Bryan Burrough
Game Changers
How two Texas oilmen invented the Super Bowl.
Angelo Coniglio says: Bryan Burrough ends his piece on the competition between Clint Murchison and the Cowboys, and Lamar Hunt and the Texans/Chiefs by saying that the Chiefs moved to Kansas City and lost the first Super Bowl, and Murchison’s team won the Super Bowl in 1972. Burrough neglected to mention that the Chiefs won a Super Bowl ***before*** the Cowboys did, in 1970, and they won it when it was a World Championship game, not just the NFL title game. remembertheafl.com (February 25th, 2009 at 10:46am)
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The game was on. Both Clint and Lamar forged ahead with their plans, Clint hiring as general manager a young CBS executive whom Halas had suggested, Texas E. “Tex” Schramm. Schramm tutored Clint on the ins and outs of sports ownership, emphasizing the chain of command, a polite way of telling Clint to stay out of football decisions. For the moment, Clint 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 Clint, whom he reportedly found “personally obnoxious.” The problem, it turned out, was that after Marshall had withdrawn his offer to sell the Washington Redskins, one of Clint’s men, Tom Webb, had quietly purchased the rights to the Redskins’ fight song, “Hail to the Redskins,” from the song’s writer, who was embittered after being fired by Marshall. Webb thought of it as a bargaining chip. Marshall just wanted his song back, and badly.
The NFL owners met at Miami’s Kenilworth Hotel for the vote in January 1960. At a gathering the night before the vote, Marshall sent a wandering accordion player to Halas’s table to serenade him with “Hail to the Redskins,” a pointed reminder of his intentions to veto Clint’s efforts. Halas promptly sent the musician to Marshall’s table, where he played “The Eyes of Texas.” The next morning, Clint went to Marshall’s room, introduced himself, and phoned Webb. The two then performed an elaborate charade for Marshall’s benefit, Clint begging and wheedling the silent Webb to turn over the song. Clint hung up. Marshall implored him to try harder. Clint called a second time, again begging Webb to hand over the song, until finally Clint put down the phone and told Marshall the rights were his. Marshall promptly pledged to support the birth of the new Dallas team.
Back in Dallas, Clint and Schramm hired their coach, a stern New York Giants assistant named Tom Landry, then set about selecting the team’s name. Clint insisted on the Dallas Rangers. Schramm resisted, pointing out that Dallas already had a minor league baseball team called the Rangers. Clint prevailed. A press release went out, announcing the name. Schramm, however, wouldn’t give up and finally persuaded Clint to rename the team the Dallas Cowboys. It took years for Clint to warm to the name. Five years later, he issued a press release announcing that the team might change its name back to the Dallas Rangers. The reaction was immediate. Clint 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’s Texans, the NFL announced that the new Cowboys would begin playing a season earlier than planned, in the fall of 1960. Lamar and the other AFL owners promptly slapped the league with a $10 million antitrust suit, calling the move sabotage. In fact, despite Lamar’s barbed quotes in the press, he and Clint remained friendly rivals. At a luncheon just before Christmas 1960, Clint surprised Lamar by wearing a bright-red 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 found himself being introduced to people as Lamar. At one point, when a tall, bespectacled man appeared at the Cowboys offices looking for Schramm, a new receptionist asked, “Are you Mr. Murchison?” The man smiled and said, “Lamar Hunt.” Afterward Clint presented the woman with pictures of both of them, captioned “This is Lamar” and “This is Clint.”
During that first season, in 1960, both the Texans and the Cowboys played at the 75,000-seat Cotton Bowl. Neither drew the crowds Lamar and Clint needed. The Cowboys mailed 200,000 letters to prospective season ticket holders; 2,165 signed up. Barely 20,000 people appeared for the team’s first game, and attendance plummeted after that, falling as low as 2,000 one Sunday. It didn’t help that, forced to field a series of NFL cast-offs—one a rodeo cowboy, another an art teacher—Landry’s team 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 so excited that he scurried around the El Morocco nightclub 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 Cowboys home game, barely 8,000 people appeared, and when it began to rain, all sought shelter beneath the press box. From his perch inside, it appeared to Clint that the entire stadium was empty. It stung, though Clint kept his spirits up. When the New York restaurateur 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, 10,000 in all.
Clint lost $700,000 that first year, but Lamar had it worse. Though his Texans won eight games and lost six against the other new AFL teams, the Texans’ crowds were even smaller than the Cowboys’—and their tickets cost less. At year-end, a Dallas sportswriter guessed Lamar had lost about $1 million. “At that rate,” he concluded, “he can only afford to lose for the next one hundred years.” Clint once said that the sole 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 fifty thousand dollars.”
The Cowboys and the Texans fought for the hearts of Dallas football fans for three long years, but nothing they did, not even winning a championship, as Lamar’s Texans did 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. He 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 $1-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 $35 million 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 Wham-O SuperBall, 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, and the league merger would not be completed until 1970, but Lamar had managed to cement football’s future preeminence. Clint’s Cowboys, meanwhile, would go on to capture their first Super Bowl win in 1972 and eventually be anointed “America’s Team,” a feel-good antidote that would all but erase Dallas’s post—Kennedy assassination reputation as the “city of hate.” Lamar and Clint’s place in American sports history was secure.
Excerpted from The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes. Copyright © 2009 by Bryan Burrough, reprinted with permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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