| Andrés Martinez
For the second year in a row, the NFL inserted a Friday night game in São Paulo, Brazil into its kickoff weekend schedule. Streamed globally on You Tube (that was a first ever), the game featured the Los Angeles Chargers facing off against the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2014 World Cup stadium that is host to Corinthians, a local behemoth in the other football.
Lamar Hunt passed away in 2006, but you know the founder of the Chiefs (and of the American Football League-turned-Conference it plays in) was absolutely loving everything about the spectacle from his box up in the heavens (well, everything other than the game’s ultimate score). Lamar Hunt, known as “Games” to friends for his obsessive interest in the intricacies of all games and sports and spectators’ experience of them, can be thought of as the patron saint of the NFL’s global push, and of the convergence of our hemisphere’s two footballs that was on display on the night when the NFL took over one of Brazil’s most important futebol grounds. That same convergence will be on display even more powerfully next summer when the Chiefs’ iconic Arrowhead Stadium hosts its own FIFA World Cup.
The NFL wouldn’t enjoy its command over American sporting culture to the degree it does without Hunt’s intrepid vision and energy in challenging the league with his upstart AFL in 1960, which was so successful the NFL agreed to merge with it, initially by means of a joint championship game that Hunt coined a “Super Bowl.” And the NFL certainly wouldn’t enjoy the global reach it does without Hunt leading the charge among owners for more games to be played beyond our borders. Hunt also innovated the game in many other ways, as seen in everything from KC’s revolutionary Arrowhead Stadium, which turned the city into the global hub for stadium design, to the fact that teams can now go for two upon scoring a TD.
Clark Hunt, Lamar’s son and the Chiefs’ current CEO, has built on his father’s legacy, chairing the league’s international committee during a pivotal period of 2011 to 2018, when the NFL expanded its global commitment. Hunt, who’d like to see the Chiefs play abroad once a season, had hoped that in Brazil the team would become the first to win five games in five different countries. Alas, the Chargers won on the night, 27-21. The LA team were the nominal “home team,” but the crowd was overwhelmingly supporting the red-and-white. We at the Great Game Lab would like to think this was all in appreciation for Lamar Hunt’s legacy, but it might also have something to do with the electrifying play of Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and their teammates in recent years, not to mention a certain global pop star who is also a Chiefs fan.
The flip side of Lamar Hunt’s legacy as an avid exporter of American football was the enthusiasm with which he tirelessly worked to import the world’s other varietal of football to the United States. Hunt holds the distinction of being in both the NFL and the US Soccer Hall of Fame, as he was a big promoter and investor in North American Soccer League and Major League Soccer (the Hunt family owns the Dallas FC franchise). Clark Hunt, who played college soccer and accompanied his dad to all but one World Cup during his youth, helped Kansas City become one of the US World Cup host cities next summer, in what will be another occasion for delight up in that box in the sky.
When Kansas City faced off against the Green Bay Packers in the very first Super Bowl in January of 1967, surely neither team’s fans nor players could have imagined that their teams would be playing regular NFL season games in Brazil (Green Bay went last year) or that their country would someday be hosting a FIFA men’s World Cup (if they even knew what that was). But to Lamar Hunt, both things would have seemed completely natural and doable, which is why they became so.