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THE BIG DADDY OF SPORT

H. L. Hunt, a likely winner in the race for world's richest man, was never much for fun and games, but two of his boys, Lamar (below) and Bunker, back their leisure-time interests with gushers of money

One of the most remarkable parties ever held for the autographing of books took place 10 years ago at the Cokesbury bookstore in Dallas. At most of these affairs the author is a rumpled, lonesome figure, more than a touch embarrassed, sitting at a table beside a placard announcing his noble work, miserably wondering whether anyone further is going to stop by and speak to him now that his mother, cousin, former roommate and publishers representative have left and the clerks have ceased to pretend they are expecting to cope with a crowd.

For this Cokesbury party, however, several hundred people lined up on the sidewalk along the block among the downtown stores and office buildings. They waited with great patience, as if there were football tickets for sale inside. It was said then that only in Dallas would such a crowd have turned out for this particular event, but no doubt that was a prejudiced judgment. The author of the novel called Alpaca would have attracted a crowd in any city in the world where they use money as a reckoning of position.

Inside Cokesbury's, as the line approached the table where the author was smilingly signing his name on flyleafs of paperback copies of Alpaca, a sound could be heard. At first you thought it was...no, no, it couldn't be...yes, yes, it was...singing! Those two little girls, plump and sweet-faced, with ribbons in their hair, holding hands behind the author's chair, were singing:

How much is that book in the window,
The one my daddy wrote?

Although the tune was nipped from a sweetly sentimental song popular at the time, That Doggie in the Window, the author would beam and bob his head to the music and turn ghostly blue eyes toward the people who filed past to buy his book for 50¢. The author liked the way the little girls sang. They were his stepdaughters and the family would sing often in the evenings around the piano in the parlor—and, besides, the author himself had written these lyrics.

Alpaca is set in a romantically imagined country of the same name and is the story of a confusion of the hearts of Juan Achala and an opera star named Mara Hani. But it was not for its literary merit alone that people lined up to purchase the book and to have the author autograph their copies. For one thing, in Dallas they liked the ideas expressed in Alpaca—that matters of government could not be discussed on radio or television or at meetings of more than a few hundred, that extra votes should be awarded to citizens who built up fortunes, scored at the top of their class or declined to take money from the government. Perhaps most important to the book's appeal, the author of Alpaca was either the richest man in the world or was so close to it that nobody could say for sure.

Sitting there that day in Cokesbury's signing autographs, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt looked like, if not a deity, then at least a ranking angel, and, in any case, altogether unlike a beginning novelist at his first autographing party. At 71 he had the face of a cherub, with fine white hair and smooth, pink-baby skin. Only recently people had begun to hear about Hunt's youngest son, Lamar, then 27, who had thought up the American Football League and had got it moving against obstructions that maybe only a prince of an international financial kingdom would have dared oppose. But the old man had not previously offered a look at himself to crowds in his home town.

Until 1948 few people in Texas or anywhere else knew about H. L. Hunt. That year LIFE magazine published a rather fuzzy photograph of Hunt on a sidewalk in Dallas, looking like an annoyed chiropractor on his way to the clinic, and in the caption proposed he might be the richest man in the world. The day the photo was taken Hunt thought the photographer was a street operator who was going to hand him a ticket offering six prints for a dollar. When Hunt didn't receive a ticket he figured the photographer was shooting the buildings in the background. Lamar saw the magazine and was startled—he hadn't realized his father was near to such a title. As a kid Lamar had thought a regular Saturday morning was to get a dollar from his mother and go stand in line at the Lakewood Theatre to see the Perils of Nyoka and later have a hamburger and milk shake. Though the old man didn't mention it to them, that photo caused considerable consternation to Lamar and his two closer brothers, Bunker and Herbert. They'd never paid much attention to money; no more would they be able to ignore it.

So is H. L. Hunt really the richest man in the world? J. Paul Getty, who is often said to be, says he would probably be richer than Hunt if position in wealthy corporations were the only consideration, but most of Getty's corporations are publicly owned, whereas Hunt and his large family own practically every piece of their businesses, and thus Hunt is the richer. And, of course, nobody knows where Howard Hughes ranks. All Hunt will say about it is, "If you know how rich you are, you aren't very rich."

