So many years, so many lives touched. And when the news hit, they all thought of the last time they’d seen him. For one of the people whose life was shaped by Lamar—Kyle Rote, Jr.—it had been a couple of years earlier, getting on a plane in New York.
From his early twenties, Rote had envisioned a life in sports beyond his playing career, and he had found success as an agent. In the course of his decade with the Tornado and working with Lamar, he’d internalized a few habits. Lamar worked during flights, so Kyle worked during flights. “Lamar’s always doing paperwork,” said Rote. “He always carried paperwork, so if he got stopped or delayed, he could be productive. Don’t waste precious time on an airplane, when they can’t call you, no one can interrupt you, you get a lot of quiet time, use it—that was his philosophy as best as I could tell.” And it had become Rote’s philosophy.
He had amassed more than 6 million miles in air travel, so while upgrading to first class was always a possibility, Rote usually saved those for occasions when he traveled with his wife and children. He had learned over time that he could often get more done in a row to himself in coach rather than sitting next to someone in first class.
On this day, boarding a flight in La Guardia, Rote had a coach ticket and hadn’t decided yet whether to upgrade. As he boarded the 707 jet, he noticed that there was plenty of room in first class.
“So I get on this plane, and it’s going to be about a two-hour flight, and as I just get to the end of first class, I’m now surveying coach to see where there’s space. The row that I’ve got is toward the back, and it’s supposed to have only me in it, and it’s a 2-3 configuration, I remember that very clearly. As I get to the coach section, I see, not three rows back, on the two-seat side, in the B seat on the aisle, Lamar’s sitting there, and next to him is a very large, overweight woman. And already, they have pulled up the armrest between them.”
Lamar was, in Rote’s memory, “squinched up,” and was wearing the Lamar Hunt Uniform: gray slacks, blue blazer, red-and-blue striped tie, light blue long-sleeve dress shirt, and loafers. Rote walked up and greeted his friend and longtime employer. “Lamar!” he said, and Lamar looked up, smiled, and the two men exchanged greetings, talked for a moment about Clark, and their respective families.
The attendants were closing the doors to the plane by now, and before moving back to his seat, Rote told Lamar, “Hey, I’ve got a complete row of three in the back, and if you want, feel free to come on back and we can talk a little bit more.”
Lamar thanked him graciously, and with that, Rote moved on toward his seat.
“And, it didn’t take me more than four or five rows walking back, and I wasn’t even close to my row yet, but I already knew he would never come back,” said Rote. “And the reason he would never come back is because he did not want to embarrass the lady sitting next to him, and make her feel uncomfortable that she was maybe too heavy or too fat, and that maybe he left because of that.”
In the days following Lamar’s death, friends and family would talk about his vision and his drive, his accomplishments in sports, his innovations, the opportunities he gave people, and his deep love of games. But what would remain with many of those who knew him was that simple, ineluctable fact: In a graceless age, Lamar Hunt was a man of steadfast decency.
“I cannot imagine having played pro sports for any entity other than Lamar and the Hunts,” said Willie Lanier. “I don’t see how it could have worked. I say that, because I know I have a somewhat different mindset and approach to things. I tend to clash pretty quickly at times. But with Lamar, it was based on mutual respect, and it just worked.”
“With other owners, after the game they would summon you to their boxes,” said Pat Schottenheimer, Marty’s wife. “With Lamar, he would stop by and visit the coaches. Entirely different.”
All the rest was important but that quality, and perhaps that alone, would have been enough. That was why, after memorial services in Dallas and Kansas City, it took Norma fully nine months to finish writing thank-you notes for each and every sympathy card, each and every heartfelt note, each arrangement of flowers, each person who wanted her to know how her husband had touched another life.
For his four children, the absence was acute, felt at the most obvious times—World Cups, Bulls’ playoff runs, the grand reopening of the renovated Arrowhead in 2010—and also at less obvious moments, when they found themselves repeating some endearing quirk of his that they’d experienced long ago. Sharron, on the road with her children, would introduce a car game to pass the time. Clark, in the midst of his hectic schedule, found a way to coach his son’s Little League team. More than five years after Lamar’s death, each of the children would occasionally encounter someone they were meeting for the first time, who would tell a variation on the same story: “I met your father once, a long time ago, when I was a nobody. And he was so nice to me.”
