KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The most enduring memory Clark and Dan Hunt share about their father, sports great Lamar Hunt, has little to do with everything. world cup match Together they thought more about the long, strange, and often winding road they took to get there.
The van drives around Europe carrying random reporters, including a young CBS reporter named Vern Lundquist. A detour to find the best Wiener schnitzel and ice cream. The fence they climbed to swim in the Italian hotel pool was closed for the rest of the day. And a Mexican restaurant that turned out to be a failure of all of them.
“Dad, he could eat anything,” Dan Hunt recalled of that night during the 1986 World Cup. “I mean, he had a cast iron stomach. He never got sick. And that’s what killed him. That’s the food that destroyed the Hunt family.”
In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, the Hunt brothers and chairman Clark said: Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL And President Dan, Major League Soccer Club FC Dallas —Looking back on the strong soccer legacy left by his late father.
Without him, the U.S. might have watched the World Cup go elsewhere instead of hosting it next month.
After all, it was Lamar Hunt who helped professional soccer gain a foothold in the United States with his investment in the North American Soccer League. And when MLS folded in the 1980s, it was the unflinching Hunt who helped found it. The very existence of MLS was one of FIFA’s requirements for allowing the country to host the 1994 World Cup.
Lamar Hunt served as co-chairman of the organizing committee for the game in Dallas that year. Nearly 32 years later, Clark Hunt is filling the same role for Kansas City games, and Dunn is taking over in Dallas.
However, unlike the previous World Cup held in the United States, there were four group stage matches and two final tournament matches. Held at Arrowhead Stadiumthe home of the Chiefs and the building that Lamar Hunt called his favorite place in the world for years.
“It’s going to be special,” Clark Hunt said. “I think I’ll go back to thinking about my dad a lot. That’s what I’m going to do during the game. Think about how excited my dad will be watching the World Cup at Arrowhead Stadium.”
learn to love beautiful games
It is no exaggeration to say that soccer was born in America in the 1950s. There was no professional league to speak of, and after losing two of three games in the 1950 World Cup, the Americans would spend four decades without ever qualifying for the World Cup.
It took a trip across the Atlantic for Lamar Hunt to fall in love with the sport.
His future wife, Norma Hunt, was attending University College Dublin as a Rotary Scholar in the early 1960s, and the son of oil magnate H.L. Hunt went to visit her. When they realized, Shamrock Rovers matchWatching the game from a standing-room-only terrace on a cool evening, I was captivated by the throbbing pitch of European soccer.
“I think that was probably my dad’s first professional soccer game,” Clark Hunt said.
This experience stayed with Lamar Hunt even after he returned to the United States and immersed himself in a different type of football, helping to found the American Football League (which would soon merge with the NFL). Dallas Texans, now Chiefs.
A few years later, Hunt returned to Europe to compete in his first World Cup. It was 1966, and he watched hosts England defeat West Germany in the historic final at Wembley Stadium for the only championship at stake.
That year, a group of entrepreneurs, including Hunt Cook and Jack Kent Cooke, founded the United Soccer Association, which later merged with the National Professional Soccer League to create the North American Soccer League. For nearly two decades, the NASL has advanced American soccer while luring star players such as Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto to North America, laying the foundation for future generations of American players.
“We know from his foray into professional football that he wasn’t afraid of a challenge. And he was also always an optimist, and many of his adventures were probably long journeys, but he had extraordinary perseverance and an extraordinary work ethic and had a vision and belief in what he was doing,” Clark-Hunt said.
Successes and failures on the American stage
The NASL grew rapidly throughout the 1970s, but in fact, too quickly. Many new owners did not have the resources to withstand losses while the club was starting to take off, so the club began to crumble, leading to several years of downsizing.
After the 1984 season, the league folded as attendance declined and games were no longer televised.
“My father was always proud of not sharing his negative feelings with others, but I’m sure he had some negative feelings,” Clark-Hunt said. “I remember being very upset about that as a high school and college student, even though I didn’t have a direct connection to the team. But I knew how disappointing it was for him, and I was sad that the sport I had come to love was really gone.”
