Lamar would stay at SMU for five years, during which time he’d play football, fall in love with Rose Mary Whittle, join the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and remain unconvinced that he wanted to spend a life in the oil business.

Lamar played four years of football at SMU without ever lettering. To teammate (and future Hall of Famer) Forrest Gregg, he was “one of the guys.”

Lamar in the summer of 1955, with his beloved dog Herschel in his lap.

After their January 1956 marriage, Lamar and Rose Mary traveled extensively, including to Las Vegas in 1957 and, after Sharron’s birth, to Europe in 1958 (see next page). All the while, Lamar was languishing at Hunt Oil and pondering a jump into the sports business.

On August 3, 1959, one day after his twenty-seventh birthday, Lamar announced the formation of a new football league, which would in the coming weeks be named the American Football League. After three years spent as a largely forgotten figure in a small office, he suddenly became the center of a national sports enterprise.

The Texans leased a practice field and had a drive-through ticket office at the corner of the North Central Expressway and Yale Boulevard (now SMU Boulevard), the same spot where Lamar had run his Zima-Bat business in college.

At first, the AFL’s launch was a battle for publicity. Lamar did whatever it took to raise the profile of the new league, including this 1959 newspaper advertisement, in which he modeled “the first short-sleeved suit shown in Dallas.”

Absorbing losses in the early years, the group of AFL owners became known as “The Foolish Club.” From a 1961 publicity photo: Billy Sullivan, Cal Kunz, Bud Adams (seated), Ralph Wilson, Lamar, Commissioner Joe Foss (seated), Harry Wismer, Wayne Valley, and Barron Hilton.

The Texan Hostesses, hired to spur season-ticket sales, were trained by the team’s broadcaster, Charlie Jones (next to Lamar), and included schoolteacher Norma Knobel (to the left of Jones), who in 1964 would become Lamar’s second wife.