•
H. L. Hunt’s legacy was the fortune wrought by his play on Daisy Bradford No. 3 and the empire he built with it. There are statues celebrating his life at the Thanksgiving Tower in Dallas and at the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore. But in the main, he is remembered today largely for his bigamy and his eccentricity. When Daniel Yergin’s 800-page The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power was published in 2001, winning the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction as the definitive history of the oil industry, H. L. Hunt merited but two small mentions. His exploits were considerable at the time, but his long-term impact was limited.
By the time of his death, Lamar Hunt’s boyhood worry—that he would never be remembered as anything other than just another of H. L. Hunt’s sons—seemed preposterous. He’d launched the most successful upstart league of the past century of American sports. In football, the AFC Championship Trophy continued to bear his name. In soccer, the U.S. Open Cup, the oldest annual team tournament in American sports, had been renamed in his honor. He was in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the International Tennis Hall of Fame, and the United States Soccer Hall of Fame, along with a score of others. Majestic bronze statues of Lamar were erected outside of Arrowhead in Kansas City, and the soccer stadiums he built in Texas and Ohio. But his impact went far beyond monuments.
To understand all that he had accomplished, it was useful to remember how humble and provincial the American sports industry was in the late ’50s. The games, even then, were a vital part of the leisure time of a group of spirited, youthful-minded people. But in 1959, one could walk down a street in virtually any major city in America, and see no evidence whatsoever of the existence of spectator sports in the country. Relegated to a few pages in the back of most metropolitan newspapers and a corner of the newsstand, sports constituted a kind of secret society out in the open, operating on the fringes of American life. The biggest effort of sports marketing in the ’50s focused on simply letting people know when the games would be played.
By the time of Lamar’s death, sports had breached the walls of mainstream culture, and insinuated itself into the daily fabric of American media, discourse and popular culture. One could quibble over high ticket prices and the sense of entitlement among modern athletes, but the importance of the culture of sports was formidable, offering a precious sense of common ground in the increasingly Balkanized, niche-driven, narrowcast America of the twenty-first century.
America’s most popular sport, pro football, owed much of its robustness and stability to his vision. At the memorial service in Dallas, Paul Tagliabue pulled Colts owner Jim Irsay aside and said, “Now, it’s your generation’s turn.” Lamar’s fellow owners recognized it as well.
“Lamar was a visionary,” said Jim Irsay. “When we’re playing games on the Moon or Mars, they ought to think about Lamar Hunt, because he’s probably in his dreams seeing a retractable dome, with the right ventilation to keep everyone breathing.”
•
The area around White Rock Lake is full of houses today. The empty lots that Lamar used to traverse on his way to the Lakewood bus line have been filled in. There are still sailboats out on the lake, and cyclists whiz by on the bike path that goes in front of Mount Vernon. But to drive up to H. L. Hunt’s old mansion today is to see a change in Dallas. Football is still preeminent—Cowboys’ decals on many of the cars, SMU and Highland Park schedules on the restaurant walls. But there’s more evidence of another movement: Round dotted balls in front yards in nearby Highland Park, practice goals with netting, pylons for cone drills, and dozens of signs reading, “WE SUPPORT OUR LADS SOCCER.”
The change is seen well beyond the view from Mount Vernon. In Columbus and Frisco, north of Dallas, are the first and third ever soccer-specific stadiums ever built in America, and in Kansas City, where Lamar had patiently waited for a local buyer, Livestrong Sporting Park, a $200 million facility, opened on June 9, 2011, and instantly became, in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, “a facility that can legitimately claim to be the finest soccer stadium in North America.”
The soccer-specific stadium boom was just one in a confluence of factors—World Cup ratings, Gold Cup ratings, European Champions League ratings, the popularity of the English Premier League on American television, the continued widespread popularity of the game as a participant sport, the stellar crowds enjoyed by traveling teams like Barcelona FC and Manchester United on their summer tours of the United States, and the slow, but unmistakable signs of growth of MLS—all pointing to a reality that would be true well before it was widely recognized: soccer was becoming the fifth major professional team sport in the American spectator sports landscape.
Books could be written about the sport’s slow climb in America, but the story couldn’t be told without Lamar’s indefatigable advocacy, faith, and work on the game’s behalf. He had found a second act to his grand American life, and the implications of that, of soccer’s growth in the American marketplace, were just beginning to present themselves.
“Well, there’s no American soccer today, without Lamar Hunt,” said Don Garber. “His contributions and experiences from the early days of the NASL through the formation of Major League Soccer, and the guidance on key decisions, the sport is what it is today largely because of Lamar’s vision. I don’t think Phil Anschutz would have come into the league if Lamar wasn’t a key supporter.”
