamar called a February 8 press conference in Kansas City, announcing that he had entered an agreement with the city of Kansas City to move the franchise there, provided the city could sell 25,000 season tickets by May 15. Taking great pains to thank the fans that had supported the Texans for three seasons, he explained that the time had come to move.
His points were clear, the reasons were self-evident, and he made them again a day later in Dallas, when he confronted the local media, most of whom sympathized with his reasons for making the move. Writing the following day in the Dallas Morning News, Gary Cartwright noted that with the free rental of the stadium and offices, the threshold for breaking even was far less in Kansas City than it would be in Dallas. “The Texans are on their way and so, possibly, is all the bitterness and frustration which has made Dallas a tragic comedy for three years,” Cartwright wrote. “Someone had to go. It’s sad, but it would have been a lot sadder if this insane war had continued.”
The group most shocked by the news may have been the Texans’ players. “Things looked great after we beat Houston,” Chris Burford said. “It was so good we couldn’t wait for the next season to start. We were going to drive those Cowboys out of town. They were getting clocked repeatedly, and we just really felt like we were going to take the town.”
Many players were frankly angry—Jerry Mays threatened to retire—and some of the rest were bewildered about their new home. Len Dawson was with his wife Jackie in Pittsburgh when he heard the news. “I mentioned to some friends that the team was going to Kansas City and they said, ‘Kansas City, Missouri, or Kansas City, Kansas?’ I said, ‘You mean there’s two of them?’ So I had no idea which one. The thought then, particularly back East, was, ‘Man, you’re going to a cow town. They have horses and cattle running in the middle of the main street in the city.’”
After the announcement, Lamar did something he’d never done before and would rarely do again. After a year that saw the dissolution of his most fervent professional dream (owning a pro football team in Dallas) and personal dream (finding a way to preserve his marriage to Rose Mary), he took a step back and left for an extended vacation. He knew that it wouldn’t help to be hovering over the Kansas City proceedings regularly, and he didn’t relish daily encounters with his fellow Dallasites who might try to convince him to keep the team in the city.
He sensed, at a level far deeper than intellectual, that he needed to get away for a time. And with only a vague notion about what he might discover—about himself or the world—he bought a plane ticket to Dublin.
•
For nearly four years straight, Lamar had been working ceaselessly, building a league and also a team, then finding a new home for the team that was, quite clearly, unloved in his hometown. Along the way, he’d lost the belief that he and Rose Mary could ever work out their problems. He’d done everything he could think of to save the relationship, quietly filed for divorce in the spring of 1962, and then grieved for its loss.
Now, as the new year dawned, and he faced the prospect of a fresh start on the football field, he also embarked on a new romance.
In Dublin, Ireland, taking a year of postgraduate study as part of the Rotary Club’s overseas fellowship program, was the woman who had drawn Lamar’s notice from her first days as part of the Texans Hostess Program.
She was the smart, pretty, self-possessed Richardson native Norma Knobel, whose magnetic presence had caused her to finish among the leaders in the ticket-selling contest (her first sale was to her father, who’d taught her to love football at an early age) and made her ideal company at Hart Bowl, for the Texans’ staff Monday night bowling league. “You could see on those bowling nights that Lamar was impressed with her,” said Jack Steadman. “And you could see why—she was impressive.”
A graduate of North Texas State University with a degree in secondary education, she had taken classes with Abner Haynes, and seen the impact of his presence, integrating college football fields all around Texas. After spending her high school years as part of the Richardson High drill team, she had developed a love for sports and the way it served as a social glue for people of different ages and backgrounds. Women liked her, men were drawn to her, and she had become adept at putting people at ease, often while talking about sports.
As one of the Texan teachers driving around town in a Renault, she cut a fetching figure. Lamar had early on noticed her bubbly, infectious enthusiasm. Rose Mary even recalled an evening when the Hunts had a group of Texan employees over for dinner: “He said, ‘I want you to meet this wonderful person, she has the most positive attitude —I want you to try to pick up some pointers from her. Look at her; just watch her.’ So I did, and I thought, ‘She is just so happy. Isn’t that great?’ Didn’t help, though.”
With the divorce set in motion, Lamar had begun casually dating again in 1962. He’d spent some time dating Joan Ryba, one half of the Ryba twins, formerly cheerleaders for Rice, then the Houston Oilers, before winding up in Vegas as part of Dean Martin’s stage act, the “Thunderbird Twins.” He’d briefly been linked with Don Meredith’s first wife, Lynne, who herself was going through a divorce. But very quickly, Lamar began courting Norma. When she left for Dublin in the summer of 1962, he took her to Love Field to put her on the plane, bringing his nephew, Al Hill, Jr., along to meet her for the first time.
Lamar liked it that she wasn’t self-conscious around him and others, the way Rose Mary had been. For Christmas in 1962, when she returned to Dallas for the holidays, he presented her with a gift, a gorgeous cashmere sweater he’d picked out at Neiman-Marcus, in a festive panorama of colors. When she unwrapped it, she was lavish in her gratitude but also forthright enough to gently explain to him that the sweater was at least two sizes too big, but that she’d love it if he could exchange it for one in her size. Then, as the weeks stretched into months with no sign of the smaller sweater, she also had the grace not to pester him about it. (“I said maybe once or so, ‘How’s the sweater coming?’” said Norma. “And Lamar would say, ‘Oh, yeah. I’m gonna work on that.’’’)
