Clark Hunt puts his own stamp on NFL - Ingles

He walks through a windowless corridor at M&T Bank Stadium, where the Baltimore Ravens play, and enters a secluded room that would be quiet if not for the chirp and roar of football players preparing for a game. The Chiefs’ locker room is next door, peace and madness separated by a thin wall.

Clark Hunt pays it no attention, because as long as he can remember, this sound has been the background track of his life.

It was his father, Lamar, who founded the Chiefs and was among a group that challenged — and defeated — the old guard of the NFL, seeing to it that their American Football League stood on equal ground. After the two leagues merged, Lamar coined the moniker for a championship game — a game so revered it should be called the Super Bowl.

“The things that he accomplished,” Clark says of his father, “I pretty early on accepted that I’m never going to accomplish as much.”

Clark Hunt is 46, and on this night, he’s sitting in a chair, his legs crossed and a brown blazer folded and hanging over the chair’s back. He speaks softly and winks when he says something that’s meant to be a joke.

Hunt still looks youthful, but his blond hair has a few more gray strands than when his father died in December 2006. That’s when Hunt took full control of the Chiefs, a year after becoming the organization’s chairman and appointing himself the man in charge of seeing his father’s baby into the future. Hunt and his three siblings share ownership of the Chiefs, but Clark is the man behind the wheel.

In these past five years, Hunt has revealed his leadership style. He is at times ruthless, and at all times competitive, making changes his father wouldn’t and helping to craft the Chiefs in his image. The team in the next room is young, aggressive and eager to prove it belongs in the national discussion. In many ways, that’s the best way to describe the man sitting here.

That’s what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell saw in 2007, when he appointed Hunt — the league’s youngest owner-representative — to its five-person Management Council Executive Committee. In June, Goodell and the league’s general counsel, Jeff Pash, deputized Hunt, a reserved and soft-spoken man with a knack for numbers and deal-making, to lead negotiations between owners and players on one of the principle disagreements during the NFL lockout.

“I would never describe him as a loud voice, if you know him,” Goodell says. “But he’s an effective voice.”

The two sides, confronted with a collective-bargaining chasm so wide that it threatened the 2011 season and the league’s future, ejected the attorneys and accountants. Fewer than a dozen men remained in the room in Minneapolis that day. Of all of them — men of power and riches, influence and fame — it was Lamar Hunt’s second-youngest son who’d been asked to explain and sell a proposal to the players that would prove to be a turning point.

“We were up against the wall that night, feeling a lot of pressure, and were on the verge of not going so well,” says Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth, one of the handful of player representatives in the room that night. “I credit Clark for, at least that night specifically, getting us back on track.”

• • •

The revelation began with profanity, a word that caught Hunt’s friend Scott Hutcheson by surprise. They had been chosen, young minds elite in the craft of numbers, and they met as junior analysts at New York’s Goldman Sachs investment banking firm. In 1987, Hutcheson says, about 6,000 college graduates applied to the firm, 600 were interviewed, and 60 were hired for a job whose employees considered knocking off at midnight an easy day.

They were ice skating in Central Park one afternoon when Hunt blurted something unfamiliar.

“I had never heard him swear before,” Hutcheson says.

They had to get to a sports bar, and fast. Why, Hutcheson wasn’t sure. In those days, Clark wasn’t much different than he is now. He was dogged and smart, calculating and quiet. And careful with information.

“He’s not going to offer all of the depth and all of the strength and all of the skills that are deeply embedded in his intellect,” Hutcheson says. “What you see is a quiet, reserved, thoughtful person.”

Hunt and Hutcheson worked long hours at Goldman Sachs, looking forward to drinks on Friday nights and workouts on Sundays. They had spent months working together when Hunt darted into a Hard Rock Café, his eyes fixed on the televised Chiefs game. Back then, the team was one of the NFL’s worst franchises. Hutcheson wondered why this Dallas native cared so much.

Someone else had put it together and nudged Hutcheson: Hunt’s family owned the team. Hutcheson watched as Hunt studied the game, intense as always during a decade of disappointment but little change. Lamar Hunt was folksy, popular and loyal; men who had been at Lamar’s side remained there, even as the franchise sank. With Jack Steadman as president and Jim Schaaf as general manager, the Chiefs reached the playoffs once in a dozen years.

Hutcheson says he asked Hunt why he never mentioned that he was part of the first family of the AFC. Hunt told his friend that he didn’t think he needed to know.

“He doesn’t talk,” says Hutcheson, who remains close with Hunt, “other than the content of what’s appropriate.”