“He deserves a lot of credit,” said Anschutz. “He deserves the credit. He was a great partner, he was the kind of guy you want to have as a partner. There are plenty of guys who are in sports leagues that are, I’m sure they’re nice enough guys, but you wouldn’t want to be their partner, even though you might have to be. Lamar was different.”
The key, in the end, was not just Lamar’s boundless faith but also his unquenchable patience. He took the long view. “I have no doubts that it will be a major sport in the United States,” Lamar had said of soccer in 2002. “I’m probably not going to live to see that day because Americans are a little afraid of getting interested in something at which they’re not very good.”
He had brought America’s Game to more cities than even the caretakers of pro football could have imagined. He helped drag tennis, despite its own vehement opposition, into an age of open prosperity. And thanks to Lamar Hunt, the Beautiful Game had finally taken root in America. Yet, in 1999, when The Sporting News released its list of the “100 Most Powerful Sports Figures of the Twentieth Century,” Pete Rozelle placed first, followed by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, ABC’s Roone Arledge, Branch Rickey, and Marvin Miller. Lamar was ranked seventeenth, right below longtime NCAA chief Walter Byers and just ahead of sports and broadcasting mogul Ted Turner. As celebrated as he was in his lifetime, his own quiet, retiring manner had left him underrated.
The rankings took note of his contributions in football and innovations in tennis and soccer, but they were perhaps blind to his deeper and more profound effect on American sports.
Asked to articulate his worldview once, Lamar said, “I really feel strongly in the equality of people, though not necessarily in ability. Some people can run faster than others, some people are smarter than others.”
If there was a theme to his life—beyond a love of sports, a gently reckoned optimism, and avoidance of personal conflict—this was it. From the fall of 1959, when he made sure that the first AFL draft was essentially a blind draw to protect the newer franchises (“we recognized it would be terribly unfair if some teams had a huge advantage in scouting”) to the end of his life, when he was still arguing for a more equitable rotation of Thanksgiving Day home games in the NFL, this impulse animated him. At virtually every turn, from the beginning of the AFL to the zenith of the NASL to the formation of MLS, he argued and worked for a philosophy and league rules and structure in which any possible financial advantages, for him and others equally wealthy, would be obscured by mechanisms that guaranteed overall competitive balance for all franchises in all markets.
Don Garber would remember, after moving to MLS, the emphasis that Lamar put on equality of opportunity. “Lamar believed that you can’t have a league that’s driven just by big markets,” Garber said. “You know, you’ve got to be successful in every market. Small markets have to succeed, they have to matter, they have to be competitive, their fans have to believe their teams can win, and have an opportunity to lift that trophy, just like fans in New York, LA, Chicago and other markets can. That model of equality and parity was a big part of Lamar’s views of what professional sports require to succeed.”
One can trace the concept of revenue sharing—the single most important aspect of the long competitive balance in the NFL—back to Lamar’s airline stationery that launched the AFL. (If you want, you can trace it back farther, to the egalitarian audacity of Bill Veeck. But even if you do so, you’d have to grant that without Lamar, the practical viability of the idea may well have died with Veeck at baseball’s 1952 winter meetings or with Branch Rickey on the drawing boards of the Continental League in 1959.)
Sports businesses around the world are Darwinian environments in which a bare fraction of teams have any kind of hope to compete. In the Scottish Premier League, either Celtic or Rangers has won the title every year since 1985. In the English Premiership, the top division of English football, only four clubs have won the title since 1995. The same is true throughout much of the world.
By contrast, sports in America—the land so often criticized for runaway commercialism and ugly avarice—stood as both the most lucrative sports market in the world, and among the fairest. Some of these mechanisms, such as the NFL draft, were in place before Lamar started the AFL. But his genius came in an understanding that competitive balance required fairness in both playing rules and in economic structure.
It started in 1960, when he pushed through equal television revenue sharing for all eight original AFL teams. The success of that plan, and the reality that every team in the AFL made more in TV revenue than nearly half of the teams in the established NFL, finally pushed the older league to adopt the same system a year later. When television revenues mushroomed in the ’60s and exploded in the ’70s and beyond, pro football alone had a financial structure that helped to guarantee competitive balance. And when the league finally adopted true free agency in the ’90s, it was with a salary cap, another mechanism that Lamar staunchly supported.
The structural realities of the NFL—teams sharing equally among television revenue, teams constricted in their spending by an artificial cap, accompanied with a salary floor, so that every team had to spend the money to be competitive—would inform the formation of MLS. During the ’90s and the ’00s, every other league in American professional sports was trying to construct a system that moved closer to the NFL model.
