Joe Pa's Lamar Hunt tribute in today's Athletic

[srvy]

For those who may not subscribe I thought I would post this column from Posnanski. He nailed the man pretty good and I am not a huge Joe Pa fan.

Posnanski: As the Chiefs and Kansas City rejoice, I reminisce about the treasure that was Lamar Hunt


By Joe Posnanski 2h ago 14
Every now and again, seemingly for no reason at all, Lamar Hunt would call me up just to talk about sports.

I say that now with the same disbelief I felt then. I mean, Lamar Hunt! He might have been the most influential sports magnate of the 20th century. He founded the American Football League! He named the Super Bowl! He did as much as anyone to popularize soccer in America, played a defining role in professional tennis, tried to start a professional bowling league and had a minority share of the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls.

A quick Bulls story: Hunt once told me that he had seen Jordan play more than 100 times live, but had never met him.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he replied, “beauty is best appreciated from afar.”

He was most famous as the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs. He always insisted on being called “founder,” rather than “owner,” because, as he said, “To me, every Chiefs fan has ownership in the team. They are just as invested emotionally as I am. I was able to bring the team to Kansas City, but it is Kansas City’s team.”

He was so different from anyone I ever met in sports. No, that’s too narrow. He was so different from anyone I have ever met.

I think of Lamar now — and he did ask people to call him Lamar — in the afterglow of the Chiefs reaching their first Super Bowl in a half-century. I think of how he would feel now after seeing his son, Clark, hold up that AFC Championship trophy — the Lamar Hunt Trophy. I think of what he would say now after seeing all those Chiefs fans, huddled in red on a bitterly cold Kansas City day, celebrating feverishly and crying real tears after so many heartbreaks.

“Bad luck,” he would say after each and every one of those heartaches, after Joe Montana got knocked out of the game in 1993, after Lin Elliot missed those field goals in 1995, after Tony Gonzalez landed out of bounds in 1997, after the defense could not force even a single punt in 2003, after the Chiefs failed to win even a single playoff game for 20 years. Chiefs fans remember all of it; the heartbreaks are what defined this team. Three generations of heartland fans grew up with those heartbreaks as surely as they grew up with Christmas morning.

To Hunt, though, it was just bad luck.

Next year, maybe luck would turn. That’s just how he saw the world.

He so deeply loved sports. When he called or sent a note — he would handwrite his notes — it was usually to talk about some new sports idea he had. He wanted to figure out a way to stop the kneel-downs at the end of games (he tried for years to institute a rule that said if you didn’t gain a yard, the clock would stop). He was one of the first people I heard talk about a pitcher’s clock in baseball to keep things moving between pitches. He was one of the first people I heard talk about how at tennis matches there should be a radar gun to tell you the speed of the serve.

He was always tinkering — that was his passion. When he was a boy, the son of the billionaire oil mogul H.L Hunt, people in the family would call him “Games” because he was always inventing some new sport. And that’s how it would be for the rest of his life.

“There are those who would say I never quite grew up, “ Hunt used to say, “And I suppose they’re right.”

He was just 27 years old when, after his application to buy an NFL expansion team was turned down, he found eight businessmen willing to help him start a new league. Nobody thought they stood a chance. They were called “The Foolish Club,” a name they quickly took pride in. Hunt’s team then was the Dallas Texans, and the team lost $1 million the first year, and the story (probably apocryphal) went that reporters approached H.L. Hunt himself to ask how long Lamar could keep up such an absurd money-losing scheme.

“About 143 years,” H.L. Hunt said.

The NFL started the Dallas Cowboys in part to run out Lamar Hunt and end the AFL nonsense. That’s when Lamar took his Texans to Kansas City. He actually wanted to keep the name — he loved that Texans nickname — but eventually he was convinced that a team called the “Kansas City Texans” wouldn’t make anybody happy and decided to go with Chiefs instead.*

*You might not know this, but the Chiefs were not actually named after Native American chiefs. They were named after Kansas City mayor H. Roe Bartle, who was instrumental in convincing Hunt to bring the team to town and who had long been nicknamed “The Chief.”

The fact Hunt really wanted to keep the Texans name sort of defined his personality. He was defiantly absentminded and delightfully quirky. He once had his own car towed from the Arrowhead Stadium parking lot during a game because he had forgotten to put the sticker on it. He used to say he owned just one suit because that’s all a man needs (“You can’t wear more than one suit at a time,” he said). His name and number was listed in the Dallas phone book until the day he died.

He would sometimes personally serve the players food and drinks on plane rides to and from games.

And you know, I’m sure, that he named the Super Bowl after his daughter’s toy superball.

