Remembering his super legacy

The Indianapolis Colts vs. the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI comes to us courtesy of Lamar Hunt, the most productive father in the history of American sport. The guy was a marvel. A very quiet marvel.

From the time I began covering Lamar and his brainchild American Football League in 1959 until we last met in 2006, I never heard this modest, soft-spoken man raise his voice. But I missed that dinner party at Antoine's in the New Orleans French Quarter the night in January 1970 before Lamar's Kansas City Chiefs played the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV.

Table talk soon turned to the oddsmakers making the Vikings 13-point favorites and the elegant old dining room grew warmer.

"Everyone was all fired up after reading and hearing all week how the poor Chiefs didn't have a chance against the mighty Vikings," said Jack Steadman, longtime general manager for Lamar's football club in Dallas and Kansas City. "Lamar began talking about how the Minnesota owners had double-crossed him and the other AFL owners in November 1959 by pulling out and accepting an NFL franchise. He wound up pounding the table and yelling, 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' "

Veteran Chiefs broadcaster Bill Grigsby wondered if the chandelier might shatter.

"The crowd in Antoine's was shocked," he said.

But no more shocked than most of America was the next day when the Chiefs whipped the Vikings, 23-7, on a bright, cold afternoon at old Tulane Stadium. This was the last time the AFL competed against the NFL before it merged with the older league the next September and the Chiefs closed the AFL's 10 seasons with a bang.

In the locker room, Lamar had a frozen expression on his face, like a little boy on Christmas morning who had gotten everything he wanted. Some people had written off the Jets beating the Colts in Super Bowl III as a fluke. But now the Chiefs had physically and strategically dominated the Vikings. It was obvious the AFL had really grown up and this quiet, bespectacled man beamed like a proud father.

It showed the passion Lamar felt for the league and team he founded when he was 27 years old. Sure, he got a kick out of founding World Championship Tennis, helping start two professional soccer leagues (NASL, MLS), and remaining an original investor in the Chicago Bulls, but all of that came later.

"Of all Lamar's loves in sports, his first were the Texans-Chiefs and the AFL," Steadman said.

His love and his leadership were saluted again last Sunday when the AFC champion Colts received the Lamar Hunt Trophy and headed for the Super Bowl, a game he named after he helped create it. Lamar, sadly, wasn't there for the celebration. He died in Dallas Dec. 13 after an eight-year battle with prostate cancer.

Lamar's imagination and inspiration changed the face of pro football when he conceived the AFL. Original Patriots owner Billy Sullivan described the league's founder beautifully when Lamar was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1972.

"Before there was a player, coach, or general manager in the league, there was Lamar Hunt," Sullivan said. "Hunt was the cornerstone, the integrity of the league. Without him, there would have been no AFL."

Because there was, Lamar always will be remembered as the father of the modern NFL. Today it's the most successful league in professional sports with 32 teams reaping the rewards of his vision, determination, and loyalty. That's a far cry from what it was in 1959.

That's when Lamar, son of legendary Texas oil man H.L. Hunt and once an unlettered third-string end at Southern Methodist University, tried unsuccessfully to buy the Chicago Cardinals and move them to Dallas. Chicago Bears owner-coach George Halas, chairman of the NFL expansion committee, then told him the 12-team NFL had no plans to expand. So he did what any young fellow with a love for football and a personal fortune of $50 million might do. He started his own league.

On Aug. 15, 1959, Lamar and seven club owners he had recruited announced their eight-team American Football League would kick off in September 1960. Then the NFL reversed its field, saying it would expand to 13 teams, adding a team in Dallas in 1960. The owner would be 36-year-old Clint Murchison Jr., son of another legendary Texas oil man. Suddenly Dallas was a city with two pro football teams, Lamar's Texans and Clint's Cowboys.

"Clint told me that all he was interested in was seeing Dallas get an NFL team," Lamar told me later. "He said he and his group would be willing to go 50-50 with me if I would give up the idea of the AFL. If this had been prior to August 15, when all the men I had contacted got together for the first time, I might have accepted. But by then commitments had been made. I had gone out and sought these men. We didn't have any binding legal instrument until several months later, but I didn't feel I should back out."

Because he honored his commitment to other AFL owners, including the ones in Minnesota, Lamar was the key to launching a decade of tremendous change in pro football. In 1966, with his Texans prospering as the Kansas City Chiefs since 1963 and the Cowboys finally booming in Dallas, he and Cowboys president Tex Schramm worked out a merger of the two leagues with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. That led to an NFL-AFL world championship game that season and an expanded NFL in 1970.

The 26-team NFL included all eight original AFL franchises (Texans-Chiefs, Chargers, Titans-Jets, Bills, Oilers, Raiders, Broncos, and Patriots) plus the Dolphins and Bengals, who joined in 1966 and '68. Lamar and the other original owners, who each paid a $25,000 membership fee, laughingly called themselves "The Foolish Club" in the early years when they lost millions and the NFL belittled them and tried to run them out of business. Today the value of these franchises has soared tremendously.

"Lamar was quiet, but my early impression was he had a fire inside him," said Len Dawson, a quarterback who joined the Texans in 1962 after playing little for five years in the NFL and became MVP of Super Bowl IV. "He took on the NFL and didn't back down. You can always wonder what the NFL would be today if Halas had told him, 'Just wait. We'll expand in a year or two.' Instead, he slammed the door in Lamar's face."

And this creative visionary opened another door and made history.

Sam Blair was a writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News for 41 years. He first crossed paths with Lamar Hunt in 1945, when they were 13-year-old eighth-graders at J.L. Long Junior High School in East Dallas.