Lamar Hunt: A Life in Sports

PROLOGUE

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.

CHAPTER ONE

LATE ARRIVAL

H. L. Hunt sat at the kitchen table, fidgeting with the straw boater in his hands, trying his best to avoid a look of boredom. Seated at the end of the table, his oldest son, Hassie, wore the slightest trace of a smile.

Lyda Hunt had felt her husband’s restlessness for days, almost as soon as H. L. and Hassie had returned from the oil fields to sit with them for what was surely going to be the family’s last baby. But that had been two weeks ago, in mid-July. And now, as Lyda sat in the path of the electric fan, her breathing forced, she felt the weight of her husband’s barely concealed exasperation, and reached a decision.

June, you and Hassie need to get back to the field.

No, Mom, everything can wait, H. L. protested, though not too strongly.

No, it cannot, she said, firmly. Our business needs attention, so do go back. I have done this six times. You two get on with the drilling, and Margaret will take care of me and the baby.

With that, H. L. Hunt exhaled, and stood up, and everyone relaxed. Very soon, he would be on his way, doing what he did best: Moving, acting, striving further in his journey to make his mark on the world. And Lyda, once again, would be the head of the household.

She had returned a month earlier, in the summer of 1932, from their new home in Tyler to El Dorado, Arkansas, where the family had lived for most of the 1920s. She wanted to be close to her physician, Dr. Murphy, and have her last baby in the comfort of the three-story brick English-revival house known as The Pines.

Within the hour, H. L. and the fifteen-year-old Hassie were on their way, the car moving past Lyda’s beloved tulip beds, its taillights disappearing behind the row of pine trees in front of the house. They would be back to work by the morning.

Lyda Hunt, pious, steady, and learned, stood barely five feet tall, and weighed 150 pounds when she wasn’t pregnant. Now, two weeks overdue and bloated closer to 200 pounds, her face seemed wan, and even getting up to her bedroom on the second floor was an effort. Her oldest daughter, Margaret, just sixteen but already a second mother to the youngest three Hunt children—the nine-year-old Caroline, the six-year-old Bunker, and the three-year-old Herbert—looked concerned as she followed her mother from room to room.

Later that night, after the children were put to bed and the kitchen lights were out, Margaret came into her mother’s room to check on her. Formally and unsentimentally, Lyda spoke directly to her daughter.

I feel fine, Margaret, and I am sorry to put this burden on you, but people of forty-three do not customarily have children. So just in case anything should happen to me, the clothes I want to wear are in a suit-box in the closet.

Margaret Hunt had never considered losing her mother before, but she was beginning to understand the gravity of the ordeal ahead. She returned to her room and slept fitfully until, early the next morning, Lyda summoned her in the dark, and urged her daughter to drive them to the hospital.

Through the quiet streets of El Dorado, a nervous Margaret negotiated the family car to the hospital, stealing frightened sideways peeks at her mother seated beside her, face contorted with pain.

Several hours later, on the morning of August 2, 1932, Baby Hunt—the name Lamar would come weeks later, with no middle name, as H. L. and Lyda had already worked their way through homages on both sides of the family tree—was born at the El Dorado hospital. By the end of that week, Lyda was out of the hospital and back in the home in El Dorado, nursing her baby, with Margaret helping in any way she could. By mid-August, Lyda and Margaret and baby Lamar were back in Tyler, in the crowded, three-bedroom home on Wooldridge Street where the Hunt family had settled after their move from El Dorado.

So Lamar Hunt’s story was just beginning, even as the legendary saga of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt and their family was well underway. In a land convulsed and crippled by the seismic financial and social trauma of the Depression, men fought for their survival and fortunes in the same breath. The cities of America knew the breadlines, and the long procession of migrants, looking forlornly for regular work. But across the South, in the small towns and hollers, the transitory phenomenon was even more noticeable. Men picked up and embarked for new surroundings at the hint of money.

