Bryan Burrough (47 page)

In 1958 an Indiana businessman named Robert Welch formed an organization called the John Birch Society, whose central tenets included a belief that Jewish industrialists led by the Rothschild banking family were conspiring with the Russians and Chinese for world domination. Almost overnight, the Birchers, as they were called, emerged as the largest and loudest group of American ultranationalists, with their strongest chapters in Southern California and Texas. Though fellow travelers, H.L. never joined the Birchers; when a reporter asked why, he said, “I always thought they should have joined me.” Bunker, however, embraced the Bircher doctrine as his own, adopting Robert Welch as his political mentor, hosting Birch Society meetings at his home and becoming one of its most important financial backers. A Baptist, Bunker also began donating to religious causes.

As famous as Bunker would become in later life, it was the youngest Hunt, the shy, well-mannered Lamar, whose exploits first made national headlines. Tall, thin, and soft-spoken, initially overshadowed by his older brothers, Lamar was a boyhood box-score enthusiast who had ridden the bench as a third-string end at Southern Methodist University. He had soft edges; people liked him, and would his entire life. After a starter marriage and divorce, he had settled in Dallas, and many evenings he could be seen shooting baskets in his driveway.

Like Bunker and many Texas oilmen, Lamar’s favorite sport was football, whose professional teams had emerged as a national preoccupation following the dramatic 1958 championship game between the John Unitas-led Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Like Glenn McCarthy a decade earlier, Lamar thought football represented the future of American sports, and he grew determined to bring a team to Dallas; the city’s previous team, the Dallas Texans, had folded after one season, in 1953. In early 1959 Lamar, then just twenty-six, approached the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, who refused to sell. So did the league’s other owners, many of whom were just as upbeat about the National Football League’s future. What Lamar didn’t realize was that he had run smack into an identical effort by Clint Murchison Jr.

In the annals of the Big Rich, the Big Four families seldom crossed paths in any serious way, and where they did, as in the lifelong friendship between Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison, relations tended to be amicable. Texas, after all, was big enough for all of them. It was the rare occasion when a Hunt squared off against a Murchison, but when it finally happened, in Lamar and Clint Jr.’s pursuit of an NFL team for Dallas, all Texas paid attention. Murchison had a head start. He had been a season ticket holder for the Texans—he had twenty seats, in fact—and had tried without success to buy the team before it left Dallas. In 1955 he tried to buy the San Francisco 49ers but couldn’t. Finally, in 1958, he reached an agreement to buy the Washington Redskins, but the talks fell through when the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, sought a change in terms. When the NFL announced it would expand to fourteen teams in 1961, Clint Jr. changed tack and set his sights on starting a new team. In early 1959, just as Lamar was sending out his first feelers about buying a team, he began meeting with the owner of the Chicago Bears, George Halas, chairman of the league’s expansion committee.

Once he realized Murchison was in the picture, Lamar realized it was unlikely he would win a franchise of his own. Like his father, though, Lamar was a creative thinker. After months of mulling over the issue, the answer came to him one night on an airplane. When he reached Dallas, he telephoned one of his father’s friends, a Houston oilman named K. S. “Bud” Adams, who had also attempted to buy the Chicago Cardinals; Adams wanted them for Houston. The two men had a long dinner at a steak house Adams owned in Houston, complaining about the NFL’s stodgy ways, but it wasn’t until Adams drove Lamar to Hobby Airport that H. L. Hunt’s youngest son turned to him and revealed his cards. “Bud,” he said, “I’m thinking about starting a new league. Would you be interested in joining me?” Adams’s reply: “Hell yeah.”

And that was all it took. On August 3, 1959, Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams, representing two Texas oil fortunes with one famous father between them, held a press conference in Adams’s Houston office and announced formation of the American Football League. Lamar had just turned twenty-seven the day before. The league, they announced, had exactly two teams, the Dallas Texans and the Houston Oilers. Twelve days later, after fielding calls from dozens of interested owners, they would unveil four additional franchises, in Los Angeles, Denver, New York, and Minneapolis. For the most part, NFL owners snickered. Sportswriters quickly dubbed the two Texans and their pals “the Foolish Club.”

At 1201 Main, however, Clint Jr. wasn’t laughing. If Lamar went forward, his new team would divert attention from the NFL franchise he hoped to win; it would divide the market for season tickets and, worst of all, Lamar was making noises about leasing Dallas’s only major football venue, the Cotton Bowl. Clint Jr. hustled to Chicago and pressed George Halas to grant him a franchise immediately. Halas understood and prevailed upon his committee to give it to him. The news was flashed across television screens all across Texas, including one in a ranch house sixty miles southeast of Dallas, where an old man frowned at his set. It was the first Big Clint had heard of his son’s plans. He thought professional football was a silly, money-losing proposition and had said as much, many times, and loudly. In Big Clint’s mind, it was just another example of his son’s inability to focus on the business that really mattered. But Clint Jr. was intent on building something of his own, something his father hadn’t given him.

