Originally Posted by BroncoBuff
Yeah, I’m SUCH an ingrate … I NEVER say anything nice about Lamar Hunt.
Oh, wait … yes I do, I go even further than you do. Lamar Hunt was a great man, a truly great man.
Further, I do NOT hate the Chiefs. I DO hate the way you guys put words in my mouth just to “win” arguments with me and run me down. Things I never said and don’t believe. Pretty sad really.
“Hunts” plural? Lamar, yes. Like I said, he was a great man, a truly great and selfless man. Tracing how this modern NFL, America’s favorite entertainment, trace how they got here, and you’ll see the AFL is of paramount importance. NFL ownership then was conservative and old-fashioned – expansion and innovation only happened because of the AFL.
And Lamar had to be selfless to make it happen. He was from Dallas, northeast Dallas near SMU, same as Matthew Stafford, Clayton Kershaw, Boz Scaggs, Steve Miller, Dimebag Darrell and me. He went to college at SMU, and he loved the city. But he saw how the senior league did business - stealing the Vikings from the AFL, jumping into the Dallas market after his Dallas Texans were announced.
But he didn’t fight them - he didn’t sue over their theft of the Vikings (he could have), and after three years he made the impossible decision to move his team out of his hometown, leave the market to the Cowboys. He did what was best for the AFL and his “Foolish Club” (the owners).
And that patience, that approach was how every-single-AFL-franchise survived. Nobody folded. And once they started competing for players, that’s when even the cavemen NFL owners knew that a merger was the only sensible move. Shoot, left to their own devices, the NFL might STILL not have 32 teams - they only had 16 when the merger happened, and that was INCLUDING the AFL-“inspired” Cowboys and Vikings. And what would they have been without an injection of new thinking from innovators like Sid Gillman, Hank Stram and Al Davis? The game would probably still be “three yards and a cloud of dust!”
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And Clark Hunt? I don’t know that much about him. I do know that WE have the richest ownership in the league … and I fairly recently learned who has the SECOND richest ownership: Kansas City. Shouldn't be a surprise, Clark’s uncle Nelson Bunker Hunt nearly cornered the world silver market in the late '70s.
I like Arrowhead, I really do … so I gotta wonder why, with all that money, Clark hasn’t been making deals with local and states (plural) governments to upgrade Arrowhead bit by bit over the years, and why in the middle of a dynasty like yours, the Chiefs still rank in the bottom three or four teams in the quality of their facilities. All that seems like Clark stuff.
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