And when the real strike came, in October 1930, the southwest United States was transformed. They came on horses, trains, wagons, and cars (the latter often getting stuck in the quagmires of the unpaved streets in the oil boomtowns of Henderson and Kilgore, Texas). There was no sense of how long the boom would last or who might prevail. So the temper of the times was bruised, breathless, and distrustful. It was in this world that H. L. Hunt thrived.

He had forever altered his own future and that of his family with his shrewd play on Columbus Marion Dad Joiner’s seminal Daisy Bradford No. 3 well in Rusk County, Texas, in the dwindling fall days of 1930, cannily capitalizing on the largest oilfield discovery in the world at that time.

H. L. Hunt had gained and lost and regained his fortune by the time of Lamar’s birth, but he was by no means secure. Earlier in 1932, just a week after Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, a ransom note—written on wax paper, inside a burlap bag—was deposited among the azaleas on the Hunt property in Tyler. The note contained a threat to kidnap and kill one of the two oldest children, Hassie or Margaret, if H. L. Hunt didn’t bring a ransom to the Blue Note Club in Tyler. The threat was viewed as serious enough, and H. L. Hunt’s standing substantial enough, to call in the Texas Rangers, with Manuel Lone Wolf Gonzaullas personally handling the case, and apprehending the would-be kidnappers.

The outsized adventure was entirely in keeping with the tone and tenor of the life of Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, Jr. Born in 1889 in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, to a Confederate War soldier father and a college-educated mother, Ella Rose Hunt, who’d served as a nurse on the Union side. Home-schooled and precocious, H. L. Hunt, Jr., quickly became known as June or Junie to his family. A restless soul, he left home at age sixteen, returning only after his father’s death six years later. He’d learned a lot in those years, using his mathematical mind to its best advantage in both games of chance and in business. He’d also learned, on what was left of the frontier in the West, to fend and think for himself.

One of the stories he told his sons was about the night he won big at poker at a labor camp in California. After lying awake much of the night, H. L. concluded that in all likelihood he would be rousted while taking the only road into town the next morning. So he left then, in the middle of that night, avoiding the main road, and instead following the train tracks by the moon’s dim light, walking 15 miles due west to the next town, still holding his winnings.

When he returned to Illinois, to bury his father in 1911, he was becoming a striking, if not handsome, young man, with soft skin, a cherubic face, and crystal blue eyes. With his $5,000 inheritance, June decided to go to Arkansas, where H. L. Hunt, Sr., had fought during the Civil War. His father had told June that during the fighting in the Battle of Ditch Bayou, he saw the richest, best-looking farmland you ever saw.

H. L. wound up in Lake Village, Arkansas, a bucolic town built on cotton, and a refuge from the bustling Mississippi. The C-shaped lake seemed to jump out of the Mississippi River, just west of Greenville, Mississippi, and when H. L. Hunt arrived, taking up residence at the Lake Shore Hotel, he found a town and a tone to his liking. The town was dignified, cultured, and full of, in his own memory, the comely ladies of Lake Village with their soft drawls.

He bought a 960-acre plantation due south of Lake Village, and commenced with the life of a gentleman farmer, overseeing his property. Two years in a row, the rising tides of the Mississippi washed out his crop. But he persevered by other means, keeping his hand in the town dealings and winning a good deal of poker games at the Lake Shore Hotel, as well as high-stakes affairs across the Mississippi River in Greenville.

Soon, H. L. Hunt made the acquaintance of the prominent Lake Villager Nelson Waldo Bunker, proprietor of the town’s general store, postmaster for the village, and all-round lodestar of other community relations. The men hit it off, and soon enough, Hunt—always girl-minded in his own words—was courting Bunker’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mattie. That summer, Mattie’s older sister Lyda came home from her teaching job in Jonesboro. June and Lyda shared a few conversations in the Bunker parlor, and he quickly became convinced that he was courting the wrong woman.

Lyda was the third of Pap and Sarah Bunker’s six children. Recognizing her thirst for education, her parents had sent her to a boarding school in Little Rock and then Potter College for Women in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She returned to Arkansas and found work as a teacher in Jonesboro, 200 miles north of Lake Village.

