![]() ![]() “What had captivated him from early on was just the idea of sports, and the whole ritual surrounding sports. Hunt),” MacCambridge said recently, “and how he had grown up in a family that was all about oil, and how he had been a dutiful son and had gotten a degree in geology at Southern Methodist University - but also how it had been clear that there was nothing about all that which captured his imagination. “It struck me how Lamar had been a son of arguably the richest man in the world at the time (oil tycoon H.L. The Chiefs moved from Dallas to Kansas City six years later, and Hunt never stopped curating and fine-tuning the Kansas City stadium experience, said Michael MacCambridge, who published a biography of Hunt in 2012. The history of the Chiefs and owner Lamar Hunt is documented in many locations inside GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, including the Founder’s Club. The Kansas City Athletics debuted there in 1955 and Lamar Hunt first saw the expanded Municipal Stadium in 1957. A $2 million measure included in the package crafted to acquire Blues Stadium received 78% approval. That August voters approved a $57.5 million bond improvement program. Kansas City never built that stadium either.īut voters spoke in 1954, enticed by the possible sale of the Philadelphia Athletics to a new owner who made clear his intention to move the baseball franchise to Kansas City. While city officials never built that facility, members of the Kansas City planning commission doubled down at the end of World War II, submitting a 1945 study promoting a new horseshoe-shaped stadium built with football in mind at one of two possible sites just north of Brush Creek. When the team ceased operations two years later, voters nevertheless in 1931 approved a $750,000 bond issue to finance a new stadium. The game was so violent that Kansas City high school officials largely banned the sport from 1905 through 1918.īut, after many thousands of American men played on military teams while training for World War I, the sport’s image improved, with Kansas City’s first NFL franchise debuting in 1924. Then there was the way the game sometime was played by college and high school students, with minimal protective gear or violent “flying wedge” formations that led to death and serious injuries across the country. In contrast, some considered professional football the low pursuit of mercenaries. (AP Photo | Charlie Riedel)īut if Kansas City today shares the same intense fascination with pro football that Hunt did, it first had to work through its complicated relationship with the game itself.īeginning in 1891, fans of the squads fielded by the universities of Kansas and Missouri gathered almost every fall In Kansas City through 1910 to watch the annual game between the two schools. Work continued on the main stage for the NFL Draft Saturday, April 22, 2023, at Union Station. Only this time it will feature a 378-foot by 176-foot temporary stage at the south doors of Union Station that, together with the National WWI Museum and Memorial’s surrounding lawns, will resemble an immersive gridiron theme park. “He would take things and try to make something out of them.” The Stadium ExperienceĪs multitudes gather this week for the NFL Draft, the stadium experience Lamar Hunt imagined for Kansas City will manifest again. At his office in Dallas, he would move from table to table, filling up one, then leaving a note that said, ‘Don’t move anything,’ and then moving on to another. “But he kept that same thought process his entire life. ![]() “This is something you would see a young boy do in the 1940s or 1950s,” said Bob Moore, Kansas City Chiefs historian emeritus. Taking a seating chart of Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium and using scissors, paste, paper clips and sheer paper, he moved this here and that there, re-configuring a community space that by then had hosted professional sports for 40 years and made it - as Kansas City fans enjoying singing before every game - the home of the Chiefs. ![]() Soon after moving the Dallas Texans football team to Kansas City in 1963, Hunt did something similar, but on a much grander scale. After moving the Chiefs to Kansas City in 1963, Lamar Hunt, working with scissors, paste and sheer paper, customized a seating chart of Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, converting a long-time baseball stadium into a football venue. ![]()
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