Columbus Crew owner Lamar Hunt is widely described as quietly polite, gracious, modest, gentlemanly.
"Don't let that mislead you," warns Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. "He is very, very aggressive within the rules. I smile when I watch him in meetings because I know how competitive he is. He's very gentlemanly, but yet he is a tremendous competitor."
Hunt's competitive nature was put on display for Jones last fall when the Cowboys traveled to Arrowhead Stadium to play Hunt's Kansas City Chiefs — a relatively rare meeting between the NFL teams because they play in different conferences.
The two owners' families were sitting in Hunt's suite before the game when Hunt decided to up the ante, since Jones and he live within a half-block of each other on tony Preston Road in Dallas.
"Suddenly, Lamar brings in this big thing and unveils the Preston Road Championship Trophy," a laughing Jones recalled. "Whoever wins the game doesn't just win the game but gets custody of the Preston Road Championship Trophy. He'd spent quite a bit of effort on this thing.
"To my dismay, he took the trophy home."
Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson has known Hunt for 40 years, since the two were among eight owners who founded the upstart American Football League in 1960, daring to rival the well-established NFL.
"He's a straight shooter," Wilson said. "He's a man of his word. If he tells you something, you can believe it."
Major League Soccer administrators are learning what NFL officials have known for decades.
"He's a delightful man," said MLS Commissioner Doug Logan. "You're not going to find anybody who will say anything different. What a tribute that is."
In 1960 Hunt founded the AFL, which virtually no one gave a chance to succeed against the NFL. Six years later, the AFL had become enough of a force to challenge the NFL in the first Super Bowl.
Hunt even came up with the interleague game's name, after spotting one of his children playing with a high-bouncing new toy called the Super Ball. Nowadays, the Super Bowl is the most-watched sporting event in the world.
After AFL teams won two straight Super Bowls, including one by Hunt's Kansas City Chiefs in 1970, Hunt led a merger of the leagues in 1970, making him, the Cowboys' Jones notes, "a founder of the modern NFL."
Hunt, 66, also helped found America's first professional soccer league in 1967, but that league foundered. "We were just too early," Hunt says now.
Hunt also established a professional tennis tour in the 1970s that helped push the sport to its highest popularity in history.
He was instrumental in bringing soccer's wildly popular 1994 World Cup to the United States, where it was an unqualified success. And Hunt was at it again in 1996, helping found the MLS with his Columbus Crew.
And now Crew Stadium — the first pro soccer-specific stadium in the nation — has opened to worldwide attention. Hunt paid $25 million to build Crew Stadium after losing two referendums in as many years to build publicly financed stadiums in central Ohio.
"As a league we need to improve the places we're playing," he said. "We're taking the bull by the horns in Columbus. I don't know that that has to be duplicated in every city, but we need to improve on where we play."
Hunt's sports business record makes one thing obvious: He likes to be first, to create.
"I really enjoy the challenge of start-up operations," Hunt said. "I think there's more of an appeal to creating things. ...That has more of an appeal to it to me than buying the Washington Redskins. The Redskins are already there. Where's the challenge? I like the challenge of making new teams a success. There's a lot of fun to that."
Dan Crawford writes for Business First in Columbus, Ohio.
