NFL Tried To Buy Off Lamar And Kill AFL

This is another chapter in the story of the birth and growth of the American Football League.

The phone call came after the AFL held its first league meeting and the NFL announced they were expanding into Dallas and Houston in 1961. It was early September of 1959 and the phone call was made to Lamar Hunt.

In those primitive days there were no cell phones and portable phones were something that spacemen used in movies and cartoons. Hunt was a busy man, moving around the country getting his new football league up and running. It took him a few days to return the call.

The voice at the other end of the line was the owner of an NFL team; Hunt never publicly identified the man, although he said it was not Bears owner George Halas, who is in the picture at left with Hunt and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle.

The voice had a simple proposal.

“He called to offer myself in Dallas and Bud Adams in Houston the opportunity to have an NFL franchise,” Hunt said several years before he passed away. “It was not something I considered, but I heard him out on the offer.”

The idea was obvious from the NFL point of view: give the founding AFL fathers teams in the NFL and the new league would die in the womb.

They no doubt were shocked when Hunt told them to take a hike, in the politest way possible because that was Lamar Hunt.

“I was with Lamar,” Adams said recently. “Whatever he decided, I was going to go with him. When he called to tell me about the offer, we talked and neither one of us wanted to walk away from the other guys who had joined us. We were just starting to see things fall together.

“We understood what they were trying to do. It was the first indication that they were worried about us. I know I enjoyed that feeling, and I think Lamar did too. We had both been turned away by the NFL within the previous year and now they wanted to admit us to their club.

“But now, we had our own club.”

At that time, things were jumping for the AFL around the country. Hunt told the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper: “Seattle may be ready to come in at the weekend meeting; the group there is awaiting the University of Washington’s approval to use the football stadium. Three groups want the Miami franchise. All applied for the Orange Bowl Stadium, but the stadium group decided to wait and see who got the franchise before opening negotiations.

“I would like to have Seattle and Miami in the league. That would give us two teams in the East, four through the middle of the country and two on the west coast. Two networks are interested in buying the television rights. Unlike the National Football League and Major League baseball teams, we are going to split the TV money eight ways.”

That was the first public acknowledgement that the AFL was going to be different and that difference was what helped the league survive: equal money for each team from the national television contract.