Lamar Hunt's legacy: World Cup adventures with sons Clark and Dan, and the foundation of US soccer

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The most enduring memories that Clark and Dan Hunt share of their father, the sports tycoon Lamar Hunt, have less to do with all the World Cup games they saw together and more to do with the long, strange and often sinewy roads they took to get to them.

The van rides around Europe with a random cache of reporters, one of them a young CBS broadcaster named Verne Lundquist. Those side trips to find the best wienerschnitzel and ice cream. The fences they scaled to go swimming at Italian hotel pools long closed for the day. And the Mexican restaurant that proved to be the downfall of them all.

“My dad, he could eat anything,” Dan Hunt recalled, thinking back to a night during the 1986 World Cup, “and that about killed him."

In interviews with The Associated Press, the Hunt brothers — Clark, the chairman of the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs and Dan, the president of Major League Soccer club FC Dallas — reflected on the robust soccer legacy left by their late father.

It was Lamar Hunt who helped professional soccer gain a foothold in the U.S. with his investment in the North American Soccer League. When it folded in the 1980s, it was an undeterred Hunt who helped found MLS, whose very existence was required by FIFA for the U.S. to host the 1994 World Cup.

Lamar Hunt served as the co-chairman of the organizing committee for matches in Dallas that year. Now, some 32 years later, Clark Hunt is serving in the same capacity for matches in Kansas City while Dan has taken on that role in Dallas.

Unlike the last World Cup played in the U.S., though, four group-stage matches and two knockout games will be played at Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Chiefs, and a building Lamar Hunt called his favorite place in the world.

“It’s going to be special,” Clark Hunt said, “and I think it goes back to thinking about my dad a lot. That’s what I’m going to do.”

Lamar Hunt's love for soccer began with a trip in the early 1960s. His eventual wife, Norma Hunt, was attending University College Dublin as a Rotary scholar, and the son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt had gone to visit. They found themselves at a Shamrock Rovers match and became enamored with the spectacle.

“I think,” Clark Hunt said, “that may have been my dad’s first professional soccer game.”

The experience stayed with Lamar Hunt, even as he returned to the U.S. and poured himself into a different kind of football, helping to found the American Football League — which would soon merge with the NFL — and the Dallas Texans, now the Chiefs.

By the time he returned to Europe for the 1966 World Cup, he was intent on bringing soccer home with him. Hunt helped establish the United Soccer Association, which would later merge with the National Professional Soccer League to create the North American Soccer League, and watched as the sport took off with stars such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto.

“We know from his ventures into professional football that he was not afraid of a challenge,” Clark Hunt said.

The NASL grew quickly throughout the 1970s but many new owners did not have the resources to withstand losses while their clubs were getting off the ground, and the league collapsed after the 1984 season. But professional soccer didn’t disappear for long.

When the game's global coverning body, FIFA, told organizers for the 1994 World Cup that one of its requirements was to host was a top-level domestic league, Hunt used what he had learned from the NASL in helping get Major League Soccer off the ground.

“You knew that if Lamar Hunt was part of it,” said Thom Meredith, his right-hand man for many years, “it meant something."

Hunt not only helped bankroll the league but owned three of its first franchises; the family still owns FC Dallas, but divested itself of clubs in Columbus and Kansas City. Over the years, the league has grown to 30 franchises across the U.S. and Canada, attracted stars such as David Beckham and Lionel Messi, and laid the groundwork for youth soccer programs nationwide.

“My dad would be so pleased to see where MLS is today,” Clark Hunt said, “and he would be so excited about where it’s going.”

When the U.S. was awarded the World Cup along with Mexico and Canada in June 2018, organizers in Kansas City and executives with the Chiefs quickly went to work. The city had missed out on hosting matches in 1994 after FIFA determined Arrowhead Stadium would be unable to fit the pitch, and they weren’t going to let that happen twice.

Over several years, and at a cost of nearly $20 million, the stadium was modified to host World Cup matches. Its first game: Messi and defending champion Argentina against Algeria on June 16.

Kansas City will host six matches in all, including a quarterfinal, and the metro is serving as home base not only for la Albiceleste and Algeria but also for perennial power England and the Netherlands, a longtime Hunt family favorite.

Meanwhile, five group-stage matches will be played at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, not far from where Lamar Hunt once lived, and four more will be played in the knockout rounds, including a semifinal match on July 14.