• • •

The final days were approaching, and Lamar Hunt told Clark to come in close. Lamar had been diagnosed years earlier with prostate cancer, and the end was near. It was 2006.

After Clark’s term with Goldman Sachs ended, he joined his father in running the family’s sports franchises. Clark observed his father over the years, marveling sometimes at his ability to connect with strangers, solve problems and crunch numbers.

“What would be an easy computation on a calculator,” Clark says, “but one where I’d have to sit down and work it out by longhand … within about five seconds, he would say, ‘Oh, well, that’s 126,’ or whatever the answer was, and I’d go, ‘Wow.’ ”

Clark studied his father’s ways, intimidated sometimes by abilities he didn’t think he’d inherited. But in some ways, Lamar saw himself in Clark: soft-spoken, meticulous and good with numbers. Approaching 40 years old, he worked primarily with the family’s Major League Soccer teams, including, in those days, the Kansas City Wizards, but he says now that it was assumed he would someday succeed his father as the face of the Chiefs.

“There was a need,” he says, “for one of his kids to step up.”

Lamar first selected Clark to help negotiate the terms of a massive renovation to Arrowhead Stadium. The process lasted several years, winning approval and tax dollars in March 2006 but losing the rolling roof addition and the dream of playing host to a Super Bowl.

“The first chance I had to do something,” Clark says, “from a leadership standpoint.”

Eight months after the stadium renovation deal was finalized, Lamar suffered a partially collapsed lung and entered the hospital, where doctors discovered his cancer had spread. Weeks later, Lamar called Clark to his side.

“An incredibly emotional time,” Clark says now.

Lamar told his son to remember the fans — and to do Arrowhead right. Clark says this was Lamar, who was 74, telling him that the Chiefs — the franchise that had most defined him and made him proudest — might be shared by the family, but the team’s future belonged to him.

“He knew he was going to pass away at that point, and we knew he was going to pass away. To have him tell me that,” Clark says, his voice trailing off. “On the one hand, you want to feel good about it. But you can’t.”

• • •

Clark Hunt shifted his primary focus from the family’s soccer ventures and non-sports business interests to the Chiefs. He began talking to anyone with an opinion, inside and outside the organization, about what they thought the Chiefs needed to be successful.

Some said the team needed change. Carl Peterson had been with the team 18 seasons when Lamar Hunt died, and he was the general manager, president and chief executive of an organization that had stalled, same as it had in the 1970s and ’80s. But Hunt waited.

“He’s someone who has a listen-to-talk ratio of probably 10 to 1,” Pash says.

Peterson had traded away draft picks and acquired big-name players, and he told insiders that it was in an effort to reach a Super Bowl before Lamar Hunt’s death, so that Hunt could hoist the AFC championship trophy that was named for him in 1984. During Peterson’s attempt at a playoff surge, from 2001 to 2006, Peterson drafted 35 players, and three of them — Larry Johnson, Jared Allen and Tamba Hali — reached a Pro Bowl.

The Chiefs went 4-12 in 2007, then 2-14 a year later. Fewer than two full seasons into his tenure as chairman, Clark Hunt presided over major change — the first of many high-profile moves that have come to paint him as a man unwilling to wait for success, even at the expense of the loyalty and affable nature his father was known for. Peterson resigned, officially, in late 2008. Personnel man Bill Kuharich and other executives followed Peterson — who spoke briefly to The Star but didn’t return a call seeking comment on Hunt — out the door. Two years later, longtime executive Denny Thum turned in his resignation, too.

What followed was an overhaul of his father’s franchise: Hunt hired Scott Pioli to be GM, Mark Donovan to succeed Thum as president, and many more to enact a team-wide shift into the 21st century. Last year, the Chiefs’ board of directors appointed Hunt as the team’s CEO. As he had done years ago with his friend Hutcheson, information was shared only on a need-to-know basis.

He had stepped off the path cut by his father, but even as he was shifting directions, he says, he reflected upon Lamar’s words: Remember the fans and do Arrowhead right. Last year, Hunt unveiled the “new” Arrowhead, with $375 million in renovations. In Hunt’s fourth season as chairman, the new Chiefs went 10-6 and won the AFC West.

“I want to win championships,” Hunt says when asked about his moves. “In pro sports, that’s really how we measure it.”

The organization’s new philosophy has rubbed some the wrong way, but there’s no denying that the team is more successful now than when Clark Hunt began running it. By August 2010, the Chiefs had, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual team valuation report, increased by $71 million in value and $49 million in annual revenue since 2006.