Lamar arrived in Dublin that winter with no agenda beyond spending time with Norma. They traveled in and outside the city and watched Kilkenny face Croke in hurling, with the ash sticks swinging at Croke Park. They saw Dublin battling Galway in Gaelic Rules football, and were dazzled by the pandemonium of the fans. And they traveled to Milltown, the legendary stadium in Glenmalure Park where the Shamrock Rovers, the country’s most successful soccer club, played its matches. The Hoops—playing in green and white horizontal stripes—were in their heyday, with a run of domestic championships and night games played in the European Cup competition. Lamar and Norma were in the standing-room-only terrace section, where the tightly packed crowd helped ward off the chill, and he looked on with avid interest at a game that looked so different from the one he’d seen played slowly and sloppily on the Far Fields at The Hill.
He took in the sports, he took in the weather, he took long walks, and he continued to fall irretrievably in love with Norma Knobel. He returned to the states in March (she would remain in Ireland until the summer), caught up on his correspondence (“forgive me, for I’ve been out of the country for much of the past two months”), and then began rebuilding his new life.
Besides the move to Kansas City in the offing, there was other good news from the AFL, though it was not universally recognized as such at the time. Writing in the New York Times after the possibility of the Texans move was announced, Arthur Daley cast a skeptical eye on the bankrupt Titans, Lamar’s wayward champions, and the entire league: “Yet the hopelessness of the Titans and the uncertainties of the Texans make those on the sidelines wonder how much future the A.F.L. was left. The Chargers already have been driven to San Diego from Los Angeles by the Rams. The Oakland Raiders are dead in trying to combat their neighbors, the San Francisco Forty-Niners. Protests to the contrary, the situation has to be shaky.”
But it was about to get much better. Harry Wismer’s tragicomic run as owner of the New York Titans had ended in the fall of ’62, when Wismer ran out of money and the franchise had to be taken over by the league. At that point, Lamar had been convinced that the league should just give up on the market. “I, personally, favored the league moving the team out of New York,” he said. “We had a chance to sell to somebody in Miami, and I didn’t think it was worth staying in New York, playing at the Polo Grounds in front of 5,000 people. I was very short-sighted; I didn’t know how strong a guy Sonny could be.”
Sonny was David A. “Sonny” Werblin, one of the heads of the Music Corporation of America, and the leader of the five-man ownership group that paid $1.3 million to take over the failed Titans franchise. Werblin had given the AFL a hand in securing its first TV deal, with ABC, in 1960, and now bought in as a full partner in the enterprise. He was smooth, understated, calmly self-assured, and wealthy—in short, everything Harry Wismer was not. In the polished persona of Werblin, the entertainment world saw a new breed of showman, less carnival huckster than professional dealmaker. Werblin’s contacts within the industry were a matter of legend; he had negotiated Ed Sullivan’s lengthy CBS deal, as well as represented the likes of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Benny, Andy Williams, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Ernie Kovacs, and scores of others.
As the Giants’ Wellington Mara would put it, “We didn’t know much about Sonny Werblin when he bought the Jets. And we didn’t like what we eventually found out. He was a much more formidable man than Harry Wismer, and we pretty soon sort of knew it meant trouble.”
On April 15, 1963, Werblin announced the launch of the “Gotham Football Club, Inc.”—essentially the reconstituted Titans, now renamed, with plans for a new stadium (Shea Stadium, then under construction in Queens, right next to the site for the 1964 World’s Fair), a new nickname (Jets, which neatly rhymed with Shea’s co-tenant, baseball’s Mets), new colors (green and white, in honor of Werblin’s St. Patrick’s Day birthday), and a new coach (recently deposed Colts leader Weeb Ewbank). Just over a month later, on May 22, Lamar announced that the Texans would move, and by the spring of ’63, two of the AFL’s major problems—the Texans and the Titans—were well on their way to being solvent, profitable franchises.
With the woeful Raiders finishing last in the league in 1962, Lamar’s lone act on the football operations side—the trade of Cotton Davidson to the Raiders—had netted the first overall choice in the AFL draft. The team chose and quickly signed the mammoth Grambling defensive tackle Junious “Buck” Buchanan, about whom Klosterman raved, “He can run a 220 in twenty seconds flat with a goat under each arm.”
Besides Buchanan, the draft included Maxwell Award winner Bobby Bell (whom Stram would call “the best athlete I’ve ever seen”); Michigan State’s bruising guard Ed Budde; the versatile Southern Miss punter Jerrel Wilson (who could also play fullback, tight end, and on special teams); and solid right tackle Dave Hill. It was a landmark draft for the team, one of the greatest in football history, and further established Klosterman as a key player in the Chiefs hierarchy. One of the things Matt Rankin noticed was how comfortable Klosterman was around the black players, whom he seemed at ease with and—even more importantly—was able to put at ease.