However, professional soccer did not disappear for long.
Lamar Hunt was persistent and treated every slip-up as a learning opportunity. So when soccer’s governing body FIFA told organizers of the 1994 World Cup that one of the conditions for hosting the tournament was a top-level domestic league, Hunt used what he had learned from the NASL to help. Create Major League Soccer.
“If Lamar Hunt was a part of it, you knew it meant something. Robert Kraft and others were there, but when it came down to it, Lamar Hunt was there,” said Tom Meredith, his longtime right-hand man.
Not only did Hunt help raise money for the league, he also owned the first three franchises. The family still owns FC Dallas, but has sold clubs in Columbus and Kansas City. Over the years, the league has grown to 30 clubs in the United States and Canada, attracted star players such as David Beckham and Lionel Messi, and laid the foundation for a robust youth soccer program across the United States.
“My dad will be very happy to see where MLS is now and I’m sure he’ll be very excited to see what’s going to happen next,” said Clark Hunt.
hunt family roadshow
Domestic football was important to Hunt, but The World Cup that fascinated himStarting with the classic game in 1966 and ending with the 2002 edition hosted by South Korea and Japan, it spurred the growth of gaming in Asia.
Most years, Hunt packed his family into a rental car and crisscrossed the host country, attending every game he could.
Clark Hunt, who later became a star player on SMU’s varsity soccer team, played in his first World Cup in 1978. But his most vivid memory was not of the game, but of the square outside the stadium in Düsseldorf, where there were activities for children. One involves kicking a ball through a hole in a piece of wood, a challenge Lamar Hunt enjoyed as much as his 9-year-old son.
Dan Hunt’s first World Cup experience was in Mexico in 1986. What was disappointing was that meal that made the whole family feel sick. But the highlight was definitely the final, when Diego Maradona helped Argentina defeat West Germany in Mexico City.
“We had seats at about the 40-yard line, right? Great seats. And we were there with tickets and people kept sitting there and they didn’t want to move. The security wouldn’t move them. So we didn’t have seats,” Dan Hunt recalled. “So my dad dutifully solved the problem by buying more tickets and we went to the penalty shootout right behind the goal.”
When the 2002 tournament began, both brothers were busy, so Lamar Hunt (who died four years later at age 74) headed to Asia alone. One day on his first day there, the billionaire entrepreneur is forced to figure out how to use an ATM in a foreign country when his briefcase containing all his money, tickets, and travel documents is stolen.
“He put in his Best card and started pushing the buttons. Then he panicked and the card got shredded. So we sent him cash and he was in South Korea and he went back to Japan and the police confiscated all the cards because he was over the legal limit,” Dan Hunt said.
“I remember thinking, ‘My dad is definitely going to get kidnapped.'”
Lamar Hunt’s World Cup Legacy
After the United States qualified for the World Cup along with Mexico and Canada in June 2018, Kansas City organizers and Chiefs executives quickly got to work. The city had missed out on hosting games in 1994 when FIFA ruled Arrowhead Stadium couldn’t provide the necessary pitch, and it had no intention of letting that happen again.
Over several years and at a cost of nearly $20 million, seats were removed from the lower bowl of NFL stadiums and other modifications were made. Makes World Cup debutonly a few days left. That first match: with Messi defending champion argentina Match against Algeria on June 16th.
Kansas City will host a total of six games, including the quarterfinals, with the metropolitan area serving as home not only to La Albiceleste and Algeria, but also perennial powerhouse England and perennial Hunt family favorite Netherlands.
Meanwhile, five group stage games will be played at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, not far from where Lamar Hunt once lived. Four more games will be played at the Cowboys’ home, including the semifinals on July 14th.
“I think this is one of the final nails in fulfilling my father’s legacy,” Dan Hunt said. “He said Arrowhead Stadium is his favorite place on earth. It’s really great to be able to play there. And you know, Dallas is his hometown and he loved it so much. So I think he’s just excited that we’re back here. I think he’s going to be over the moon.”
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AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup
