KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The most enduring memories that Clark and Dan Hunt share of their father, the sports tycoon Lamar Hunt, have less to do with all the World Cup games they saw together and more to do with the long, strange and often sinewy roads they took to get to them.
The van rides around Europe with a random cache of reporters, one of them a young CBS broadcaster named Verne Lundquist. Those side trips to find the best wienerschnitzel and ice cream. The fences they scaled to go swimming at Italian hotel pools long closed for the day. And the Mexican restaurant that proved to be the downfall of them all.
“My dad, he could eat anything,” Dan Hunt recalled, thinking back to a night during the 1986 World Cup, “and that about killed him.”
In interviews with The Associated Press, the Hunt brothers — Clark, the chairman of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and Dan, the president of Major League Soccer club FC Dallas — reflected on the robust soccer legacy left by their late father.
It was Lamar Hunt who helped professional soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. with his investment in the North American Soccer League. When it folded in the 1980s, it was an undeterred Hunt who helped found MLS, whose very existence was required by FIFA for the U.S. to host the 1994 World Cup.
Lamar Hunt served as the co-chairman of the organizing committee for matches in Dallas that year. Now, some 32 years later, Clark Hunt is serving in the same capacity for matches in Kansas City while Dan has taken on that role in Dallas.
Unlike the last World Cup played in the U.S., though, four group-stage matches and two knockout games will be played at Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Chiefs, and a building Lamar Hunt called his favorite place in the world.
“It’s going to be special,” Clark Hunt said, “and I think it goes back to thinking about my dad a lot. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Learning to love the beautiful game
Lamar Hunt’s love for soccer began with a trip in the early 1960s. His eventual wife, Norma Hunt, was attending University College Dublin as a Rotary scholar, and the son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt had gone to visit. They found themselves at a Shamrock Rovers match and became enamored with the spectacle.
“I think,” Clark Hunt said, “that may have been my dad’s first professional soccer game.”
The experience stayed with Lamar Hunt, even as he returned to the U.S. and poured himself into a different kind of football, helping to found the American Football League — which would soon merge with the NFL — and the Dallas Texans, now the Chiefs.
By the time he returned to Europe for the 1966 World Cup, he was intent on bringing soccer home with him. Hunt helped establish the United Soccer Association, which would later merge with the National Professional Soccer League to create the North American Soccer League, and watched as the sport took off with stars such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto.
“We know from his ventures into professional football that he was not afraid of a challenge,” Clark Hunt said.
Success and failure on the American stage
The NASL grew quickly throughout the 1970s but many new owners did not have the resources to withstand losses while their clubs were getting off the ground, and the league collapsed after the 1984 season. But professional soccer didn’t disappear for long.