“Jim Beavers and I were born and raised in East Texas,” said Rankin. “And didn’t have that California charisma of being able to talk those people’s language. And it definitely was a different language.”
Late in 1962, Klosterman spent a week in Minneapolis with Bobby Bell, the All-American whom everyone assumed would sign with the NFL’s Vikings. “The Vikings and [coach] Norm Van Brocklin just sort of had this attitude like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, he’ll come here,’” said Bell. “But Don Klosterman was a salesman. He said, ‘Bobby, we really want you with us; what’s it gonna take here?’” What it took in this case was Lamar flying up and approving Klosterman’s offer of a five-year, no-cut contract, a rarity even in the days of sky-high bonuses.
Lamar didn’t have all the paperwork with him the day he visited Minneapolis, but he sealed the deal with a handshake with Bell and his advisers, and welcomed Bell to the team. The next day, both Lamar and Bell happened to be on the same flight from Minneapolis to New York. After arriving at Idlewild Airport, they shared a cab ride into the city. “We’re coming out of [the airport], and as we cross the bridge, the cabbie reaches back and says, ‘I need 15 cents for toll,’” said Bell. “Lamar reaches in his pockets and doesn’t have any change, so I hand the guy 15 cents. So we stop at Lamar’s hotel first, and he gets his stuff out of the trunk, and I’m sitting in the car. Then he knocks on the window and says, ‘Hey, Bobby, do you have any cash on you?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash on me; I’m gonna need you to pay for the cab.’ And I said, ‘Oh-kay.’ So now I’m going to my hotel. I jump out of the cab, I run into the hotel, I check in as fast as I can, rush up to my room, and I call back to Minnesota, and I say, ‘Hey! Hey! Hold on, what’s the deal here? I just signed with this guy Lamar Hunt to play there.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, what’s wrong with that?’ And I said, ‘Hey, man—Lamar Hunt’s broke!’”
In Kansas City, despite the massive effort, season-ticket sales had fallen short of the goal of 25,000, but even at 15,182, they set a new record for an AFL team, and on May 22, Lamar made it official, announcing that the team would move to Kansas City.
Throughout that month, Lamar surveyed the hundreds of variations of entries he received in the “Name the Team” contest. There was everything from “Royals” to “American Royals” to “Monarchs” (the moniker of the city’s old Negro Leagues team) to the “Mo-Kans” and “Meat Packers.” The most popular of the 4,866 entries to the contest was to call the team the “Mules,” followed by Royals, Pioneers, Steers, Stars, Mavericks, Plainsmen, Scouts, and Hunters. None immediately swayed Lamar, and for a time, both he and Stram wanted to retain the nickname Texans.
“Lamar, we can not call the team the Kansas City Texans!” Steadman insisted.
Lamar, still sanguine, argued that the Dodgers had kept their name after leaving Brooklyn, and the Lakers had kept their name after moving from Minneapolis.
“It’s a completely illogical argument,” he would admit later, “but I was so wrapped up in the name at the time that it didn’t seem that way. Jack said it would have been a disaster and, of course, he was right.”
Lamar finally succumbed to Steadman’s logic and selected a new name. On May 26, he announced that the franchise would be called the Chiefs, owing to the area’s Native American heritage and, as well, as a nod to Mayor Bartle. A week later, in the kitchen of his Dallas apartment, Lamar sketched out the team’s new logo on a napkin, placing the elongated, interlocking “K” and “C” inside a white arrowhead. Soon enough, the silhouette of the state of Texas came off the red helmets, and the arrowheads went on.
Lamar announced that he would keep his residence in Dallas but spend much of his time during the football season in Kansas City. He persuaded Steadman to move his family to Kansas City, so the team would have an executive presence in the city. Steadman had already spent much of the spring in Kansas City, helping to scout out the location of the team’s new office building and training site, on 63rd Street in Swope Park.
On Friday, June 21, 1963, the staff of the Dallas Texans and the moving vans accompanying the team set out north for Kansas City. “I was crying like a baby as I drove out of town,” said Hank Stram, “just thinking about the fact that we were having to leave. I was the last guy to leave Dallas. Lamar had explained the economics to me. I understood. But I was just hoping against hope that he would change his mind. I felt like Dallas was our town.”
Actually, Lamar would be the last to leave, driving up with Lamar, Jr., as well as Stu and Dale Stram on July 13. On the morning of July 14, the team reported to training camp at William Jewell College in Liberty, about 15 miles northeast of the city.
The team’s initial reception in its new home was largely positive. Before the season, fifty-two different Kansas City companies purchased at least fifty season tickets. In three years in Dallas, only four companies had reached that threshold, and one of them was Hunt Oil. At the first team luncheon, in front of a crowd of 270, Lamar said, “It feels strange to be in a city that does not suffer from an overpopulation of football teams. But it feels good.” Lamar, ever optimistic, was fairly beaming that summer. His football team, reigning champions, were getting a fresh start in a city that seemed glad to have them. Norma had returned from her fellowship in Ireland, and they had started to date regularly. She was along with him for a preseason game against the Oilers, played in Wichita, Kansas, on August 30.