H. L.’s courtship of Lyda, held in the dining rooms, ballrooms, and front porches of Lake Village, was an exercise in willfulness. He respected her intelligence, grace, and self-possession, and the sense that so many had of enjoying the grounded warmth of Lyda’s company. There was an earnest goodness to her that he found comforting, even civilizing.

Conversely, H. L. must have made a distinctive and convincing suitor. He was a distillation of the American virtues of honest craftiness, a keen sense of ingenuity, exacting thrift, and a disregard for pretensions borne of book learning and the trappings of high society. Possessed of a formidable mind, a certifiably photographic memory, and a strong sense of personal manifest destiny, he was a man serenely confident in his own abilities and specialness. His genes, he allowed to Lyda, were special and must be passed on to further generations.

They were married on November 26, 1914, and Mattie was the maid of honor. For a few years, H. L. and Lyda lived a life that was unremarkable, save for the traumatic shifts in fortune that H. L. experienced in the cotton business. Even as they were building a family—Margaret born in 1915, and Haroldson Lafayette Hunt III, or Hassie, born in 1917—June’s business acumen kept them solvent.

It was in 1921, while about to make yet another plantation deal, when June had a change of heart. He caught wind of the oil rush in El Dorado, 90 miles to the west, and decided after a mere few minutes of reflection to turn his attention to the burgeoning new business.

In the slapped-together oil towns, filled with card sharps and prostitutes, men and women possessed of empty bluster and a desperate need to make a score, H. L. Hunt confirmed something about himself. In matters of business, he was not merely smarter than most other men, he was more principled as well. Others might not have been able to cope with the convulsive uncertainty, but H. L.’s nerve was staunch. He could unabashedly ask for help when he needed it, confident in the rectitude of his mission. In his business dealings, he was content in operating at a profit in that space of chance where other prospectors and speculators might grow wary, wait for further signs of promise, and, in that moment, lose their opportunity. H. L. Hunt did not waver; he surged headlong into the fray, with an unshakeable will, and faith in his own powers of perception and instincts.

Over the next decade, June mastered the arcane art of oil drilling and the buying and selling of oil leases. Buying low, selling high, often keeping a share in leases that he would turn around and sell at profit, he became a premier wildcatter, with a reputation as an indefatigable worker and an honest debtor.

So by the fall of 1930, when H. L. caught wind of a test well being drilled near Kilgore, Texas, he had spent nearly a decade in the oil business. Driving over from El Dorado, he met Columbus Marion Dad Joiner, and wound up with a crucial stake in the East Texas Oilfield. While the immediate effect of the immense strike was a dilution in the market, with oil prices falling from a dollar to 15 cents a barrel, June knew the long view was good: In a country where cars were being produced in record numbers, and where interstate transportation was booming, the business to be in was oil.

In 1931, he moved his family to Tyler, Texas. By now the Hunts had five children—Margaret, Hassie, Caroline (born in 1923), Bunker (born in 1926), and Herbert (born in 1929). Lyda Hunt was ready to settle down, and quite ready to stop having children. Lamar would be her last.

Margaret later joked that baby Lamar had exhibited the family’s trademark frugality even before he was born, delaying his arrival until August, when many of the (non–air-conditioned) hospitals in Arkansas offered a discount on their surgical procedures. Back in Tyler, Caroline followed the day nurse around the house, rushing to the kitchen when the woman asked for a napkin, only to realize that she’d meant for the girl to fetch a diaper. Fussed over by his sisters, doted on by his mother, Lamar Hunt had arrived in the world with an almost angelic disposition.

Two things happened in 1933 that would shape his early life. Having outgrown their first Tyler home, the Hunts moved into a regal white antebellum mansion on the end of Charnwood Street near downtown Tyler. With its white-columned front porch looking out at the massive magnolia tree abutting the front sidewalk, the home sat on the brick-lined T that marked Fanning Street meeting Charnwood. There was a wide yard on the side of the house, bordered by a rectangular walk and azaleas, room on the other side for Lyda to plant her rose garden, and servants’ quarters in the back, where the chef Gertrude and the young maid Pandora Waters were housed.

