The day was crisp and the mood festive as the family of H. L. Hunt left home late in the morning of Monday, January 2, 1939.
H. L. was dressed, as usual, in a simple suit and tie, with a white linen shirt, his wife, Lyda, beside him in a Sunday coat, with a corsage she’d worn for the occasion. Their youngest daughter, the fifteen-year-old Caroline, had climbed in the other car, along with Hassie and Margaret. H. L. got in behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile sedan, Lyda at his side, and Herbert and Bunker happily chattering in the back seat. Sitting next to his brothers, the six-year-old Lamar Hunt gazed out the window, his deep-set eyes wide open.
As H. L. wheeled the car down Abrams Road toward Fair Park, Lamar watched the Christmas decorations still on the shops throughout Dallas, and the wreaths on the front doors of the homes. Then, as the traffic thickened, he could spot in the distance the initial glimpses of Fair Park—the congregating pedestrians, the flags fluttering in the New Year’s breeze, the signs for parking in and around the Fair Park grounds. He had been to the park once before, for his first visit to the Texas State Fair three months earlier, but now he wasn’t thinking about ice cream or rides or arcade games, but instead was eagerly awaiting a clear look at the giant concrete edifice where the family was headed.
They parked on the other side of Parry Avenue, and saw the distinctive cream-brick façade of the Fair Park Auditorium, near the front entrance. Taking his mother’s hand for the walk, Lamar looked around at other families decked out in their holiday best, young couples walking and holding hands, an assortment of marching bands from all over the state, some walking into the stadium while playing rousing fight songs. Throughout the crowd were the red-and-black bedecked alumni of Texas Tech University, many wearing cowboy hats, with the spirit ribbons on their coats anchored with tiny gold footballs. Fewer in number, but still visible, were the supporters of St. Mary’s College of California, wearing red, white, and blue, waving pennants and sporting shiny buttons that proclaimed “Galloping Gaels.” It was a magnificent, good-natured bustle, and everywhere he looked, Lamar saw people who appeared just as happy to be there as he was.
As the Hunts reached the turnstiles, H. L. distributed tickets to each of the children—the brightly lettered stub announced that this was the “Cotton Bowl Classic”—and Lamar handed his to the man at the gate, before moving quickly inside to the stadium concourse, then tugging Lyda’s arm to ask for a quarter so he could buy a game program. She fetched it out of her purse, waited while he gave the coin to the concessionaire, then took Lamar’s hand and brought him with the rest of the family through the tunnel and into the giant cement bowl. A full half-hour before kickoff, they reached their row under a bright, cloudless Texas sky.
For a time, Lamar grew very quiet, and just stared down at the field. There was Texas Tech’s star Elmer Tarbox, No. 21, in the all-red uniform, with black shoulders and piping on the arms, the white inset panels on the rib cage and the inside of the sleeves. Meanwhile, the St. Mary’s Gaels, the young Cinderellas from the West Coast, were decked out in equally nifty uniforms, their blue jerseys capped with white-paneled shoulders.
As the teams headed to the sidelines for final pre-game preparations, out came the marching bands from Southern Methodist University and Woodrow Wilson High and Highland Park High, playing “The Eyes of Texas” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and then, with the crowd standing at rapt attention, hands and hats over hearts, the National Anthem.
On what the Cotton Bowl’s press-box statistician described as an “ideal” day for football, Lamar watched St. Mary’s take a 20–0 lead, then thrilled to the sight of Tarbox and the Red Raiders rallying for 13 points in the fourth quarter, before St. Mary’s ran out the clock to seal an exhilarating win.
Afterward, on the long walk back to the car, and the stop-and-start drive through the congested traffic toward their home on White Rock Lake, the boys in the backseat spoke excitedly about all they’d seen—the bright uniforms, Tarbox’s remarkable touchdown reception, the public address announcer’s updates of TCU’s game against Carnegie Tech in the Sugar Bowl, the beautiful Cotton Bowl queen who spoke at halftime, the marching band that spelled out the letters “HELLO TECH” before the game, and the sharp roadsters parked in a line just outside the park.
Back home, while the ladies got changed, and the family maid, Pandora Waters, prepared dinner, Lamar thanked his mother, whom he still called by the pet name of “Papoose Mooze.” He then rushed into the library to ask his father to turn on the radio. Dashing back to the closet under the front stairs to fetch his football, he returned to his favorite spot in the library, planted himself in front of the large console, and listened to all the talk about TCU’s big Sugar Bowl win in New Orleans, and accounts of the Cotton Bowl game he’d just returned from, and then heard Graham McNamee’s call from Pasadena, as USC scored a late touchdown to edge previously unbeaten, unscored-upon Duke in the Rose Bowl.