The game was a chance for the team’s impressive rookie class to get work. Few were working harder than Stone Johnson, the Grambling running back who—on a team with the deepest roster of running backs in the league—was also playing on the specialty units. Johnson had been an Olympic sprinter (at the 1960 U.S. Olympic trials, he equaled the world record in the 200-yard dash, running it in 20.5 seconds), but he was determined to prove he wasn’t just a trackman in shoulder pads.
In the first half of the game in Wichita, Lamar was about twenty rows back in the crowd, with Norma, when Johnson made a block on an oncoming defender and, losing his footing in traffic, crumpled up against an Oiler defender, falling to the ground.
Lamar knew instantly that it was bad. He could tell not just from Johnson’s prone form but also from the hasty way that the other players on the field stepped back, and then began motioning furiously for the medical staff to come to the field. But on this muggy summer night, in a small stadium in Wichita, there was no one on either sideline prepared to administer first aid for the convulsive trauma that Johnson had suffered. Lying on the ground, Johnson looked up in horrified fear, unable to move his legs, while his teammates grew more concerned. Stram’s son Hank, Jr., who had befriended Johnson in camp, looked on from the sidelines, tears in his eyes. After a few minutes, Lamar went down to the field himself. “Sometimes, it seems like forever before help comes,” said Abner Haynes. “But this was forever.” There was no ambulance at the stadium, and it took about 20 minutes before one arrived on the scene.
“At that juncture,” said Curtis McClinton, “everyone knew it was serious. And nobody wanted to play football.” The injury, diagnosed as a compression fracture of the cervical vertebrae, left him in critical condition at Wichita General Hospital.
The teams played out the game in a distracted haze. Lamar didn’t wait for the finish but instead followed Johnson to St. Francis hospital. He then made the call to Johnson’s parents in Texas. Late that night, he got through to Stone’s college coach, Grambling’s Eddie Robinson, and delivered the bad news.
“Mr. Robinson,” he said when he reached him at home. “I have some terrible news. Stone Johnson’s been hurt in our game in Wichita. And it looks very serious.”
Back at Wichita’s Veterans Field, the team dressed and got aboard the charter bus heading back to Kansas City. But Stram and some of the players stopped by to visit Johnson at the hospital. Johnson would never leave. He died a week later from complications related to the surgery.
“Lamar stayed,” said Curtis McClinton. “He stayed there with Stone, in the hospital room. He was there the next morning, and he was there a week later when he died.”
In a way, the shock from the incident was felt throughout the season. Buck Buchanan packed up his roommate’s belongings, to be mailed to Johnson’s parents in Texas. At his new home in Kansas City, Stram was left mute by his son Henry’s anguished and repeated question, “Dad, how could he die? It’s only a game.” At the funeral in Texas, as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson watched their son buried, Lamar and several of Johnson’s teammates wept.
Lamar set up a trust fund for Johnson’s parents, and at his behest, the team retired Johnson’s number 33, though he never played a down in the regular season. From there, the team shored up its own safety procedures and tried to move on. Abner Haynes, especially, seemed deeply troubled. He still had his bravado, but there was something missing, some telling sense of abandon in his play that was gone. “Abner was never the same,” said Chris Burford.
Despite the tragedy, the Chiefs began the season in convincing fashion, routing Denver 59-7. For Lamar, game days were distinctly different in 1963, since every game was a road trip. It meant even more travel, but by now that was second nature to Lamar. He’d still frequently fly to SMU or some other big Southwest Conference game on Saturday, then head to Kansas City the night before a Chiefs home game.
He was also, undeniably, transformed by his new relationship, out of his divorce languor and deeply in love with Norma. “He took dancing lessons at Arthur Murray,” said Bill Adams. The courtship of Norma continued through the fall. Jake Cobb, piloting the Hunts’ private plane, quickly noticed that she brought a different air to the festivities. “She was more of a people person than Rose Mary was,” said Cobb. “She made people feel at ease around her.”
There was more to it than that. Norma went beyond an appreciation for the moment. Other women might point to the pageantry of a game, or the sound of a band, but she was an unabashed fan and a quick study, attuned to the technique of the athletes, able to follow some of its strategy. She also gravitated to the good-natured partisanship between the AFL and the older league (of NFL loyalist Tex Maule’s withering dismissals of the AFL in Sports Illustrated, she would recall, “I would read his articles and just practically gag”).
On the first weekend in October 1963, Lamar and Norma went to the Cotton Bowl on a Friday night to watch SMU play Navy, then returned the next morning for the annual rivalry game between Texas and Oklahoma. After the game, they drove to Love Field, where Cobb flew them down to Waco, for the Baylor–Arkansas game. They returned that night, then flew commercial to Kansas City Sunday morning, to watch the Chiefs’ satisfying 28–7 win over the Oilers, in a rematch of the ’62 title game. Back in Dallas on Monday, they went with Chiefs’ talent scout Don Klosterman back to the Cotton Bowl, for the night game between Prairie View A&M and Wiley College. It was not uncommon to see multiple games in a weekend, but even Lamar was impressed that Norma had been game for all five. “We saw a fipple-header!” he declared.
On the trips to Kansas City, they’d often stay in town afterward and have dinner with Stram and his family. Outwardly, Hank and Lamar made an unlikely pair: Stram, raised in poverty, had a striver’s sense of purpose; with his tailored suits and monogrammed shirts, he was exquisitely aware of appearance. Lamar, reared in absolute wealth, was utterly indifferent to the visible trappings and signs of success. For much of 1963, the briefcase he used was a battered in-flight freebie from his trip to Dublin on Irish Airlines. Lamar and Hank called each other “Lad,” in homage to Stram’s Frank Leahy impersonation; they shared a nearly identical passion for games and competition, whether it was golfing at the Dallas Country Club or playing horse in Stram’s office, taking turns shooting crumpled-up pieces of paper into a wastebasket.
The weekend before Thanksgiving looked like another normal one for Lamar. The plan for the weekend of November 22–24 was to fly to New York on Friday with Bill and Mollye Adams and Buzz and Dorothy Kemble, take in the Harvard–Yale game on Saturday, then watch the Chiefs play the New York Jets on Sunday.
On that Friday, November 22, Lamar headed to downtown Dallas to work in his office, then met Fort Worth businessman Tommy Mercer and baseball executive Dick Butler for a lunch at the Petroleum Club to discuss the possibility of investing in the Fort Worth Cats, with an eye toward future expansion in Major League Baseball. They were eating lunch when the news broke that the president had been shot. Norma was about an hour outside Dallas, speaking to a Rotary Club about her time in Ireland—her speech was interrupted by the emcee giving the terrible news.
With uncertainty and panic enveloping the streets of Dallas, Lamar and Norma both found their way to Love Field that afternoon, where they decided to carry on with their trip. “Lamar was definitely sad,” said Norma. “Everybody was sad, and boy, were we sad it had happened in Dallas.”
While Lamar consistently voted Republican, he was mostly apolitical. As a proud Dallasite, he sensed earlier than most what the event would do to the reputation of Dallas. That gray afternoon, the traveling party took off for New York (minus the Adamses, who decided not to make the trip), and they spent a rather listless weekend in New York—both the games they were to attend were canceled. Leaving New York on Sunday morning, Lamar wanted to stop in Washington, D.C. Cobb landed the plane at National Airport and ordered a limo (there were no rental cars available by then), but the snarled traffic that encircled the District prevented them from getting any closer.
The AFL’s decision not to play—Foss felt strongly that the league shouldn’t play its games that weekend, and on Saturday, the league announced it would postpone the games—was vindicated in the end. By contrast, the NFL had chosen to go ahead with its games. In the harried hours after the assassination, Rozelle had spoken to his college classmate, Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger, who advised him that “Jack would have wanted you to go ahead.” That may have been, but Rozelle couldn’t have anticipated the way the rise of television would alter the rest of the weekend, creating a communal electronic experience that was all the more heightened when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday morning, just a half-hour before the NFL’s games were kicking off.
(While Lamar would eventually be questioned by the Warren Commission—Jack Ruby had been in the Hunt Oil offices the day before the assassination, driving one of his Carousel Club dancers to a secretarial job interview—the real attention shone on H. L., who had heavily criticized Kennedy for being soft on communism. The FBI advised him to leave Dallas for the time being.)
With more than a dozen native Texans on the roster, the shock over the assassination was yet another downbeat episode in a brutal season for the Chiefs. The team, beset by injuries and narrow losses, ended the season at 5-7-2.
The overall business prospects were good—the team even turned a slight profit in 1963—but the honeymoon did not last long. Stram would euphemistically describe Kansas City in the 1960s as “not far removed from its frontier heritage,” but the truth was something more pernicious. The city, like so many American cities in the ’60s, was a victim of white flight to the suburbs and an increasingly dangerous environment around the downtown area. This was particularly true in the heart of Kansas City, sprinkled with a series of mean little bars and dimly lit nightclubs, some of them still under Mafia control. In the spring of 1964, guard Ed Budde was brutally beaten in a bar fight, with one assailant bashing him repeatedly with a lead bolt. After surgery, Budde had a metal plate in his skull, and his return was considered doubtful. A year later, tight end Fred Arbanas was jumped on the street and wound up losing vision in one eye.
Throughout the weeks following Kennedy’s assassination, Dallas was rent by recrimination and doubt. As the long, bleak season drew to a close, Lamar was certain of one thing: He’d found his true life companion in the effervescent Norma Knobel.
Back in Dallas over Christmas, Lamar gave Norma a box exactly the same size and shape as the one he’d given her for Christmas a year earlier. She opened it to find the exact same sweater that he’d given her the year earlier—still two sizes too big, since he hadn’t yet exchanged it at Neiman-Marcus. She began unbuttoning it, mentioning how much she loved it and that she could wear it over layers and it would be just fine as it was, and then she stopped. As she reached the last button of the sweater, she found one detail different from the previous Christmas’s gift: This time, Lamar had attached an engagement ring to the bottom button.
They were married on January 22, 1964, at Norma’s parents’ house in Richardson. Lamar asked Hank Stram to be his best man, and there was little of the fanfare that greeted his first wedding. On the morning of the wedding, as Hank and Phyllis were driving Lamar to Richardson for the ceremony, Lamar asked them to pull over, so they could stop for a snack at an ice-cream stand.