By then seventeen, Margaret had taken some of the parenting responsibilities from her mother, often tending to Lamar and the toddler Herbert, but when she left for college at Mary Baldwin in Staunton, Virginia, in the fall of 1933, H. L. Hunt recognized a need for more help. That fall, he wrote Margaret a letter in college:

While in New York I hired a Swiss governess, Eugenia de Tuggenier, for Lamar as I would like Mom to be less tied down to family obligations. Raising the first five of you has not left her adequate time for the traveling she enjoys and needs to do with you all to expose you to more of the world. I hired her on the basis of her impressive references, however, Miss Tuggenier’s previous experience had not prepared her for living in Texas. Upon arrival she expected to be threatened by Indians. Also, she has never before experienced devoted colored servants. Bunker calls her Toogie to her face which he manages to get away with although she is quite strict otherwise. Toogie is teaching Bunker and Herbert to speak French which I do not suppose will damage them. Toogie has some Flying Elephant books which the boys read out loud with her in French . . . Hassie wants to play football in school but Mom and I are not giving our permission. I never knew of a football player who didn’t end up with some permanent injury . . .

Taking residence at Charnwood, the governess shared a room with the infant Lamar, feeding him a bottle and singing him to sleep in French. That Thanksgiving, Lyda left to spend Thanksgiving with H. L., Hassie, and Margaret on the East Coast, while Toogie stayed in Tyler with the three youngest boys.

From an early age, Lamar proved to be keen and sweet; he loved chasing after his brothers and following after his sisters, and was a preternaturally patient and observant traveler. While she by all reports adored Lamar, the new surroundings strained Miss Tuggenier’s Continental sensibilities. One summer day in 1934, supervising Lamar and his siblings out in the yard at Charnwood, the stout Toogie fanned herself and proclaimed, I would not trade one acre of Switzerland for all of Texas.

In 1935, with Texas in the midst of a polio epidemic, the Hunts summered in Newport, Rhode Island, taking up residence at a house right off the Atlantic. As the family spent one of their days sunning on the beach, Caroline looked on at her littlest brother, and paused to take a picture.

She caught him that splendid day in his element, contentedly amusing himself in the wet sand, holding his toy boat, setting it in the water and snatching it back, utterly absorbed in play.

•

The same year that Lamar Hunt was born, the United States Caramel Company issued a set of thirty-two sports heroes cards, celebrating the famous athletes of the day. The makeup of the set provided a good index of the sporting popularity of the era: There were twenty-seven baseball players, three boxers, and two golfers. Zero football players. Had there been any, they surely would have been college stars. The National Football League, barely a decade old, consisted of eight franchises, including teams in Portsmouth, Ohio, and Staten Island, New York. The league did not have a championship game, divisions, or a uniform schedule. It was a pale echo of the college game. In 1925, when the Chicago Bears signed Illinois’s Red Grange following his last college game, the Bears drew more fans for Grange’s barnstorming off-season tour than the entire league drew for its 1925 season.

There is a conventional, and largely credible, history of American leisure that argues that, up until the middle of the twentieth century, spectator sports existed on the periphery of American society, as a diversion that knew and accepted its position. There was a time and a place for sports: weekends, mostly, and holidays; the quadrennial modern Olympics had developed a following, the World Series focused the nation’s attention for a week in October, as did the New Year’s Day bowl games, the Memorial Day running of the Indianapolis 500, Fourth of July doubleheaders, and Thanksgiving Day football games.

There were, as yet, no regular periodicals solely devoted to all sports. The Sporting News, the bible of baseball, would remain a baseball-only publication until the 1940s. Radio became more pervasive, giving the games a broader base, reaching beyond the shift workers and gamblers who were at the heart of sports fandom in the ’10s and ’20s. As movie theater attendance increased, even through the Depression, the opening short reels of sports coverage, often hosted by radio personality Bill Stern, helped create a new era of modern, mythic athletic heroes.