“I think this is one of the final pegs of fulfilling dad’s legacy,” Dan Hunt said. “He called Arrowhead Stadium his favorite place on earth, and it’s just so cool to have games there. And you know, Dallas was his hometown, and he loved it so much. So I think he would be just excited that we’re back here. I think he would be over the moon.”

AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup

FILE - Dan Hunt, president of FC Dallas, speaks to reporter after a news conference announcing the 2026 FIFA World Cup Fan Festival soccer experience in Dallas, March 9, 2026. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

FILE - FC Dallas chairman and CEO Clark Hunt, left, looks on as Dan Hunt, president, FC Dallas, speaks during an induction ceremony for the National Soccer Hall of Fame, May 4, 2024, in Frisco, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)

FILE - From right, Major League Soccer owners representative Lamar Hunt, actor Andrew Shue, Commissioner Douglas Logan, Chairman Alan Rothenberg, and FIFA representative Joao Havelange gather on the field before the start of the league's inaugural game in San Jose, Calif., April 6, 1996. (AP Photo/Craig Fujii, File)

LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP) — Crews were set to resume searching Wednesday for nine workers at a Washington paper mill where a tank imploded, releasing a highly destructive chemical mixture called “white liquor” and causing at least one confirmed death.

Authorities said there was no hope of finding more survivors of Tuesday's tank implosion at Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co. in Longview, which also injured nine other people, including a responding firefighter. But before any bodies of the missing can be recovered, crews on Wednesday must first stabilize the tank, which was at risk of collapsing further and leaking more of the caustic liquid.

The implosion caused the huge circular tank to buckle and collapse on one side, and officials said they would only work during daylight because of the dangers. While the cause remains unknown, authorities said there was no threat to the community, a Columbia River city of about 40,000 people with long ties to the Washington and Oregon paper and lumber industries.

It was the second notable chemical tank failure in days on the West Coast, following the evacuation of thousands of Southern California residents due to a damaged tank at an aerospace plant before those orders were lifted Tuesday night.

The paper mill tank was holding about 900,000 gallons (3.4 million liters) of a liquid made of mostly sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide. Known as white liquor, it is used with heat to break down wood to make kraft paper, a durable material used in packaging, shopping bags and other products.

The sprawling plant, which employs about 1,000 people, makes material for tissues, printing paper, cups, plates, and cartons. It sits along the river next to other timber, paper and chemical businesses.

At a community vigil Tuesday night, dozens gathered to pray, light candles and embrace loved ones.

Crystal Moldenhauer, a Longview resident, said she has friends at the plant who remained unaccounted for. She said people called and texted each other all day trying to figure out what happened.

“We’re all still waiting for answers,” she said. “There’s families that have been torn apart, and we don’t know why.”

The cause of the implosion remained unclear.

Scott Goldstein, a fire chief with Cowlitz County, said Tuesday night that the tank still held about 90,000 gallons (more than 340,000 liters) of the volatile liquid.

“We don’t know until we know, hopefully tomorrow, how we can stabilize the tank. Do we remove the product first? Do we stabilize the tank first or the vice versa?” Goldstein said.

Hours after the disaster, officials repeatedly referred to the situation as a recovery effort.

Some of those who were injured suffered burns or inhalation injuries, authorities said.

Following the tank's rupture, the liquid spilled into a drainage ditch, said Brittny Goodsell, a state Ecology Department spokesperson.

“I know there’s a lot of questions about how all of this happened and I want to assure you that we will all continue to pressure to get answers to those questions,” Murray said.

Safety complaints were filed against Nippon Dynawave in March and May. The state’s labor and industries department said on X that both were unrelated to the current situation. One was an anonymous complaint about a valve on a tank, according to the department, which noted that it was not the tank that imploded.

Nippon Dynawave, a subsidiary of Japan-based Nippon Paper Group, has been fined $3,400 for three separate health and safety violations found by Washington Department of Labor and Industries inspectors since the start of 2021, according to the department’s online database.

Just over 40 people died between January 2021 and mid-October 2023 as a result of hazardous chemical incidents in the U.S., according to a paper released by a network of environmental justice organizations in late 2023.

Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press reporters Gene Johnson and Hallie Golden in Seattle and Christopher L. Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed.

This photo provided by the City of Longview, Wash., shows structural damage to the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Co., after a tank containing hazardous liquid imploded, on Tuesday, May 26, 2026 in Longview, Wash. (City of Longview via AP)