Lamar Hunt

• 1. Introduction

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  Lamar Hunt coined one of the most famous phrases in American sports almost by accident. In a letter dated the 25th of July 1966, to NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, Hunt wrote that he had "kiddingly" been calling the proposed championship game the "Super Bowl." He added that the name "obviously can be improved upon." It was not improved upon. The name stuck, became official with the third annual game in 1969, and has been shouted by hundreds of millions of people ever since.

  But the Super Bowl was only one footnote in a life spent building sports from scratch. Hunt was the son of one of the richest men in America. He graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1956 with a geology degree. He grew up watching sports and never stopped wanting to own them. When the NFL told him no, he did not walk away. He built a rival league. When soccer had almost no audience in the United States, he spent decades and millions trying to change that. When tennis professionals were banned from major tournaments, he helped create the circuit that would define the Open Era. Three separate sports halls of fame eventually inducted him. That is not an accident. That is a life's work.

• 2. The Foolish Club

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  By 1959, professional American football ran a distant second to Major League Baseball in popularity. NFL executives worried about oversaturating the market. That logic left Hunt with nothing, after he applied for an expansion franchise and was turned down. He had also tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals that same year, intending to move them to Dallas, but the NFL refused that too. The Cardinals relocated to St. Louis in 1960 without Hunt.

  Hunt's response was to approach other rejected applicants. Fellow Texan and oilman Bud Adams of Houston was among them. In August 1959, they and six others formalized the American Football League. The eight founding owners called themselves the "Foolish Club," a name that captured exactly what establishment football thought of them.

  Hunt became owner of the Dallas Texans and hired Hank Stram as the team's first head coach. Stram would later earn a place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Texans and the AFL began play in 1960, the same year the NFL, rattled by the new competition, rushed a franchise of its own into Dallas: the Dallas Cowboys. Hunt's team suddenly had to share its home city with a direct rival.

• 3. Kansas City and the Chiefs

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  At the end of the 1962 season, with the Dallas Texans competing against the Cowboys for every fan in town, Hunt concluded the city could not sustain two teams. He began looking elsewhere. Kansas City emerged as a candidate partly because Hunt wanted a city he could easily commute to from Dallas. Mayor H. Roe Bartle made it concrete, promising Hunt home attendance of 25,000 people per game. Hunt took the deal, and in 1963 the Dallas Texans became the Kansas City Chiefs.

  Attendance took time to reach what Bartle had promised. But by 1966 average home attendance had climbed to 37,000, and by 1969 it had reached 51,000. The Chiefs won the AFL Championship in 1966, after previously winning it in 1962 as the Dallas Texans, and then played in the first-ever Super Bowl. They lost to the Green Bay Packers. Four years later, in Super Bowl IV, the Chiefs defeated the heavily favored Minnesota Vikings to win the AFL's final championship before the league was absorbed into the NFL as the American Football Conference.

  Hunt insisted on being listed in team media guides as founder of the Chiefs rather than owner. He publicly listed his home telephone number for the rest of his life. From 1960 to 2005, with Hunt as founder, the Chiefs reached the postseason fourteen times. The AFC Championship trophy was named after Hunt in 1984. He did not live to see the Chiefs win it; they lost the AFC Championship Game in 1993.

• 4. Soccer's Long Game

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  Hunt's interest in soccer traced back to 1962, when he accompanied his future wife Norma to a Shamrock Rovers match in Dublin, Ireland. He was not yet a soccer investor. He was a spectator falling in love with a sport his country barely followed. In 1966, he watched the FIFA World Cup in England. He would go on to attend nine of the next eleven World Cup tournaments.

  In 1967, Hunt founded the Dallas Tornado as members of the United Soccer Association. A year later, that league merged with the National Professional Soccer League to create the North American Soccer League. The Tornado won the NASL championship in 1971 and finished runners-up in 1973. Hunt advocated loudly for the league and the sport.

  The NFL pushed back. League owners tried to create legal requirements that would bar NFL franchise holders from owning teams in other sports. The strategy failed. The NASL won an anti-trust case against the NFL, and Hunt was among its primary beneficiaries. Still, after fifteen seasons and losses totaling in the millions, Hunt and his partner Bill McNutt merged the Dallas Tornado with the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1981, retaining a minority stake. Two years later they sold the Rowdies to local investors. The NASL itself collapsed in 1984, one year after Hunt had effectively exited.

  He came back. When Major League Soccer launched in 1996, Hunt was one of its original founding investors, owning the Columbus Crew and the Kansas City Wizards. In 1999 he financed Historic Crew Stadium, the second large soccer-specific stadium in the United States and the first since 1913. He bought a third MLS team, the Dallas Burn, in 2003. The U.S. Open Cup, the oldest ongoing national soccer tournament in the country, founded in 1914, now bears his name.

• 5. Tennis and Silver

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  In 1968, Hunt co-founded World Championship Tennis, a circuit that gave professional players a structured competitive calendar outside the constraints that had kept them from the sport's major tournaments. The circuit helped establish what became known as the Open Era of professional tennis. The International Tennis Hall of Fame inducted Hunt in 1993.

  Less celebrated was the financial catastrophe Hunt helped engineer alongside his brothers. During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Hunt and his brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt began buying silver. By the end of 1979, the three brothers controlled roughly one-third of the world silver market. The price per ounce rose from $11 in September 1979 to $50 in January 1980. In the last nine months of 1979 alone, the brothers were estimated to have profited between $2 billion and $4 billion. Then, on the 27th of March 1980, a date the precious-metals industry came to call Silver Thursday, the price collapsed. In September 1988, the Hunt brothers filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

• 6. The Man Behind the Institutions

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  Hunt built the Kansas City Chiefs but he also built theme parks. Worlds of Fun opened in 1973, and Oceans of Fun followed in 1982. Both grew out of a larger industrial development he created in the bluffs above the Missouri River in Clay County, Missouri. Adjacent to those parks, Hunt developed SubTropolis, a manmade limestone cave covering 55 million square feet across 1,100 acres, described as the world's largest underground business complex.

  His holdings in Clay County had practical effects on the Chiefs: the team held its NFL training camp at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri until 1991, partly because of Hunt's extensive business ties to the area.

  Hunt was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1972, the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 1982, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1993. In 1999, the National Soccer Hall of Fame gave him its Medal of Honor, an award that had been presented to only three recipients in its history. He was close friends and neighbors with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, whom he had first met when Jones was 25 years old. In 1998, the two men commissioned the Preston Road Trophy, awarded to the winner of games between the Chiefs and Cowboys. When it changed hands, they were known to pull pranks on each other.

  Hunt died on the 13th of December 2006, at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas of complications related to prostate cancer. He was 74 years old. Upon his death, his son Clark was named chairman of the Kansas City Chiefs and FC Dallas. Norma Hunt, who had attended every Super Bowl from 1967 onward, continued that streak until her death in June 2023, the only woman on record to have done so.