After the service, the newlyweds took their honeymoon at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. They ran into Dan and June Jenkins on their first day in Austria. Dan was writing about the games for Sports Illustrated. He remembered Norma taking the eccentricities of her new life as Mrs. Hunt in stride. “Norma said they flew over in coach,” said Jenkins. “Lamar laid down in the aisle to sleep. They lost his luggage, and he went around for two or three days wearing the same thing—a suit, with his tie loose, freezing. I’d say, ‘Lamar, there’s a store, there’s a store, there’s another store there—I’m sure they’ve got your size.’ He just laughed and said, ‘Oh, it’ll be here. They say it’ll be here any minute.’”
They spent an idyllic week watching the pairs figure skating competition and the men’s downhill. They happily braved the frigid days together. On the ski slopes one day, the nearly tee-totaling Hunts finally ordered a drink. “The Austrians had, cleverly, the most gorgeous, blond-haired, blue-eyed, incredibly tall Austrian girls with those tall fur hats in their ski clothes, going around with St. Bernards, with barrels of schnapps around their necks,” said Norma.
The best surprise came when they ran into Bills owner Ralph Wilson, who was attending on his own. Early in the Games, news had come back from New York that the NFL had signed a record-breaking two-year, $28.2 million TV contract with CBS—the deal that many NFL owners hoped would spell the demise of the AFL. But just days later, the Jets owner Sonny Werblin shrewdly orchestrated a deal with NBC sports head Carl Lindemann that brought the AFL a $42 million deal for a five-year contract—which would lift each AFL team’s annual TV revenue to nearly a million dollars per year, actually narrowing the TV disparity with the NFL. In Austria, the impeccably dressed Wilson and the rumpled Lamar raised a toast (though Lamar’s drink may well have been hot cocoa) to the long-term health of the AFL. With the new NBC television deal, the AFL’s survival seemed assured. “I didn’t hear any, ‘Gee, we made it’ talk,” said Norma. “But they knew they’d taken one gigantic step forward.”(Back in Pittsburgh, the Steelers’ Art Rooney recognized that the AFL was now around to stay, telling his sons, “They don’t have to call us ‘Mister’ anymore.”)
It would have been difficult for the future to be any brighter. Lamar’s team had been profitable for the first time in 1963, the shambolic New York franchise that Werblin had purchased had been transformed in a year, and, later in 1964, it would open at the new Shea Stadium, drawing 50,000 fans a game. The Broncos were on the right track and even the Raiders, remade in the image of the former Charger scout Al Davis, had been stabilized. In fact, the battle between the leagues only served to raise pro football’s profile. By the fall of 1964, a Fortune magazine cover story noted that the game “is wonderfully attuned to the pace and style of American life in the 1960’s. To a nation of spectators, it offers an unsurpassed spectacle. In a time of mass education, it is an educated man’s game.”
The signing of the NBC deal had raised the stakes in the war between the leagues. Though their contract didn’t originally call for payments until 1965, NBC advanced five different AFL clubs $250,000 each to help them cover signing bonuses in November 1964, on the eve of the ’65 draft. Signing players offered a double advantage, in that it had the zero-sum result of bringing a good player into one league and keeping him out of the other, and it furthered the perception in the press that “the war” was being won.
The entire ordeal brought the AFL owners closer together. Billy Sullivan in Boston was most attuned to the numerous sacrifices Lamar had made, thinking league first and then the fate of the Chiefs. Adams saw Lamar most frequently, though they were not particularly well-matched in temperament—Lamar with his low-key reluctance, Bud barreling into a room. (If any AFL owner was going to get into a fistfight with a member of the press, it could only have been Adams, who did exactly that with Houston Post scribe Jack Gallagher in 1966.)
Lamar was perhaps most comfortable with the Bills’ Ralph Wilson. They would sometimes eat together during weeks of league meetings in New York. And Lamar appreciated Ralph’s fiscal restraint. At Toots Shor’s once, Wilson greeted the owner with a bit of kibitzing. “Toots, your prices are outrageous,” Wilson cheerfully told him. “I could get a steak like this for half as much in Buffalo.”
“Yeah,” replied Shor. “But when you finished it, Ralph, you’d still be in Buffalo.”
Even Wilson, sensible though he was, couldn’t resist poking fun at Lamar’s legendary frugality. By agreement, when the owners met en masse in New York, they would take turns picking up the check. In 1965, with Lamar due to pick up the tab for the next meeting, Sonny Werblin and Adams decided the group would eat at 21. Prior to the visit, Werblin had the staff prepare a series of fake menus just for the occasion, in which all the normal 21 prices (already exorbitant) were doubled and tripled. Then, at lunch, the group went around ordering elaborate portions of caviar and filet. At the first sign of Lamar’s raised eyebrow, the group fell into laughter and confessed.
But for all the mirth at his expense, the question wasn’t one of generosity so much as prudence. “Lamar would always pick up the check,” said Dan Jenkins. “But he didn’t like being taken advantage of. And he would have friends make reservations for him, not using his name, because he thought people charged more if they knew it was a Hunt.”
