Pro football icon Hunt, 74, dies

DALLAS – Lamar Hunt, the pro sports visionary who owned the Kansas City Chiefs and came up with the term “Super Bowl,” died Wednesday night. He was 74.

Hunt, a founder of the American Football League and one of the driving forces behind the AFL-NFL merger, died at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas of complications from prostate cancer, Chiefs spokesman Bob Moore said.

Hunt battled cancer for several years and was hospitalized the day before Thanksgiving with a partially collapsed lung. Doctors discovered that the cancer had spread, and Hunt had been under heavy sedation since last week.

“He was a founder. He was the energy, really, that put together half of the league, and then he was the key person in merging the two leagues together,” said Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, Hunt’s neighbor. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody that’s made a bigger contribution (to the NFL) than Lamar Hunt.”

In 1967, Hunt’s Chiefs lost the first AFL-NFL championship – it was then called the World Championship Game. Three years later, the Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings for the title.

By then, the championship game had been christened the Super Bowl. Hunt came up with the name while watching his children play with a SuperBall.

In 1972, Hunt became the first AFL figure to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and each year the Lamar Hunt Trophy goes to the winner of the NFL’s American conference.

Hunt long campaigned to let teams other than Dallas and Detroit play at home on Thanksgiving Day. To honor his effort, the NFL scheduled a third game on the holiday this year – in Kansas City. Hunt missed it, though, because he was in the hospital and couldn’t get the game on TV.