After publication of the photograph in LIFE Hunt slowly emerged as a public person. He became known as a patron of Facts Forum and, later, Life Line—two means of presenting Hunt's fundamentalist, anti-Communist views to the people—and he began to write letters to the editor and to phone newspaper writers to issue lengthy warnings about the enemies of America. His appearance at Cokesbury's was somewhat of a coming out. By that time Lamar was already in the newspapers daily with his new football league. Not that the father and the youngest son were in any sort of competition for publicity, of course; the old man had done very well without it.

H. L. Hunt had known nothing of Lamar's plans to form the AFL and did not approve once he found out. He thought pro football would be a flop in Texas and if Lamar felt he had to have a team, one could have been obtained a bit cheaper. Hunt's secretary, Juanita Edwards, recalls his reaction when newspapers called to tell him about the AFL: "He'd just discovered it a little while earlier and said he was a typical parent, never knowing what his kids were up to." There was a story that someone told H. L. Hunt that Lamar would lose a million dollars a year and the old man replied that if this were true, Lamar would go broke in 150 years. Both H. L. Hunt and Lamar deny such a thing was ever said. "The story is so good it ought to be true," says Lamar. "But I do know my dad thought I'd gotten a little silly."

H. L. Hunt's grandfather, Waddy Thorpe Hunt, was a Confederate cavalry leader who was called to the door of his farmhouse toward the end of the Civil War and shot to death by Quantrill's Raiders, according to a family history Hunt has had compiled. Hunt's father, after serving in the family cavalry, settled on a farm in Vandalia, Ill., where H.L. Jr. was born in 1889. Youngest of eight children, little Haroldson could read by age 3 and could beat the entire household at checkers by the time he was 5. He quit school in the fifth grade and later wandered down to Arkansas, where as a young man he made a fortune in cotton and timber and began to deal in oil leases. In 1930 a famous wildcatter, Dad Joiner, hit a discovery well, Daisy Bradford No. 3, in what became the East Texas field. Hunt had a hundred wells of his own by then, and he put all his money into buying leases to the east of the Daisy Bradford wells. That was the wrong side. The pool lay to the west.

"I went into the oil business without knowing what I was doing, but pretty soon I recognized the structure of that East Texas field, and the big companies didn't," Hunt recalled recently. As he spoke, the old man was sitting in a wicker rocker on the front porch of his mansion in Dallas on a hot Sunday afternoon, wearing a gray plaid suit and a clip-on bow tie. Out before him the lawn sloped down to White Rock Lake, where sails of a regatta boomed across the water. Like Trimalchio, Hunt has a favorite dog, a little poodle named Muffin, which tiptoed up and down the porch giving out tiny yaps. "This was around Thanksgiving in 1930, not long after the stock-market crash, and there was no money available. But a clothing-store owner in Arkansas just loved to lend me money. I got $30,000 from him, $45,000 from some banks, and I bought out Dad Joiner as well as all the land I could get west of Daisy Bradford. I gave Joiner $1.26 million in future production payments, first time anybody'd ever thought up a plan like that." Hunt used to be a shrewd and heavy gambler and a noted poker player, and for years it has been said around Dallas that he played poker for three days with Joiner in a locked hotel room before walking out with the leases. "Nonsense!" said Hunt. "I quit playing poker in 1921. Only played twice since. Never played any cards with Joiner. People claim I kept him in a room by duress, but he had a suite in the Baker Hotel and so did I. He could come and go as he pleased." The East Texas field, the largest in the world until the Middle East discoveries, was the springboard to Hunt's extraordinary fortune.

Chuckling at the mechanical-doll prancing of Muffin, the old man heaved himself out of his wicker rocker to lead a visitor on a tour of the grounds of his 10-acre estate, Mount Vernon, an outsize replica of George Washington's home. Always alert for a bargain, Hunt bought the house for $69,000 in 1937 from an engineer who could no longer afford it. The whole place would fit in the flower garden of some of the estates of the wealthy on Long Island, but it must be remembered that Hunt is within sight of downtown Dallas and that he does own a few million acres elsewhere.

Behind the house, Hunt pointed to the seven deer he keeps in a wire pen and then, moving slowly, he gestured toward the path that leads between the trees to the red-brick home next door where his oldest son, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt III, now lives. Hassie, as the old man calls him, is 52 and looks eerily like his father. At the age of 3 he accompanied the old man into the oil fields and by the time he was 20 he was a legend in the oil business. It was said that Hassie had a divining rod inside his head, that he could drive down a country road and smell oil where no one had ever dreamed of looking. One Hunt employee recalls overhearing the old man angrily lecturing to his assembled geophysicists one afternoon, "My son Hassie can find more oil with a road map than you so-called educated fellows can find with millions of dollars worth of equipment!"