Sitting there, pigskin at his side, paging once again through the Cotton Bowl program, Lamar Hunt was a picture of contentment. He’d seen his first football game that day.
•
When the end came, nearly seventy years and countless thousands of games later, the news broke too late to make the next morning’s papers in the Midwest and East. By sunrise, December 14, 2006, word of Lamar Hunt’s death the previous night was working its way through Dallas and Kansas City and Columbus, Ohio; the National Football League offices in New York; Soccer House in Chicago; and around the globe, from Wimbledon to Roland Garros; the Football Association headquarters in London to the Brazilian national team’s training pitches in Rio de Janeiro. On that day, people throughout the world of sports shared in the loss of the kindly gentleman who had shaped so many of their lives. The news prompted sad smiles, and many raised a private toast to the man who never drank.
The obits wrote themselves. ESPN called him a “soft-spoken man who changed the face of pro football,” and the New York Times referred to him as “the man who gave the Super Bowl its name.” USA Today was one of many publications that described him as a “visionary.”
The sports world in which Lamar Hunt’s death was reported was not precisely one of his own making, but it would have looked far different without his involvement. He did not build the networks that covered sports every minute of every day of every year, nor was he the architect of the omnipresent web of sports news, discussion, and tribalism that made up the messy realm of the Internet.
Instead Hunt instigated a series of audacious ventures—in pro football, tennis, soccer, basketball, and other sports—that implicitly recognized and celebrated the notion that many Americans would happily spend much of their discretionary time and income absorbed in the world of spectator sports, that even in a land of freedom and prosperity, there was still refuge and solace and camaraderie that could be found only in the world of games.
When it came time to catalog his contributions, it was inevitable that he would be remembered first for his work in pro football. As a quiet, shy twenty- six-year-old in Dallas in 1959, better known at the time as simply the youngest son of legendary oilman H. L. Hunt, he had politely but resolutely pressed his case to bring pro football to Dallas. After repeated rejections from the men who ran the National Football League, he decided to start his own league, founding the American Football League, which began play in eight cities in 1960. The AFL and its eventual success ushered in an era of widespread expansion in all American team sports. The universe of pro football nearly doubled overnight, growing from twelve teams in 1959 to twenty-one in 1960, then adding five more teams in the next eight seasons. In the same decade of the ’60s, partly in response to football’s rapid and successful growth, baseball grew from sixteen to twenty-four teams, hockey from six to fourteen, and pro basketball from eight to twenty-five.
In 1966, with the war between the NFL and AFL at a furious pitch, Hunt coolly negotiated the agreement that led to the merger between the two leagues, in which all eight of the original AFL franchises were welcomed into the NFL (making the AFL the first upstart American sports league to survive intact since the American League successfully challenged the National League in baseball in 1901).
The existence and viability of the AFL made necessary both the merger and the game that would first be played after the 1966 season, which the NFL originally called “the AFL–NFL World Championship Game.” In this, Hunt took a special role, first suggesting that the game be called the “Super Bowl,” then later proposing the arch but distinctive manner of identifying its component games with roman numerals, befitting something grand and majestic like, as one writer put it, “Popes or World Wars.” After the 1970 death of Vince Lombardi, it was the AFL loyalist Hunt who suggested to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that the league rename the Super Bowl trophy after the Packers’ patriarch. It was in this small gesture and a hundred others like it for which Hunt gained his reputation in football as a man who thought about the good of the game and the league first, and only then about what might benefit his own team’s interests. The transformation of pro football in the ’60s landed Hunt in Canton, Ohio, where he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1972. Two weeks after induction, he presided over the opening of Arrowhead Stadium, an innovative, vastly influential structure that would become the first modern, classic, football-only stadium. By then, he was well on his way to transforming other worlds as well.
In 1967, with the sport of tennis still clinging to its Old World conventions of ostensibly all-amateur competition, Hunt signed on as a minority partner to a radical plan hatched by New Orleans entrepreneur David Dixon to push the game decisively into the professional era. With the advent of World Championship Tennis, he helped sign “The Handsome Eight,” an octet of world-class players from around the globe; the circuit would eventually take pro tennis out of the station wagons and one-night stands of the Jack Kramer tours of the ’50s and ’60s. The very existence of WCT was a factor in bringing about the revolutionary change in tennis, when Wimbledon announced late in 1967 that its tournament would allow professionals to compete for the first time in 1968.