Outside of the large cities of the industrial Northeast, sports were still a decidedly parochial exercise, something to be done rather than seen. In Texas, baseball still ruled but college football was a passion of nearly equivalent widespread interest. The violent sport had swept the state, nourished by the widespread competition among the high schools and focused each fall on the seven major colleges comprising the Southwest Conference, all save the University of Arkansas within the state’s borders. H. L. Hunt had grown up playing baseball in Illinois, but he grew to love football and he observed, more than once, that he was perfectly happy to gamble on either.

At Charnwood, there were daily lunches and nightly dinners served in the spacious dining room, with large bowls of meat, potatoes, and vegetables for the family and H. L. Hunt’s numerous, unannounced guests (he never called ahead, recalled Herbert, he would just show up with one or two people). The older children sat at dinner, attentively listening while June weighed in on the business of the day, politics, and foreign policy. Lamar, because of his youth, still took meals in a high chair in the kitchen, developing a rapport with and a trust of the domestic staff.

H. L. Hunt was prone to definitive statements, a product of a time when the exemplars of American manhood were known to have little patience for ambiguity of any kind. At dinner, he would take a break from his daylong smoking of La Corona Belvederes but not his running commentary on the events of the day. Dad didn’t do idle chitchat, said Herbert. If you were talking about something and it was nothing, you’d be interrupted. Dad took over.

In the evenings when H. L. was at home, the family would often sit by the baby grand piano and listen to their father singing along with Lyda’s playing. While she loved the church hymns, he was fond of the popular songs of the day, often crooning to Fats Waller’s I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.

Lyda doted on all her boys, and both Lamar and Herbert used the same term of endearment, Papoose Mooze (or simply Mooze), in addressing their mother. There were crucial differences, though, between Lamar and his brothers. Both Bunker and Herbert had trouble reading, exhibiting traits that would generations later likely be diagnosed as dyslexia. And they were initially far more headstrong. After Herbert came down with pneumonia in the fall of ’34, H. L. wrote to Margaret, We have to bribe him to take his medicine. It has gotten to where he is charging five dollars to take castor oil. Around the same time, the confident Bunker took to walking by himself around Tyler and, during a vacation in England in 1936, he caught a bus to a movie theater by himself. By the time he got out of the show, the buses had stopped running, so he walked across London at night, the ten-year-old American boy searching for the familiar façade of a hotel.

By contrast, Lamar was more malleable in personal relations, in all ways the baby of the family. He was also precocious, with both words and numbers. He didn’t have the photographic memory of his father or Hassie, but he was adept at math and showed a gift for names and numbers. He also developed an early love of sports and games. Caroline remembered, even before his fifth birthday, that Lamar was rattling off the names of his football and baseball heroes.

While all of H. L. and Lyda’s children grew up feeling loved, there was a distinct sense of reserve in the family. Husband and wife slept in separate rooms; no one in the family was overly demonstrative. Margaret once relayed that her father had referred to her as beautiful on the day she was born, and never gave me another compliment. H. L.’s pride was the young Hassie, who bore a haunting resemblance to his father (they won a father-and-son lookalike contest at a fair in the early ’30s) and who, from the age of thirteen on, accompanied his father in the oil fields. But even Hassie was reproached when he once kissed his mother. Stop that! ordered H. L. Don’t be kissing people.

The Hunts did not talk a lot about their feelings. And, as it happened, there was a lot to not talk about. The gas leak in the house at El Dorado that led to the death of their fourth child, the month-old Lyda, in 1925. The growing spells of erratic behavior that Hassie suffered later in his teenage years. Then there was the chaotic fantasia that was H. L. Hunt’s personal life.

Through the ’20s and ’30s, in Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas, he was known as an honest businessman. But in his personal life, H. L. Hunt—quite secretly at first, then later more or less unapologetically—was a bigamist. After baby Lyda’s death in 1925, H. L. told his wife that he was setting out for an adventure in Florida, to capitalize on the Florida land boom. Down in Tampa, he met and courted a young woman named Frania Tye, to whom he identified himself as Major Franklin Hunt. They were married in a civil ceremony later that year. For the next decade H. L. Hunt traveled incessantly. He spent less than half his time at either home, and it wasn’t until 1934, after H. L. had brought Frania Tye and their children to Dallas, that