Lamar Hunt died at age 74. This man was a true great in the history of American Football. He was one of the founders of the American Football League, the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs (formerly the Dallas Texans), he negotiated the AFL/NFL merger and coined the term “Super Bowl” for the the AFL/NFL championship game.
In 1959, Hunt applied for an NFL franchise but was turned was turned down for an expansion team in Dallas. He responded by forming the American Football Legue in 1960. Bud Adams, who had also been turned down by the NFL for a Houston expansion team, joined Hunt. Hunt and Adams brought professional football to Texas for the first time by founding the Dallas Texans and the Houston Oilers which are now the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tennessee Titans respectively. The Texans took the AFL championship in 1962 but struggled with the competition brought by the new NFL Dallas Cowboys. Hunt decided to move the Texans to Kansas City and they became the Kansas City Chiefs in 1963. In 1966 the Chiefs won their first ever AFL championship and competed in the first ever AFL-NFL Championship Game which was later dubbed the Super Bowl by Hunt himself. According to legend, Hunt got the name from a ball his daughter was playing with called the “Super Ball” and when Hunt said it with his Texas accent, it came out like “Super Bowl.” In 1972, Hunt became the first AFL guy to be inducted into the Football Hall of Fame. The Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones called Hunt, “a founder of the NFL as we know it today.”