Those who knew him best understood that some of his most infamous instances of frugality had more to do with the pace of his life than an aversion to spending money.
“He was a spokesman for Hart, Schaffner & Marx,” said Jake Cobb. “As a nice gesture, they sent him some beautiful suits. All he had to do was go in and get them fitted. Those suits hung in his office closet for years. He would never take the time to get a tailor. He’d always say, ‘I’m going to do that next week.’”
The most notorious instance conflating Lamar’s thriftiness with his impatience occurred in New York. At an AFL league meeting, Werblin noticed the holes in his shoes, and Lamar sheepishly admitted he needed to get them resoled.
The next morning, the owners gathered at their conference room and Werblin interrupted the start of the meeting. “My friends, can I just say I have never seen a man so cheap as this,” and he pointed to Lamar. “He got one shoe soled!”
In the midst of a round of laughter, Lamar explained that by the time he found the shoemaker, it was almost time for him to close. He said he’d have time to do only one shoe.
“So I’ll get the other one done the first chance I’ve got.” And of course, he didn’t.
Though the joke about Lamar’s cheapness was ongoing, the losses the AFL owners absorbed were real, even after the NBC windfall. It was Lamar who, cognizant of the challenges faced in Boston and Denver, pushed hardest for roster limits and prudent spending. Having set out on his own, away from his father, to pursue another business, Lamar was perhaps more committed than most to making sure football was a legitimate business. And one of the definitions of a legitimate business was that it made money.
But for the league, profitability would remain elusive as long as the AFL was battling the NFL. The conflict between the leagues took on tones of the Cold War, full of intrigue, double-dealing, and a layered sense of reality.
In 1965, the NFL established “Operation Hand-Holding,” a highly sophisticated “babysitter” program, in which the league recruited salesmen and other business executives to make contact with draft prospects weeks before the draft. “We didn’t call them ‘babysitters,’” said Rams general manager Bert Rose. “We called them ‘NFL representatives.’ We put the program into operation in about three weeks. We had about eighty men, about thirty of whom were friends of mine and the rest who were recommended by friends. Almost all of them had the same thing in common: They were sales oriented. They had to be, since we were asking them to sell the NFL to the best pro prospects in the country.”
At its most extreme, the babysitting program was equal parts auction, fraternity rush, and velvet-gloved kidnapping. One operation found twenty-seven different players squired away in a hotel in Detroit, and the AFL teams interested in drafting them repeatedly frustrated in trying to get though. In that same ’65 draft, the Chiefs had high hopes for signing the dazzling running back Gale Sayers from Kansas. “Sayers, in fact, was married to a girl from K.C.,” said Hank Stram, “and he told us he was definitely signing with the Chiefs, when suddenly Buddy Young of the NFL flew into town and simply made off with him.” Sayers signed with the Chicago Bears.
Even after losing Sayers, the Chiefs didn’t come away empty-handed in the ’65 draft, owing in part to a decision Lamar had made a year earlier, when he’d suggested to Klosterman that the Chiefs hire the inimitable Lloyd Wells as an addition to the scouting staff. “The Judge” was an ebullient, sly, ladies’ man, a Houston photographer with a long list of contacts, a taste for fine things, and an angle on virtually everything. He had invited Lamar to a black all-star football game in Houston and spoke persuasively about his contacts within the black community. Lamar didn’t need to be talked into recognizing the vast reservoir of untapped talent in the black colleges. He’d seen it as far back as the Yam Bowl of his high school days.
Added to the staff, proudly driving around in the red Lincoln with the Chiefs decal on the doors, Wells—the first full-time black scout in pro football—was instrumental in the club’s effort to comb the country and connect to players from historically black colleges. Some other pro teams were aware of the talent that existed down South, where the schools in the Southeastern, Southwestern, and Atlantic Coast Conferences remained entirely segregated. But with Wells, the Chiefs were there first and most convincingly, and in the space of a few years, the team selected players from Grambling, Jackson State, Southern, Prairie View, Morgan State, and Tennessee State, all of whom would become pro stars.
That 1965 draft included one of the war’s greatest cases of signing intrigue, and certainly its most legendary, the one for Prairie View A&M wide receiver Otis Taylor. At 6-foot-3, 220 pounds, fast, strong, a physical blocker, and a marvelous athlete with dazzling long strides, Taylor was a spectacular glimpse of the future of the wide receiver position. Decades later, Klosterman would say, “When I first saw Jerry Rice, the person I thought of was Otis Taylor.” Lamar had personally scouted him as well, catching him in the Prairie View–Wiley College game that he attended, along with Norma and Klosterman, at the Cotton Bowl in 1963.
The Chiefs were confident they would sign Taylor; Lloyd Wells was a friend of the family, had known Taylor since junior high school, and had remained close to him throughout his college years. But on Wednesday, November 26, in a classic case of babysitter subterfuge, the Cowboys descended on the Prairie View campus and invited Taylor and teammate Seth Cartwright away to spend Thanksgiving in Dallas, with handshakes and a kind of pushy cordiality.