"Hassie was the smartest thing ever to hit the oil business," Hunt said. "When he was 19 he emancipated himself from me and took a stake of $181 and headed for Mississippi. He made a lot of money for himself, an awful lot. Hassie just knew things that there's no way anybody could know. I've got extrasensory perception myself, but Hassie had it stronger than anybody. He was such a brilliant boy that he scared people." Hunt looked toward Hassie's house and shook his head. "I made a terrible mistake with Hassie. He was a rugged boy and wanted to play football. But I wouldn't let him. Football players get kidney damage, and I didn't want Hassie hurt. As a boy I was a baseball fan, could recite hundreds of batting and pitching averages, knew 'em all. Hassie could have played baseball, but he didn't care for that. He went off to Culver Military Academy, where the discipline was too strict for a sensitive boy like him, and one day I found him boxing with Culver's best pugilist and giving that fellow all he could handle. Hassie needed a lot of action."

Hassie entered the Army in 1943, during a period when the Hunts were producing more oil than Germany and Japan combined. While going through officers' training at Fort Knox he had what the family calls "a nervous breakdown." Since that time he has been under almost constant medical care. Some say that Hassie is, ironically, still the richest of the Hunt sons. Leading his visitor into the dining room for lunch, the old man kept talking about Hassie. "With my other boys," he said, "I never was so strict as with Hassie. They could do what they wanted."

On Hunt's dining table were two telephones, a portable radio and a box of Kleenex. He began his meal by drinking a glass of carrot juice, a glass of grape juice and a glass of papaya-cranberry juice. Then he nibbled from a plate of mixed nuts and apricot seeds. "I intend to live to be 140, like the people in a certain tribe in the Himalayas, and one of their secrets is if you eat enough nuts you'll never get cancer," he said. At 81 Hunt is unwrinkled as a peach—which he attributes in part to the daily use of a body lotion cosmetic sold by one of his firms, but he is somewhat concerned that he is shrinking from his former six-foot height. "My grandmother lived to be 97 and kept getting smaller. When she died she was no higher than this table," he said. As the asparagus soup was set out—to be followed by roast beef, green beans, brown bread milled from uncracked wheat grown only in Deaf Smith County, Texas ("Never had a dentist in Deaf Smith County until an old dentist retired and moved there"), fruit salad, apricot cake and carrot cake—Hunt began to hum another tune he had written.

"In 1925 I had $600,000 cash and decided to go to the Florida land boom," he said. His first wife, Lyda Bunker Hunt, who died in 1955, went with him on the trip and they detoured for their first visit to New York City. While there the Hunts saw No, No, Nanette and Rose Marie on Broadway. Inspired by the works of Youmans and Friml, Hunt wrote an operetta in Florida between land deals. "It's never been published," he said. "Never had the time. But I've published nine books of my own in the last few years, and now I think I'll have my light opera produced. It's a sentimental thing, I admit, but it's right pleasant. Listen." And in a small, quavery old voice he began to sing the major ballad of the piece: Wherever Dreams Come True I'll Be with You:

Up to the time I met you,
Life was as drab as can be...
Something was missing for me...
You are my love now forever,
If only in sweet reverie...

Growing up at the Dallas Mount Vernon was, Lamar remembers, a fairly relaxed and uneventful experience, at least until the world discovered H. L. Hunt. "They were pretty easy on us," Lamar says. "My mother used to say she'd spanked herself out on Hassie and didn't have any spanking left for me. I can remember hiding from my father one day because I knew when he came home he was going to teach me to swim, but I was afraid of swimming, not of him." When Lamar entered Southern Methodist University in Dallas it was no longer a secret that he might have the richest father in the world. Some of his football teammates called him Poor Boy, an unimaginative nickname that Lamar endured with good humor. In one way the nickname was appropriate. Lamar seldom has any cash in his pocket.