“That’s gonna break that boy,” Big Clint murmured.

Dallas, it appeared, pending a final vote of NFL owners, would now have not one but two new professional football teams. But Clint Jr was determined to prevent that from happening. He had met and liked Lamar at a dinner party when Lamar was still in college. When he got the Halas committee’s approval, Clint Jr. arranged a meeting at Lamar’s office. There Murchison offered him 50 percent of the NFL franchise if Lamar would agree to kill the Texans. Lamar thanked him, but said he simply couldn’t abandon his partners in the aborning AFL.

The game was on. Both Lamar and Clint Jr. forged ahead with their plans, Clint hiring as general manager a young CBS executive Halas had suggested, Texas E. “Tex” Schramm. Schramm tutored Clint Jr. on the ins and outs of sports ownership, emphasizing the chain of command, a polite way of telling Clint Jr. to stay out of football decisions. For the moment, Clint Jr. was more focused on securing final approval for the new franchise from the NFL owners. It required a unanimous vote, and the Redskins’ owner, George Marshall, had spread the word that he might blackball Murchison, whom he reportedly found “personally obnoxious.” The problem, it turned out, was that one of Murchison’s men, Tom Webb, had quietly purchased the rights to the Redskins’ fight song, “Hail to the Redskins,” from the song’s writer, embittered after Marshall fired him. Webb thought of it as a bargaining chip. Marshall didn’t care; he just wanted his song back, and badly.

The NFL owners gathered at Miami’s Kenilworth Hotel for the vote in January 1960. At a gathering the night before, Marshall sent a wandering accordion player to George Halas’s table to serenade him with “Hail to the Redskins,” a pointed reminder of his intentions. Halas promptly sent the musician to Marshall’s table, where he played “The Eyes of Texas.” The next morning Clint Jr. went to Marshall’s room, introduced himself, and phoned Tom Webb. The two then performed an elaborate charade for Marshall’s benefit, Murchison begging and wheedling the silent Webb to turn over the song. Murchison hung up. Marshall implored him to try harder. Murchison called a second time, again begging Webb to hand over the song, until finally Murchison put down the phone and told Marshall the rights were his. Marshall promptly pledged to back the birth of the new Dallas team.
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Back in Dallas, Clint Jr. and Tex Schramm hired their coach, a stern New York Giants assistant named Tom Landry, then set about selecting the team’s name. Murchison insisted on the Dallas Rangers. Schramm resisted, pointing out Dallas already had a minor-league baseball team called the Rangers. Murchison prevailed. A press release went out, announcing the name. Schramm, however, wouldn’t give up, and finally persuaded Murchison to rename the team the Dallas Cowboys. It took years for Clint Jr. to warm to the name. Five years later he issued a press release announcing the team might change its name back to the Dallas Rangers. The reaction was immediate. Murchison counted 1,148 phone calls to the Cowboys office. As he wrote in a note to a Dallas sportswriter, the tally came in at “Keep the name Cowboys, 1,138. Change the name to Rangers, 2. Murchison is stupid, 8.”

In an effort to compete with Lamar Hunt’s Texans, the NFL announced the new Cowboys would begin play a season earlier than planned, in the fall of 1960. Lamar and the other AFL owners promptly slapped the league with a ten-million-dollar antitrust suit, calling the move “sabotage.” In fact, despite Lamar’s barbed quotes in the press, he and Clint Jr. remained friendly rivals. At a luncheon just before Christmas 1960, Clint Jr. surprised Lamar by wearing a bright red Dallas Texans blazer. A week later Clint was hosting a gathering at his home when two friends dragged in a massive six-foot-high gift-wrapped box. Clint stepped over, unwrapped the bow—and was startled when who should emerge but a smiling Lamar. The two men bore a passing resemblance, and more than once Clint Jr. found himself being introduced to people as Lamar. At one point, when a tall bespectacled man appeared at Cowboys offices asking for Tex Schramm, a new receptionist asked, “Are you Mr. Murchison?” The man smiled and said, “Lamar Hunt.” Afterward Clint Jr. presented the woman with pictures of both of them captioned, “This is Lamar” and “This is Clint.”
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During that first season in 1960, both the Texans and the Cowboys played at the seventy-five-thousand-seat Cotton Bowl. Neither drew the crowds Lamar and Clint Jr. needed. The Cowboys mailed two hundred thousand letters to prospective season ticket holders; 2,165 signed up. Barely twenty thousand people appeared for their first game, and attendance plummeted after that, falling as low as two thousand one Sunday. It didn’t help that, forced to field a team of NFL castoffs—one a rodeo cowboy, another an art teacher—Tom Landry’s Cowboys failed to win a single game, finishing with eleven losses and a tie. The tie, in a December game against the Giants in New York, got Clint Jr. so excited he scurried around the El Morocco night club trying in vain to find a Texan to tell. He arrived back in Dallas to find a Love Field welcoming throng of exactly two fans.