But even before that first open Wimbledon, Dixon had abandoned WCT, unable to keep up with the early losses. So Hunt agreed to bankroll the enterprise and, over the next five years, constructed the template of the modern tournament and tennis tour, which culminated with the weeklong WCT Finals in Dallas, the marquee new event in professional tennis. In 1972, in front of 40 million viewers on NBC, the WCT Finals played host to the legendary five-set final between Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver that many experts considered the finest match ever played. Though WCT would perish in 1990, Hunt was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1993. “He simply made pro tennis,” said one observer. “We owe it all to Lamar.”
If ever a sport were in Hunt’s debt, it would be soccer in America. Transformed by watching the TV broadcast of the epic spectacle that was the 1966 World Cup Final in London, Hunt soon invested in the venture that would eventually be known as the North American Soccer League. In the face of massive public indifference, and nearly equal amounts of hostility, he worked quietly and tirelessly, over two leagues and the next four decades, to create the right environment for the sport to flourish in America. Even after the NASL died, crushed by the weight of the maniacal ambition of other owners—and the imbalance created by the New York Cosmos juggernaut built around Pelé and other superstars—Hunt continued to quietly support the cause of soccer in the United States. He was the co-chair of the Dallas host committee in 1994 when the World Cup came to the United States, and invested again, even more heavily this time, in Major League Soccer, which launched in 1996.
Along the way, he bought a stake in the NBA expansion franchise the Chicago Bulls in 1966, and stuck with the team through nearly a quarter-century of losses before reveling in the Bulls’ six world titles of the 1990s. In the ’60s, he invested in a minor league baseball team in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, with an eye to bringing Major League Baseball to the area. Around the same time, he was a part-owner of a seventy-two-lane bowling complex that included a bowling amphitheater, which hosted a short-lived venture in the early ’60s called the National Bowling League. While running that complex, he came up with a precursor of the “Superstars” competition, a multi-event contest featuring stars from a wide array of different sports. By the time of his death, he had been chasing these sporting pursuits for more than fifty years. His very first business venture, in which he invested and operated during his college years at Southern Methodist University in the early ’50s, was a baseball batting cage and miniature golf course.
“I would say certainly I had a penchant for what I call show business or entertainment or the sports business,” he said. “They’re all interchangeable in my mind.”
When Hunt began the American Football League in 1959, the universe of sports in America was still operating at the margins, sitting over at the kid’s table of American popular culture. Five years earlier, when Time, Inc., considered launching a weekly magazine devoted to sports, one executive surmised that the only people who would want to read such a magazine were “juveniles and n’er-do-wells.” When the company subsequently launched Sports Illustrated, it found a surprisingly large and affluent audience, a vast swath of the American mainstream—Lamar Hunt among them—that built much of their social lives around playing and watching sports.
Those who were routinely dismissive of sports were missing the makings of a social revolution, of the ways that in a time of heightened social stress and splintering cultural divisions, the animating influence of games could cut across divisions of race, class, religion, and economics, serving as a safe common ground for social discourse and a vital social glue in a polyglot society.
Lamar Hunt didn’t miss it. He not only saw it coming, he helped make it happen.
All through American history there had been well-heeled businessmen, tycoons, and heirs who indulged their love of sport; these so-called sportsmen were the moguls who helped develop the infrastructure of modern American sports.
But Hunt was different. Never before and not since has anyone with so many resources spent so much time watching, participating in, and being captivated by the absorbing ritual of sports and the suspended state of play. His accomplishments would put him in the company of the other giants of American sports—Charles C. “Cash and Carry” Pyle, Abe Saperstein, Rube Foster, George Halas, Branch Rickey, Red Auerbach, Pete Rozelle. Each was present at a revolution. But Hunt, significantly, was present at a number of revolutions. And he was a catalyst for each one.