Not long after graduating from SMU, where his athletic labors had lifted him to the position of third-string end, Lamar tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals, a pro football team, at a time when pro football was as foreign to Texas as downhill ski racing. Curiously, Clint Murchison Jr., son of probably the second-richest man in Dallas, tried to buy the same team at about the same time. Earlier Murchison had tried to buy the old Dallas Texans, who moved to Baltimore and became the Colts, and had been brushed off by National Football League Commissioner Bert Bell. Lamar and Clint did not know each other, had never even met, but within a few years each had a pro football team in Dallas—the Cowboys of the NFL for Clint and the Texans of the new American Football League for Lamar. For three seasons Dallas saw a sort of civil war, and a lot of businessmen didn't know which way to jump. The Murchisons were a more social family and had a more diverse empire. But it was very dangerous to underestimate the Hunts. One result was that a great many Dallas business firms declared themselves neutral and deprived themselves of football altogether, refusing to buy blocks of tickets to the games of either team.

The feelings ran so deep that even Lamar was sometimes uneasy about personal relationships. In 1960 he gave a party in honor of his first wife's dentist at the ordinary middle-class house in which Lamar then lived—a brick home with a broken dishwasher, an old car in the driveway and a basketball hoop above the garage door. One of the guests was Don McIlhenny, a former SMU teammate who later played for Green Bay and had just joined Murchison's Cowboys as a halfback. As McIlhenny was leaving the party, Lamar followed him out to the porch.

"Don, I hope you're not mad at me," Lamar said.

"For what?" asked McIlhenny.

"For starting this new league."

"I'm not mad at you. I think it's great," McIlhenny said.

"Swell!" said Lamar. "Come over again one evening and we'll shoot some baskets."

In the three seasons that Lamar's Texans competed with the NFL Cowboys for the Dallas audience, attendance at the Cotton Bowl was announced as "estimated" rather than by turnstile count. The announced attendance had very little to do with the number of people in the stands. Lamar gave away tickets with groceries and inside bags of potato chips. He sponsored a Friend of the Barber Day, which allowed any barber in a white jacket to enter the Cotton Bowl free, and it wound up with anybody in a white shirt being admitted. Once Lamar hired a number of girls and put them into a fleet of foreign cars to cruise the city selling tickets. One of these girls was a pretty schoolteacher, Norma Knobel, who later became Lamar's second wife. Lamar says now that in 1962, his team's last year in Dallas before moving to Kansas City, the genuine attendance average was 10,000 per game. "The Cowboys drew only 9,800," he says, "but we had a championship team and they were losing, so beating them was nothing to be proud of."

The two most discouraging times for Lamar in the early days of the AFL were when the Denver franchise almost folded in 1960 and when Lamar realized that Harry Wismer's New York Titans were a fiasco. Without a successful team in New York, the AFL faced extinction. The rumor was that Lamar's fortune kept the Denver and New York franchises alive. "The NFL people used to claim that I owned every team in the league," Lamar says. "It wasn't true. The only money I ever put into a team other than my own was when the AFL took over Wismer's franchise in 1962 and I contributed my share."

Lamar is a somewhat unprepossessing man, quite modest, even naive. Like his father, he does not drink liquor or coffee and has never smoked (H. L. Hunt quit smoking cigars when he figured out that he had used up $300,000 worth of his time tearing off the wrappers). Though he has now moved into an elegant section of Dallas and lives in a large home that resembles his father's version of Mount Vernon, Lamar still dresses like a preacher and cannot bring himself to use the power of the Hunt name in a public place. Some years ago Lamar was trying to recruit a Mississippi guard named Bookie Bolin. He took Bolin in one of the Hunt airplanes to Las Vegas and later to San Diego, a trip that resulted in the University of Mississippi threatening to bar AFL scouts from its campus and Bolin signing with the New York Giants. While in Las Vegas, Lamar's party, which included his football team's general manager, Jack Steadman, and Lamar's old friend, Buzz Kemble, was standing in a long line in a hotel lobby, waiting to see the Mitzi Gaynor show. As in all nightclubs, of course, the fix was operating with the guardian of the entrance, and dozens of people were moving in ahead of Lamar's party. Finally someone said, "Lamar, why don't you say something to that guy at the door?"

"What could I say?" asked Lamar.

"Tell him you're Bunker Hunt," was the reply.

"Hunt?" said the man at the door. "If you're a friend of Bunker Hunt's, come right in."

Thoroughly surprised and delighted, Lamar was escorted to a ringside table. "That Bunker sure knows his way around," Lamar said.

