Lamar Hunt's legacy: World Cup adventures with sons Clark and Dan, and the foundation of US soccer

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.

When the game's global coverning body, FIFA, told organizers for the 1994 World Cup that one of its requirements was to host was a top-level domestic league, Hunt used what he had learned from the NASL in helping get Major League Soccer off the ground.

“You knew that if Lamar Hunt was part of it,” said Thom Meredith, his right-hand man for many years, “it meant something."

Hunt not only helped bankroll the league but owned three of its first franchises; the family still owns FC Dallas, but divested itself of clubs in Columbus and Kansas City. Over the years, the league has grown to 30 franchises across the U.S. and Canada, attracted stars such as David Beckham and Lionel Messi, and laid the groundwork for youth soccer programs nationwide.

“My dad would be so pleased to see where MLS is today,” Clark Hunt said, “and he would be so excited about where it’s going.”

Lamar Hunt’s World Cup legacy

When the U.S. was awarded the World Cup along with Mexico and Canada in June 2018, organizers in Kansas City and executives with the Chiefs quickly went to work. The city had missed out on hosting matches in 1994 after FIFA determined Arrowhead Stadium would be unable to fit the pitch, and they weren’t going to let that happen twice.

Over several years, and at a cost of nearly $20 million, the stadium was modified to host World Cup matches. Its first game: Messi and defending champion Argentina against Algeria on June 16.

Kansas City will host six matches in all, including a quarterfinal, and the metro is serving as home base not only for la Albiceleste and Algeria but also for perennial power England and the Netherlands, a longtime Hunt family favorite.

Meanwhile, five group-stage matches will be played at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, not far from where Lamar Hunt once lived, and four more will be played in the knockout rounds, including a semifinal match on July 14.

“I think this is one of the final pegs of fulfilling dad’s legacy,” Dan Hunt said. “He called Arrowhead Stadium his favorite place on earth, and it’s just so cool to have games there. And you know, Dallas was his hometown, and he loved it so much. So I think he would be just excited that we’re back here. I think he would be over the moon.”

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AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup