The Talented Mr. Hunt
A Football Visionary Who Bowled Us Over
Lamar Hunt, the bespectacled boy genius of the early American Football League, and an heir to one of America's largest silver fortunes, died at age 78. Think about that- it means Hunt was only 39 years old when the AFL and NFL agreed to join forces, and 32 when the younger league was founded. Hunt’s Dallas Texans, and later the Kansas City Chiefs, helped the upstart American Football League challenge the NFL in major markets. The Texans were an early power, with stars such as Abner Haynes and Cotton Davidson. Still, Big D proved not big enough for two expansion football experiments, and Hunt moved his franchise to kansas City- leaving Tex Schramm's Cowboys as the only game in town. Coach Hank Stram was the sharpest young mind in the business, guiding the Chiefs to the heights of the AFL . The team was especially ahead of the curve in drafting players from predominantly Black colleges, signing massive linemen, and introducing innovative formations.
Hunt and Oakland maverick Al Davis lobbyed commissioner Pete Rozelle for a chance to face the best of the NFL. Legend has it that Hunt even contrived the name for the championship game between the leagues, after his daughter’s favorite toy, a superball.
Kansas City's success in signing college stars such as Otis Taylor and Bobby Bell, and creating starring roles for NFL castoffs such as Lenny Dawson, helped force a merger with the established league. One Chiefs' tactic was to court college stars during all-star game weekends, and stash them in discreet hotel rooms out of sight from NFL team officials. Legendary Houston sports photographer Lloyd Wells would sequester Black players with whom he had a relationship from their days at Texas Southern or Prarie View A & M.
Men such as Hunt, Pete Rozelle, Vince Lombardi, George Allen, and Joe Namath helped transform pro football from Midwestern collisions of mastodons to the colorful bi-coastal blitzkrieg it is today. Lamar Hunt gained a measure of acknowledgement for his methods in Super Bowl Four, where his space age Chiefs used the I-formation, the moving pocket, an open huddle, and running backs as compact as foreign cars to upset the mighty Minnesota Vikings 23-7. More than a landmark game (and perhaps not as much so as Super Bowl Three, when the counterculture New York Jets shocked the world and the crewcut, hightop Baltimore Colts), it was a clash of cultures. The Vikings, with a defense nicknamed The Purple People Eaters and a front four called "The Four Norsemen", were a gut-it-out, cold weather NFL archetype. The crimson-clad Chiefs, with fancy-footed receivers and brash mini-coach Stram, embodied the young AFL. Speed vs. power, boxer vs. slugger, and the team whose wideouts taped cleats resembled Muhammad Ali's white shoes was triumphant. In a game that was the last tile macthup of teams from separate leagues, it was a victory symbolic of Hunt over Halas. Only the younger owner could have known how sweet it was, having lost the era's flashiest back, Kansas' Gale Sayers, in a 1965 bidding war with the Chicago Bears. Hunt and Stram found other diamonds, and lent class to the gridiron's generational wars.
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