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Game changers: how two Texas oilmen invented the Super Bowl.

Article Excerpt
In the first years after World War II, a new breed of ultrawealthy oilman arose from obscurity to capture national attention as no Texan had since Sam Houston. The media, from the New York Times to Life magazine, christened this top layer of Texas society "the Big Rich," and its richest representatives were the so-called Big Four: Hugh Roy Cullen, of Houston, the conservative gadfly who funded the University of Houston and jousted with politicians from Wendell Willkie to Dwight Eisenhower; Sid Richardson, the secretive Fort Worth oilman who hosted Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson at his modernistic island retreat off Corpus Christi; Clint Murchison, of Dallas, who introduced Texans to the joys of private airplanes and kingdom-size Mexican ranches; and the wealthiest of all, H. L. Hunt, a Dallas billionaire with three families--two in secret--and a burning desire to spread the virtues of conservative politics to postwar America.

By 1959, however, only Hunt remained an active oilman. From that year forward, the most notable exploits of the Big Four families would belong to their second generations, ambitious youngmen struggling to escape their fathers' shadows. One of the first to make nationwide headlines was the youngest of Hunt's sons: shy, well-mannered Lamar. Like many Texas oilmen, Lamar's favorite sport was football, whose professional teams had emerged as a national preoccupation following the dramatic 1958 championship game between the John Unitas--led Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Lamar thought football represented the future of American sports, and he grew determined to bring a team to Dallas; the city's previous team, the Dallas Texans, had folded after one season, in 1953. In early 1959 Lamar, then just 26, approached the owner of the Chicago Cardinals, who refused to sell. So did the National Football League's other owners, many of whom were just as upbeat about the league's future. What Lamar didn't realize was that he had run smack into an identical effort by Clint Murchison Jr.

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In the annals of the Big Rich, the Big Four families seldom crossed paths in any serious way, and where they did, as in the lifelong friendship between Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison Sr., relations tended to be amicable. Texas, after...

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