At one Cowboy home game barely eight thousand people appeared, and when it began to rain, all sought shelter beneath the press box. From his perch inside, it appeared to Clint Jr. that the entire stadium was empty. It stung, though Clint kept his spirits up. When the New York restauranteur Toots Shor wrote seeking box seats for a Giants game in Dallas, Clint sent him the tickets along with a note. “In case you want to bring any of your friends with you,” it read, “I am also sending you Sections 1, 2, 3 and 4.” Shor opened an accompanying box to find every ticket in those sections, ten thousand in all.
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Clint Jr. lost seven hundred thousand dollars that first year, but Lamar had it worse. Though his Texans won eight games and lost six against the other new AFL teams, Texan crowds were even smaller than the Cowboys’ and their tickets cost less. At year-end, a Dallas sportswriter guessed Lamar had lost about one million dollars. “At that rate,” he concluded, “he can only afford to lose for the next one hundred years.”
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Clint Jr. once said the only game he truly enjoyed in those early years was between the teams from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh: “It was the only game I’d seen since joining the NFL that hadn’t cost me $50,000.”

The Cowboys and Texans fought for the hearts of Dallas football fans for three long years, but nothing they did, not even the AFL Championship Lamar’s Texans won in 1962, could fill the Cotton Bowl. Finally, in 1963, Lamar ran up the white flag. He wanted to relocate the Texans to a city within easy commuting distance, and was poised to move them to New Orleans when, at the eleventh hour, its mayor refused to let the team play at Tulane Stadium, fearing the loss of Tulane fans. Instead, Lamar negotiated a one-dollar-a-year stadium lease (for two years) with the mayor of Kansas City and in May 1963 announced that the Texans were moving to Missouri to become the Kansas City Chiefs.

The AFL, plagued with dwindling crowds, remained shaky until later that year, when Lamar ensured the league’s survival by negotiating a thirty-five-million-dollar television package with NBC. Three years later, in June 1966, he would spearhead the AFL’s merger with the NFL and the creation of a title game between the two league champions. The NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, wanted to call the game “the Big One.” But it was Lamar, after seeing his children bouncing a Super Ball, who came up with the name that stuck: the Super Bowl. His Chiefs would lose Super Bowl I to the Green Bay Packers in January 1967, but Lamar’s place in American sports history was secure. He was thirty-five.

With the notable exception of Bunker Hunt, the second generation of the Big Rich paid scant attention to politics, though the day was fast approaching when they all would grapple with what their fathers had wrought. Gauging what if any political legacy the original Big Four oilmen left their children is a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Was it their efforts—Facts Forum and LIFE LINE, Murchison’s anti-Adlai newspapers, Cullen’s fiery telegrams—that explained why so many Texans became ultraconservative? Or were oilmen just a product of the state’s innate attitudes? The reality is probably a bit of both.

Whatever the case, there is no denying that by the early 1960s, while Texas ultraconservatives no longer held any major state office, their numbers were growing. Far below the media’s radar, Houston had emerged as a stronghold of the paranoid Birchers, while Dallas bristled with racists and right-wing demagogues, many of them avid LIFE LINE listeners. (George Rockwell of the American Nazi Party once said Dallas had “the most patriotic, pro-American people of any city in the country.”) As the nation, and the state’s own politics, moved away from their hard-core values, Texas ultraconservatives grew restive. When George Bush ran for a Houston congressional seat as a moderate Republican, he found angry Birchers shouting him down at public meetings. When Lyndon Johnson accepted John F. Kennedy’s invitation to run as vice president in 1960, Texas ultraconservatives denounced him as a traitor. During the campaign that November, Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, came to Dallas for a speech, only to be met by an unruly crowd outside the Adolphus. After Johnson had words with a demonstrator, he waded into the crowd and was spat upon. Afterward Johnson called it “a mob scene that looked like some other country. It was hard to believe that this was happening in Dallas, and in Texas.”