Though he has been seen at league meetings with holes in his shoes and has frequently borrowed small sums from acquaintances, Lamar can be generous. A 16-handicap golfer, he won a member-guest tournament at a Fort Worth country club and gave the substantial amount of prize money to his partner. His wife has tried to mod-ify his manner of dress. "I stay after him, but he never changes," she says. However, he did approve of flaming red as the color for the official blazers of his football team. In a Dallas nightclub one evening two men who identified themselves as a famous acrobatic team called The Flying Punzars borrowed the red blazers off the backs of Lamar and Jack Steadman. The Flying Punzars went into the spotlight, requested a fanfare and a drum roll and then did an involved trick that landed one of them in the drums and the other dazed and flattened on the floor. "These red jackets are just the thing we need to attract attention," Lamar said.

Before the decision to merge the two football leagues, Lamar kept busy in the competition to sign players. His results were mixed. When the Texans acquired draft rights to Quarterback Roman Gabriel, Lamar called him up at college and talked to him for more than half an hour, offering insurance plans, investment opportunities, whatever he believed might induce Gabriel to join the AFL. It was not until two years later that Lamar found out he had not been talking to Gabriel but to Los Angeles Rams General Manager Elroy Hirsch, who hung up the phone and signed Gabriel to a contract. "Those days were interesting, enjoyable, unforgettable, but it's just as well they're over," Lamar says. Though he and Clint Murchison Jr. have offices in the same building and occasionally encounter each other in the elevator, they rarely meet socially. An exception was in 1960 when, on Clint's birthday, a large package was carried into a party and Murchison was asked to unwrap his present. Out of the box leaped Lamar. "They really howled," he says.

Lamar decided to move his football team to Kansas City in 1963 for what he admits were in the beginning purely financial reasons. "Clint was determined to stay in Dallas and originally so were we. But we both couldn't survive there, and an economic decision had to be made. Now a lot of people in Dallas are saying the wrong team left town, but it's worked out great for both teams." For the 1971 season, when they hope to be playing in a new 75,000-seat stadium, the Kansas City Chiefs have sold 70,000 season tickets. "We could have sold every seat," Lamar says. "It's phenomenal. Not long ago a lady saw the big Super Bowl world championship ring I was wearing and said, 'Oh, I didn't realize football was lucrative.' Well, it certainly can be."

Lamar considers that he spends his working time 80% in the "entertainment business" and the rest in oil and real-estate ventures. At one point he was principal backer of a professional bowling league which flopped. He is part owner of the Chicago Bulls basketball team. With his nephew, Al Hill Jr., he owns a professional enterprise called World Championship Tennis, which now has such stars as Rod Laver, Pancho Gonzales, Don Newcombe and Tony Roche under contract. With Tommy Mercer of Fort Worth, Lamar owns a baseball team called the Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs which has led the minor leagues in attendance over the last five years, and the Hunt-Mercer combine is trying to obtain a major-league franchise. With Bill McNutt, the fruitcake king from Corsicana, Lamar owns the Dallas Tornado, a team in the North American Soccer League. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, Lamar believes soccer will flourish in the United States within 10 years, and he brings good teams from Europe to Dallas so the fans can see them play. His wife agrees. "Soccer has flow, beauty, grace, skill, is easy to understand and requires endurance. It's a great game for women to watch," she says. All these athletic interests have given Lamar probably the most varied assortment of investments in professional sport of any man who ever felt the urge to own himself a team. "I guess I'm the biggest sports investor in terms of projects but not in terms of dollars," he says. "I always go in on the ground floor. The Chiefs, for example, cost me $25,000 for the franchise. Then I had to pay the losses for a few years. But what are the Chiefs worth now? Leonard Tose paid $16 million for the Philadelphia Eagles, and that's far more money than I've put into all my sports endeavors combined, but the Chiefs would have to be worth at least as much as the Eagles. My only sport investment that has practically no worth at the moment is the soccer team, but it will come around in a few years."

His brother Bunker, who has a small financial piece of the soccer league, is afraid Lamar is talking like a fan. "It would be easier to take American football to Europe than bring soccer here," says Bunker. "Soccer doesn't fit the American personality. The game doesn't have enough climaxes. In baseball you have three strikes, three outs, and so forth, and in football you have first downs. In soccer you're just out there kicking the ball around."

Bunker has left the team sports to Lamar, but has developed quite a sporting passion of his own—horseracing. In 1952 a former roommate at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pa. invited him to the thoroughbred sales at Keeneland, Ky. Bunker amazed himself by buying three horses. Currently Bunker has a number of mares in Kentucky, about 10 more mares in Virginia, a dozen horses training in California and 22 horses training at Chantilly in France, where he does most of his racing. "One Saturday in Paris I had nothing to do and went out to the races," he says. "I found out it costs one-third as much to train a horse in France as it does in the United States, and the purses in France are comparable to ours. So I thought I'd try it."

Bunker owned half-interest in Vaguely Noble, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe winner of two years ago who was later syndicated for the then record price of $5 million, and owned French Oaks winner Gazala and French 1,000 Guineas winner Pampered Miss. He has recently purchased a farm in New Zealand, where his racing operation will be headquartered. "I've grown to love racing," he says. "It's the cleanest sport there is."

Bunker is usually on the move, filling a seat in the Hunt Lockheed Jet Star for much of the 200,000 miles the plane is flown in a year by Jake Cobb, who has worked for the Hunts since 1949. "Bunker likes jokes, characters and good times, in that order," says Cobb. During the uranium craze in the mid-'50s, Cobb would fly Bunker to Las Vegas for a spot of relief from filing mining claims, and when they reached the tables they would switch names. Cobb recalls that it was rather a pleasant experience for him to be flattered and hustled, but now Bunker is too well known on sight to be able to conceal his identity at his favorite recreation parlors. For one thing, he is one inch less than six feet and weighs 230 pounds, which makes him about as easy to hide as an Ohio State guard. In 1960 a car called the Ken-Paul Special, driven by Jim Rathmann and owned by Bunker's friends Ken Rich and Paul Lacy, won the Indianapolis 500. At the party afterward a few cases of champagne roused the spirits of the celebrants, who began throwing members of the victorious group into the motel pool. When Bunker's turn came to be dunked they couldn't lift him. "I'll help you," he said, and jumped into the water. "Bunker is always on half a diet," says Cobb. "That means he skips the ice cream with his pie."

Beyond Bunker, the Hunts' sporting interests diminish. Herbert Hunt, the third of the active brothers, is a skier and owns a small piece of Lamar's soccer league, but he primarily runs the Pen-rod Drilling Company and other enterprises out of the family offices on eight floors of the First National Bank Building in Dallas. One of the two Hunt girls, Margaret, is married to Dallas oilman Al Hill, who has an indoor tennis court in his home where private tournaments are held involving international stars. The other, Caroline, is the wife of oilman and rancher Loyd Sands. H. L. Hunt's second wife, the former Mrs. Ruth Ray Wright, whom he married in 1957, has four children, all of them occupied in the family businesses.

But other than the old man, the best-known of the Hunts is, to be sure, Lamar. Although he changed cities with his football team he refused to change coaches or concepts. For years the Chiefs had been accused of failing in the important games—a complaint Dallas fans are now directing at the Cowboys—and Lamar was often urged to fire Coach Hank Stram, who was an assistant coach at the University of Miami when Lamar hired him 10 years ago.

"I'm like everybody else. I like to see my team win and I have second thoughts when we lose," Lamar says. "But I've always felt that Stram is a leader and has the ability to produce a winner. He's improved as a coach. He should have, after all these years. Now he's the granddaddy coach of the league and is regarded as outstanding. That makes me very happy. I enjoy the challenge of helping something succeed. The fact that we've sold as many season tickets for 1971 as we sold total tickets for all our home games in 1962 doesn't exactly displease me, either."

"Lamar is something like me," says H. L. Hunt. "He's stubborn and knows how to fight." The old man, who is liable to fly off alone tourist class with a suitcase bound up by leather straps to visit a sheik and try to beat a 20-man delegation from another country out of an oil concession, is an authority on determination. Once he crashed a party given by a foreign potentate at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan for Russian Premier Khrushchev ("the old rascal grinned and shook my hand on his way out"), and there are many tales of financial enemies overcome, of deals made and games won. Although he insists he had no part in Lamar's effort to put the AFL across, H. L. Hunt clearly enjoys watching it. "Lamar's turning out to be a pretty good trader," the old man says.

TWO PHOTOS

PHOTO

Bunker Hunt researches his subject at Saratoga while relaxing with his wife Caroline.