Lamar Hunt's World Cup Odyssey

By Michael Lewis
MLSnet.com columnist

Yokohama, Japan -- It isn't every day you get an opportunity to talk to Lamar Hunt while sipping a soft drink in the departure lounge of Itami Airport in Osaka at 9:30 in the morning on Monday.

Then again, it isn't every day you get a chance to talk to Hunt one-on-one, one of soccer's great benefactors. Here is the man who forced the AFL-NFL merger, named the Super Bowl, helped found the NASL and MLS, and has built our nation's premiere soccer-specific facility, Columbus Crew Stadium.

There we were talking soccer -- the U.S.'s remarkable World Cup run, the tournament itself and soccer stadiums, among other topics about this beautiful game.

Perhaps no American is better equipped to impart his perspective about the greatest show on earth and the U.S.'s performance. After all, Hunt has attended eight of the last nine Cups, missing only the 1978 event in Argentina.

He also put his money where his mouth and heart were some 35 years ago as the owner of the Dallas Tornado in the old North American Soccer League. Hunt again demonstrated his passion for the game by owning two teams in Major League Soccer(Columbus and Kansas City) and operating a third (Dallas).

Hunt called the U.S.'s 2-0 second-round triumph over Mexico, the first time the Americans reached the quarterfinals since the very first World Cup in 1930, "wonderful. It was great."

His excitement originally was fueled by the U.S.'s 3-2 stunning win over Portugal in Suwon on June 5.

"It was very special," he said. "I got to go on the U.S. family bus, which is the wives, family, parents and children of a lot of the players and some of the staff. There was anticipation and the fact we got off to such a great start and won the game, there was real exhilaration. Afterwards there was such a great feeling, 'What a great day this was.' Unlike other sports, we've now got to sustain it. We've got to make it to the second round or otherwise this is going to be a hollow day. Fortunately, we had a tie in the second game and good help from Korea to get in after three games."

Of course, it will a hollow tournament if the league and the sport doesn't use this remarkable experience as a springboard.

"Obviously, I think it will be positive and it could come in a lot of different ways," Hunt said. "I'm going to give you some scenarios. Brian McBride happens to be a very sellable American player. He has an All-American look. Nobody should be allowed to be that handsome. He has played in Major League Soccer for seven years. He is not someone who goes off and plays in Europe and nobody hears about him. Were he would have another outstanding performance, like his goal in the first game, and the U.S. wins, then you're talking about the potential of magazine covers and more newspaper coverage. He would be very recognizable as a star as opposed to, and I don't want to pick somebody negatively, say, one of our European-based players. That player would not be nearly as sellable."

"Obviously Clint Mathis plays for New York. That's another level of exposure if he would be the star and he has done darn good thus far. There are a lot of things that could happen and a lot of ways it can go. Clearly, the most defining thing is winning games."

That includes the long term as well.

"I have no question, none, that it will be a very, very major sport in the United States," Hunt said. "When that's going to be, I'm probably not going to live to see it because the grading system in the United States is difficult. In other words, Americans are a little afraid of getting interested in something that we're not real good at. Now, how quick can we get real good? Well, we've made huge strides since the '90 World Cup, '94 and obviously since '98. Those strides are taken only every four years in World Cup measurements."

In fact, Hunt felt it has succeeded already.

"I get asked this a lot: 'Why has soccer not succeeded?'" he said. "My answer, which is copied from somebody I heard, is this: Soccer has succeeded. It is already the fastest growing youth participation sport. It has already succeeded at the youth level, no question, boys and girls, high school, college growth, club team growth. It has succeeded very definitely on the women's side where our team has been the strongest in the world for most of the last 10 years."

"It has begun to succeed from a men's standpoint because now compared to 15 to 20 years ago, it would have been laughable of having players from the United States playing in the First Division in Europe. Now we have a lot of players playing there. Plus, the MLS players have helped make our men's team stronger. I don't know if it is the right ranking -- I saw the last one where we were ranked 13th in the world -- but we beat No. 5 (Portugal) the other day. That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving up or getting better. But it does mean that we're succeeding."

"Where it has not succeeded is in building soccer-specific stadiums, which is much more important than I realized, certainly than I realized 20-30 years ago. I thought well, it's the same shape as an American football field so you play in the same stadiums and it will succeed. But that's not quite it. It's a sport that needs to be more intimate in the spectator proximity to the field. That's one area we took a risk in Columbus and Phil Anschutz took a real big risk in the facility he is building in Los Angeles. I think his facility will maybe revolutionize soccer stadium building in this country. I think you will see a lot more of these facilities built."

That's one of the reasons why Hunt is here. His World Cup appearance is multi-fold: To take in the grandeur of the event, as an American fan and for a little business as well -- to check out the stadia.

To do that, Hunt, who turns 70 on Aug. 2, arranged an audacious and grueling schedule that will take him to all 20 venues (10 in each country). He has completed tours of 16 of the 20 venues, including all of Korea, with only Osaka and Shizuoka in the quarterfinals, Saitama in the semifinals and Yokohama for the final left in Japan.

"The stadiums are like no undertaking I've ever seen," he said. "I think there must have been some strong competition nationally between Korea and Japan to make it happen."

Hunt is taking photos and notes of each stadium, "seeing the good and bad -- and there is not much bad," as he put it. The homework is obvious -- to see how he can improve Arrowhead Stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs and bring back some fresh ideas to help build his proposed Kansas City Wizards stadium and other MLS stadiums as well.

"They are very well designed," he said. "These stadiums, for the most part, are not very large. A number of them are in the range of 40,000-42,000 and they've been very generous in space in comparison to American stadiums. We're looking at ideas to remodel Arrowhead Stadium. It's now 30-years-old. It is not a good soccer stadium in the American sense right now. We're looking at ways of improving Arrowhead for the spectators. Again, that's probably more of a football orientation."

"We are probably looking at ideas at how a soccer style stadium gets built in Kansas City as well as Dallas. Although we can't imagine things as grand as these stadiums, there are things that can be incorporated."

Such as?

"I like personally the intimacy of the stadiums," he said. "The Columbus Crew Stadium has a very good intimacy. That's important. The ones that I have enjoyed the most are the ones that don't have a running track around them. For obviously a soccer-style stadium in America, we would want to stay totally away from a running track."

Hunt's most vivid memories? The fans -- foreign and domestic.

"The English fans and their support," he said. "The Brazilian fans as they've always been. Then there’s the passion of the Korean public. I saw the U.S. game with the street scenes. That was unbelievable. That was the greatest atmosphere I've ever seen at a sporting event at that Korea-U.S. game. It was really, really special. A part of that was a stunning beautiful stadium in Daegu. I've never seen anything like that and I've seen Kansas City Chiefs fans all dressed in red, but this is a whole nation dressed in red. Hundreds of thousands watched the game on TV.

"The Super Bowl tends to be a crowd that's more polite and little more neutral. You have 7,000-8,000 fans for each team. The difference in that Korea game was that there were a couple of thousand U.S. fans very into the game, dressed in American fashion as American fans. The other 62,000 at the game were totally in red and totally orchestrated in their cheers and chants."

Michael Lewis, who writes about soccer for the New York Daily News, is covering his fifth World Cup. His fourth book, World Cup Soccer (2002 edition), was published last month. He can be reached at SoccerWriter516@aol.com.