While Taylor was being squired away, Wells was down in Tennessee, trying to keep tabs on another prospective Chiefs choice. Klosterman, checking with Taylor as a matter of course, was alarmed when repeated calls to his dorm went unanswered. “So I called Otis’s mother,” said Klosterman, “and told her that I thought her son had been kidnapped.” Wells, having heard from Klosterman, rushed back to Texas and began scouring the Houston area, calling Taylor’s mother, his girlfriend, and many of his friends. He learned that Taylor and Cartwright had been taken to a Holiday Inn in Richardson, just outside of Dallas, where they were being watched over by Buddy Young and another babysitter. When Wells tried to go see Taylor, he was recognized instantly, and the Cowboys representatives wouldn’t let him through the lobby.
Wells was providing periodic reports to Klosterman, who during one call told him, “Just tell Otis his red T-bird is parked outside the Kansas City Chiefs facility, waiting for him.” Later that night, Wells helped Taylor and Cartwright sneak out the back balcony of their hotel room and flew them to Kansas City. The following day, after signing his contract, Taylor joined the Chiefs on a trip to New York for a Jets game on Sunday, November 29, then returned with the team to Kansas City and proudly drove his new red Thunderbird home to Houston.
“The intrigue,” Lamar would say decades later, “was marvelous. The public loved it. I loved it.”
•
The 1964 season, another injury-marred disappointment at 7–7, was overshadowed for Lamar by the news that Norma was pregnant. Clark Knobel Hunt was born on February 19, 1965, by which time Lamar and Norma had moved to Highland Park, into a handsome white house with four columns in front, at 4231 Armstrong Parkway. It was beautiful, yet sparsely appointed, with a small black-and-white television in the living room, the couple having agreed to furnish it gradually, one room at a time.
By this time, Lamar had grown preoccupied with maintaining his fitness. He’d seen many in his family gravitate toward an egg-shaped middle life: H. L., Lyda in her later years, Bunker, even Caroline. He would never say it out loud, but he fretted over his weight even more than his siblings. On the second floor of the home, Lamar put a five-gallon container from a watercooler. Every day after returning from work, he would sprint upstairs place his spare change in it. “I don’t get as much exercise as I should,” he once explained to Stram. “I figure I get two benefits at the same time.”
He was still traveling plenty, but with the marriage, his new child, and the franchise being more stable, Lamar and Norma lived a life verging on the normal. He spent more time playing what he described as “fat-man football,” a regular touch game with some old friends from SMU. He also began coaching Lamar, Jr.’s little league team. He delved into this with customary vigor. He typed up a short playbook, which secretary Jean Finn mimeographed off to distribute to the team. One year, when the team decided to call itself the Mongooses, Lamar found fifty decals of mongooses and carefully affixed them on all the boys’ helmets.
For Sharron, by now six years old, he did the most important thing in the world a father could do: He got her and Lamar, Jr., tickets to the Beatles show, September 18, 1964, at Dallas Memorial Coliseum. Lamar, Jr., had already shown an aptitude for music and was taking guitar lessons. Earlier that year, Lamar had taken Sharron to a theater in downtown Dallas to see A Hard Day’s Night. She would recall him lying on his back in the living room, gently holding her hands as he lifted her up by his stockinged feet, and saying, “Okay, now sing ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ for me!”
They had tickets in the front row, and when they arrived—while the opening act, the Bill Black Combo, had just started playing—there were people in their seats. Rather than confront the squatters, Lamar presented his tickets to an arena usher, and the official cleared the seats for them. When the Beatles opened with “Twist and Shout,” Sharron started twisting and Lamar joined in. For Lamar, the concert was an act of parental love. “None of that ever had any appeal for me,” he said. “I didn’t like the loud noise.” His own musical tastes were geared more toward what he described as “romantic music.” Others noticed he had a fondness for country crooners in an era when Nashville was moving toward a more cosmopolitan, mainstream sound.
Though his schedule was often erratic, dependent on the Chiefs’ schedule and AFL league meetings, he found the time to make it all work. Lamar did not need to explain to Norma that he didn’t want to repeat the sins of his own father, who had been an absentee parent in the lives of most of his children. “He spent more time with the kids when he was divorced than he had when we were married,” said Rose Mary. Though Rose Mary spiraled dangerously close to a nervous breakdown in the months following the separation, she soon steadied herself and by 1965 remarried to a businessman named John Carr. “Norma was a better wife to him than I could ever be,” said Rose Mary. “She was young and pretty and had so much energy. And she liked being out there with Lamar. She was wonderful.”
Even under the best of circumstances and with the best of intentions, the divorce had wrenching consequences. Lamar made an extra effort to see his oldest children regularly, but they were less a part of the daily bustle. “After the divorce you just about never saw Rose Mary and Lamar, Jr., and Sharron,” said Al Hill, Jr. “I knew where they were—they were over on Walnut Hill—but they really just weren’t even around.”
Inevitably, of course, something was lost for Lamar in his relationship with Lamar, Jr., and Sharron. “There’s a lingering pain that goes with it,” said Sharron, who was just three when Lamar and Rose Mary separated. “Even though it wasn’t my divorce, there’s a piece of your dad that you didn’t get. And I always missed that piece of Dad. I always missed that.”