He was also impossibly patient. The Chiefs had so much early success. They scoured the historically black colleges for great players such as Buck Buchanan, Willie Lanier and Otis Taylor. Their third choice for coach happened to be a Hall of Famer named Hank Stram. They landed an NFL discard named Len Dawson to play quarterback. They somehow signed a force of nature named Bobby Bell. They appeared in Super Bowl I — before he would even name the game — and won Super Bowl IV.


Hunt, with former Chiefs coach Hank Stram (left) and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle (center) at Super Bowl I. (Rich Clarkson / Rich Clarkson & Assoc.)
But then the team went into a long dry spell, so long and so dry that there was some concern that Kansas City could not support an NFL team. After 20 or so years of half-empty stadiums and constant failure, the team — led by GM Carl Peterson and head coach Marty Schottenheimer — became a perennial playoff team … and a perennial heartbreaker.

“Bad luck,” Hunt would say over and over again in those years. By that point, the Chiefs were everything in Kansas City and many people longed for him to be more aggressive, more hawkish, more impatient. But that simply wasn’t in his nature. While his wife, Norma, would watch the games with a referee doll that she’d tear limb from limb after bad calls, Lamar would watch the games silently, without saying a word.

“I suppose I’m a pretty patient man,” he said. “It’s a vice. I tend to let things play out. I want to see what will happen.”


Hunt, left, alongside former GM and team president Carl Peterson. (CLIFF SCHIAPPA/AFP via Getty Images)
The last time he called me was a couple of years before his death in 2006. As it turned out, he called when my wife and I were at the doctor’s office for our daughter’s regular checkup, and Lamar could not have been more apologetic. I kept telling him it was fine, she was fine, but he was mortified.

“You take care of her,” he said, and he hung up.

When I called him back, he asked about her again and again. And then he began to talk about Kansas City. He talked about how, many years earlier, the kooky owner of the old Kansas City A’s, Charlie Finley, had tried to convince Hunt to team up and move both the baseball and football teams to Atlanta. “Kansas City is a $&#&#* town,” Lamar remembered Finley saying, and he apologized for repeating the swear word.

Of course, Hunt did not move the team (Finley later did move the A’s to Oakland). And he wanted me to know that he was happy that he had chosen Kansas City. He wanted me to know just how much the town had come to mean to him. He wanted me to know just how much he wanted the Chiefs to go back to the Super Bowl, not for him but for all those fans.

That’s just how he was. He died in 2006, and I would never say I knew Lamar Hunt. How can you ever know someone like Lamar Hunt? This was a guy who tried to buy Alcatraz and turn it into a mall. This was a guy who built amusement parks and resorts and commercial fishing lakes and the world’s largest underground business cave. This was a guy who had riches beyond imagination but would always fly coach. This was a guy whose brothers tried to corner the silver market, a guy whose father was included in at least one JFK conspiracy theory.

So, no, I didn’t know him. But I did know how much he loved Kansas City and how much he loved the Chiefs. And I think I know what he would have said on that stage after the Chiefs — behind their already immortal quarterback Patrick Mahomes — beat the Titans on Sunday to get back to the big game. He would have said: “Well, we had some good luck, didn’t we?”

(Top photo: Ross Lewis/Getty Images)

https://theathletic.com/1547555/2020...shared-article

[Marcellus]

Read this earlier, its just plain awesome.

[DJ's left nut]

Joe Pa died after getting fired when his DC spent a decade diddling little boys.

JoePo, OTOH, is still probably the best sportswriter to come out of KC (sorta).

He gets unnecessarily flowery and nostalgic at times; often a little too proud of his pen, so to speak. But he does love him some nostalgia.

[chiefzilla1501]

Awesome story!

Might recommend a wording change, though. Joe Pa is Joe Paterno... might confuse a few people.

[big nasty kcnut]

Great read!

[big nasty kcnut]

Also **** Charlie Finley!

[cosmo20002]

Originally Posted by srvy

Joe Pa's Lamar Hunt tribute in today's Athletic

moron

[srvy]

Well he did become Joe Pa's penis leech with his book glorifying Peterno. Much like you are CPs penis leech we cant seen to rid ourselves of.


typed with my trusty nose picker using Tapatalk

[srvy]

Joe pa's leech did right a good article here though.

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[gblowfish]

Posnanski is a great writer. It's a shame he was the Paterno Bio writer, which was about as controversial of a gig as one could tackle. But he's also a Cleveland transplant with a KC heart, and has an undeniable love of the Chiefs. He and Whitlock were the two columnists for the Chiefs during the King Carl/Marty era.

[srvy]

Maybe before your time but Joe McGuff was a lot better than Posnanski.

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[KChiefs1]

I thought Joe Pa was dead but he sure wrote a great piece on Lamar Hunt.

[MahiMike]

I was wondering what ever happened to Posnaski.

[Prison Bitch]

What charities was Lamar involved with

[Discuss Thrower]

Okay now I really dislike the A's. **** Charlie Finley.