•
He was as well-mannered as he was rich, which is to say absurdly so. Writers could not resist pointing out the incongruity between his vast wealth and the decidedly unelaborate way in which he carried himself. Just under six feet tall, with a smallish head, chestnut brown hair carefully combed, blue eyes set close above an easy smile and a pronounced chin, Lamar Hunt looked exceedingly normal. At various times over the years, he would be described in print as resembling “a level G-18 federal bureaucrat,” “a technical trouble-shooter for Monsanto,” “a healthful, earnest accountant,” “a junior executive or a minister,” “a Methodist parson on his way to visit the sick,” “a Baptist deacon at a sales meeting,” “Mr. Peepers,” and the “the guy who lives next door.” Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer, described him as “a larger-than-life figure without being a larger-than-life personality.”
To those who knew him best, the sum of the contradictions all made a kind of vivid, poetic sense. A shy, retiring figure by nature, he remembered being “horrified” the first time he saw his name in the newspaper. Yet he would give thousands of public speeches and interviews over the decades, in an attempt to further his various enterprises. The man who had a listed phone number in the Dallas phone book and answered virtually every letter ever sent to him until he died was also notoriously secretive and guarded. As his friend and onetime business partner David Dixon put it, “Lamar is the best super-rich guy I’ve ever known. But by his family practices, he’s very secretive, a lot of times unnecessarily so.” This was true throughout his life. Edward “Buzz” Kemble, his teammate at SMU and one of his closest friends in life, didn’t find out Hunt had cancer until months after the diagnosis came in 1998, and then only because Lamar’s wife Norma confided in Buzz’s wife Dorothy. “He just wasn’t one to volunteer personal things,” said one friend.
If he was misunderstood by many, it was perhaps because they made as many assumptions about his wealth as the observers in 1959 who, upon hearing that the son of a wealthy Texas oilman was starting a new football league, expected a blustering man-child in a 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, and found instead a soft-spoken young gentleman who would invariably greet his elders with courtesy titles, then frequently adjust his glasses and stare off in the middle distance before dutifully attempting to answer each and every difficult question.
The contradictions played themselves out across the decades: He would invest tens of millions of dollars in sports franchises, would shop extensively for art and rare antiques, travel the world and eat at its finest restaurants. And yet, as a wealthy man who usually flew commercial, and then invariably coach (“the back of the plane gets there at the same time,” he happily pointed out), he became as well known for his parsimony as any American celebrity since Jack Benny. “I do detest ostentation,” he once explained, and in so doing explained a lot. A charity roast for Hunt in the summer of 2000 consisted of more than a dozen friends and associates telling anecdotes about Lamar running out of money and/or gas, asking to borrow everything from 55 cents for a taxi to $20 to get his rental car out of the parking lot. Everyone had a variation on the “Lamar needed money” story. Hank Stram’s son Dale once saw Hunt write a check in the sum of 10 cents to pay a toll on the Dallas Tollway.
“Lamar knew the value of two things,” said Clive Toye, who traveled and worked with Hunt in the North American Soccer League. “He knew the value of a dollar, and he knew the value of his word.”
He was careless and forgetful about so many things in his hectic life. The daily details of getting gas, getting his state inspection sticker renewed, having cash on hand, and replacing worn-out shoes, were all matters that eluded him. A notorious technophobe who left his cell phone turned off in the glove compartment, and whose VCR blinked “12:00” for years, he died without ever having turned on a computer. He was perpetually late in his meetings and correspondence, and he never seemed to have enough paper on hand for his thousands of memos and communiqués.
Yet the same man who could at times seem so disorganized in his personal and business affairs also had a draftsman’s eye for balance and symmetry, and casually created one of the most enduring emblems in American sports—the Kansas City Chiefs logo, with its interlocking, block-shadowed K and C inside an arrowhead—while sitting in his kitchen one day in 1963. This was no one-off. For all his adult life, he’d sketch marvelously detailed renderings of logos, museum walls, stadium elevations, all the different elements of the world of sports that captivated his imagination (and most of his waking thoughts) since he was a boy.
In a sports world dominated by salty language and offhand profanity, he was an exemplar of probity. It wasn’t simply that Hunt didn’t swear. It was that people who did swear made it a point to swear less when they were around him.
He spoke in clichés and platitudes, and yet thought in terms of innovations, and was willing and able to discuss details down to a granular level. “One of the things that made him special,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, “was that the small stuff mattered. Incredible attention to detail. He saw the big picture, but he also saw how the little pieces built up to that.”