As the broadcaster Bob Costas wrote in 2000, “baseball owners are still fighting today over things that football owners settled 40 years ago.” Major League Baseball would move closer to the NFL model in the ’00s; the NHL would soon follow suit. And in 2011, in the midst of the lockout that threatened the NBA’s season, none other than Michael Jordan, by now the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, said, “We need a lot of financial support throughout the league as well as revenue sharing to keep this business afloat. . . . For us to be profitable in small markets, we have to be able to win ballgames and build a better basketball team.”
In every case, the rhetoric of collective bargaining was informed by the principles that had first guided Lamar in starting the AFL, and later had been applied to all of pro football. Without fanfare, he had pulled off the most audacious of revolutions, not in any single sport, but across much of American professional team sports as a whole. It wasn’t just that he built, directly or indirectly, so many stadiums and playing fields. It was that, all along the way, he worked to make those playing fields more level. He had successfully interjected the doctrine of fairness into the business of American sports.
•
Lamar, Norma, Clark, and Tavia were at a party in the early 2000s in Aspen, where Clark and Tavia often vacationed. At one point, a group of guests were gathered on the patio, engaging in the aimless but comfortable after-dinner chat that marks a Saturday evening of good food and good company.
Someone brought up a fabulous vacation to a distant island, and described it as “my favorite spot in the world.” And then that became the subject, and the small group of revelers went around the circle, each person citing his or her favorite place in the world.
“Lamar, what about you?” someone asked. “What’s your favorite place in the world?”
The question required no extended reflection. Lamar knew his answer, and smiled as he replied, “Arrowhead.”
He had been around the world, spent millions on fine art, eaten at many of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, stayed in the most luxurious hotels, and spent time at exotic locales, looking at the world from countless breathtaking vistas. His favorite place was a football stadium.
None who knew him could be surprised. He’d spent a childhood conjuring up visions of packed stadiums from agate box scores, and later realized those dreams in ways that even he couldn’t have conceived. What, after all, could be better than building an apartment inside your own football stadium? On the eve of games, as Norma went over final preparations for the next day’s Gold Suite gathering, Lamar and his children often headed down to the field at Arrowhead. There was a sideline-to-sideline punting game that Lamar invented, where contestants tried to kick it as far across the field as they could, while keeping the ball as close as possible to the yard line they were kicking from. Those games, and their variations, could last into the evening. With the lights glittering down on the sacred space at the heart of the empty bowl, Lamar and his family and friends would just play.
Lamar Hunt’s triumph was not merely that he loved games and stadiums and sports, and so many of the same things that he’d loved as a twelve-year-old. It was that he loved those things in the same way. An arch pun in a sports story, a good-natured yet wholly serious competition with Buzz Kemble over their respective weights, an eye-catching gimmick in a halftime show. It was a life in sports, not merely a livelihood; it was his connection with the world around him and, to a great extent, the way he viewed that world.
Always, at the heart of it all, were the games themselves. This, too, made perfect sense. If you’d grown up in a privileged world where your house was every bit as big as your imagination, with deer grazing in the backyard and a lake in the front, if you felt loved by but somewhat disconnected from your parents, and not privy to many of the whispered secrets of your older siblings, if you grew up realizing you would have more money than you might ever know what to do with, and this caused some people to stare at you or treat you differently, wouldn’t you want to avoid that attention? Did Rita Hayworth like talking to strangers about her beauty? Did Einstein enjoy discussing his own intelligence? Lamar Hunt didn’t dwell on money.
Nor did he dwell on pain—on the sadness of his lobotomized brother; the sudden, unimaginable loss of his mother; the stubborn will of his father, whom he was proud of and ashamed of at the same time. He never mastered a way to talk about these things, or his own divorce or, later, about the divorces of his two oldest children, or the financial self-destruction of his brothers, or his own illness.
These things surely troubled him. But he found sanctuary where he always had: It was in the tumult and boisterous goodwill before a big game, on a sunlit day or under the lights at night; sitting beneath a scorer’s table courtside or looking out from the distant remove of a grandstand seat. His refuge was in the stadiums and arenas, where for two or three hours, he was swept up in the beauty and urgency and brilliant promise of the moment. Amid the clamor and excitement, the differences felt so acutely elsewhere in the world melted away, and people flowed together across race, class, and even language and nationality.
There, as a face in the crowd, Lamar Hunt was at home.
By the end of his life, much of America was right there with him.