A lifelong Republican who voted for the GOP candidate in every presidential election, he was at the same time a trail-blazer in race relations in pro sports, helping to integrate both private and public institutions, hiring the first full-time African-American scout in pro football and tapping into the rich vein of historically black colleges in the South. In 1960, he signed to his new pro team the first black to play football at a predominantly white four-year college in the state of Texas (Abner Haynes from North Texas State), and in 1967, his team featured the first starting black middle linebacker in pro football (Willie Lanier). In 1969, his Kansas City Chiefs were the first championship team in pro football history to have a majority of black players in their starting lineup. Lloyd Wells, the black scout who helped the Chiefs sign many of their stars of the ’60s, summed it up in a sentence: “Finest white man I ever met.”
Others would second the motion, without the qualifier. “He is the finest human being it has ever been my privilege to know,” said Marty Schottenheimer. “I’ve never met a better human being in all my life,” said Dick Vermeil. His friend Bill McNutt once said, “He’s warm and genuine and straight as a string. If everybody were like him, the world wouldn’t have any problems.” His longtime lieutenant, Jack Steadman, said at Hunt’s memorial service, “When God created man, he had Lamar Hunt in mind.”
But to those outside his remarkably compact inner circle, the sum of all these heartfelt encomiums was to reduce Lamar Hunt to a bland, saintly figure. He was the kindly, reserved but enthusiastic uncle walking the perimeter of Arrowhead Stadium on game-day mornings in Kansas City, unfailingly cheerful and polite while meeting the public. Even those who admired him struggled with his seemingly boundless capacity for pleasantness.
“What a wonderful man,” said Steve Sabol, the longtime head of NFL Films, before pausing a second. “And boring! What a boring man!” Sabol had wrestled with a film on Hunt’s life that, in the end, became a long, uninterrupted flow of his acknowledged goodness and, in Sabol’s opinion, less interesting because of this.
Those who worked for him, almost to a person, were fond and protective of him. They appreciated his approachability so much that they took pains not to take advantage of it. “He was busy, so he wouldn’t just sit down and start talking to you, and you’d have this long, deep conversation for a half-hour,” said his longtime assistant Thom Meredith. “That would happen maybe once a year, if that.”
His innate shyness became one of his defining characteristics. There were people whose lives he dramatically shaped—Hall of Fame quarterback Len Dawson and tennis great John Newcombe among them—who could not recall a single conversation they had with Lamar that lasted more than a few minutes.
“He didn’t do small talk,” said one friend.
Many people in his sphere revered him at a distance, speaking to him briefly once or twice a year, grateful that he always answered their letters and returned their calls, wishing only that they could have known him better. “I wish I would have said to him, ‘Lamar, let me come down to Dallas for a day and just follow you around,’” said Pat Williams, the longtime basketball executive who first met Hunt in 1969. “I’m sure he would have let me.”
They loved his decency, his whimsy, his generosity of spirit, and his bottomless reservoir of ideas—always the ideas. Many of those closest to him put it precisely the same way: “He was a man of many ideas,” each would say, before pausing and adding, at once affectionate and protective, “Not all of them good ones.” And then: “Don’t quote me on that.”
He contained multitudes. He was described by his wife as being “both calm and constantly active.” There was no doubt, both inside and beyond his family, that he loved his kin, loved being a father, loved being a husband, drew strength from the times he was surrounded by his children. And yet, there he was, out the door and off to the airport, flying for a meeting in Los Angeles, or a game in Cincinnati, or a dinner in New York, or a World Cup tournament overseas. Alone, if necessary.
He was his mother’s son, unfailingly polite, and—with vast wealth at his disposal—he set out on a journey that would forever alter the landscape of American sports. He is not remembered, like his father, for being a mythic figure of oil and politics and manifest destiny. Instead, Lamar Hunt was renowned because he was perhaps the most unusual combination ever of decency, innovation, secretiveness, optimism, persistence, naïvete, politesse, shyness, loyalty, and an irrepressible love of the moment.
“If you just met Lamar, you’d never guess he was born rich,” said the legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins, who counted Lamar as a friend, a neighbor, and a subject at different times over the years. “You’d just think he was a football fan. He was a kid for life. You know, people in sports, they never get over being a kid . . . if they’ve got any sense.”
There was something deep and abiding about his love of competition—something that went beyond the surface diversions that many people find in games. So the obituaries only got it half right. Lamar Hunt wasn’t a traditional sportsman. He was a sports fan. And though publications and networks all across the sports world reported his many ventures and triumphs and innovations, none took the measure of the long road he’d taken to make his own dreams come true. Nor did anyone mention that of all of his many signal accomplishments, the greatest of these had yet to be fully grasped.
The score wasn’t final just yet.