Hunt has earned a reputation as a no-nonsense owner, but in the past two years he also has been called chintzy, a guy who values dollars more than championships. Despite the increase in team value, the Chiefs have been near the bottom of NFL payroll since Peterson departed, and Pioli has yet to bring in a marquee free agent. Hunt says this is a product of having a young roster assembled primarily through the draft. Pioli has said Hunt has never put restrictions on his spending, and Hunt says Pioli has “a lot of latitude” to sign whomever would help the team.

Hunt says Pioli talks with him to clear most decisions, but adds that’s more a matter of Pioli’s choice than a requirement. He presents Pioli with a budget each year, but does so with the understanding that it can be flexible.

“I’ve always told him, ‘Look: If there’s something we need to do from a players standpoint that you think is really important, by all means, do it,’ ” Hunt says. “We’re not going to let the budget stop us from doing that. … I don’t know that we’ll be a high spender, but we’ll be no worse than average.”

Hunt says it’s not unusual for an owner to be called a miser, saying that no matter how he’s viewed now, that’s not how he’ll be remembered.

“The fans will see our spending on players go up,” he says, “and that issue will go away.”

• • •

It’s June in Minneapolis, and the labor discussions are at a standstill.

The issue of stadium credits — the percentage of money the owners save when a new stadium is built or renovated — has separated the two sides. Negotiations have stalled.

“The Minneapolis meeting,” Foxworth says, “was kind of the back-against-the-wall moment.”

Hunt has spent the past few days trying a new approach: Instead of negotiating only in meeting rooms, he begins pulling players aside for private discussions. Hunt and the NFL’s treasurer, Joe Siclare, discuss a plan in which owners will receive a 1.5 percent credit for stadium expansions. Hunt explains the complicated concepts in simple terms, Foxworth will say later, and that helps players to understand the owners’ proposal is not as one-sided as others have made it sound.

Goodell and Pash, the owners’ lead negotiator, notice that when Hunt speaks, players seem to respond. And, like his father, Hunt understands numbers. So after sunset, with another fruitless day coming to an end, two of the NFL’s most powerful men turn to the league’s youngest owner. They ask the attorneys and accountants to leave the room, and they appoint Hunt, who has little experience in labor discussions, to explain the owners’ proposal to the players’ representatives.

“An intimidating group,” Hunt says now.

His opening statement is laced with humor, and maybe for the first time on this day, the tension begins to dissolve. Players listen without suspicion, and Foxworth says things start to make sense.

“The one thing we got from him was that he’s honest and genuine, which goes a long way in negotiations,” Foxworth says. “He didn’t speak a whole lot, but when he spoke, we knew he had done his research and he wasn’t trying to … pull the wool over our eyes; he was trying to find a way to make this work for everybody.”

The minutes pass, and not long after, the players agree to the owners’ proposal for how stadium credits will be divided.

“He identified the problem,” Goodell says, “and he found a solution. And he sold it.”

“The brains of the operation from their side,” Foxworth says.

The sides emerge, having overcome one of the lockout’s major obstacles, and hopes are lifted that the season might begin on time.

“You could see from that meeting on,” Hunt says, “that we were on a path to getting a deal done.”

The man who sold it is no longer just Lamar’s kid, a legacy who sits in the back and says nothing; Hunt is someone worth listening to. Months later, Goodell will say he’s uncertain the season would’ve begun on time if not for Hunt’s ability not only to articulate the plan to players but also to convince them it was a good deal for both sides.

“A critical voice and role,” Goodell says, “in getting this agreement completed and getting us back to football.”

Weeks later, Goodell prepares to hold a news conference in Atlanta, where he’ll stand behind a lectern and announce that the owners have agreed on a proposal. It is July 21. Goodell asks Hunt to join him on stage. As the commissioner explains that the lockout’s finish line is in sight, Hunt stands a few feet away, in view of the cameras, just to Goodell’s left.

• • •

Hunt finishes his pregame conversation and drapes the brown jacket over his shoulders. It’s time to go be the face of the Chiefs again, and besides, there’s someone on the field he’d like to say hello to.

He says something about irony; how things sometimes happen in unusual ways. He says it’s interesting that his first leadership role with the Chiefs dealt with the stadium and that his first significant role with the league centered on the same issue.

“I sort of look back on that,” he says. “There’s a little bit of a parallel for me.”

There’s a parallel between Hunt and the Chiefs, too. As Hunt has risen to power, both within the organization and in the NFL, his team has returned to prominence. For the first time in years, the Chiefs are seen as one of the league’s young and improving clubs. Those who know Hunt say that he’s similar to his father, but he is perhaps more focused on results — on the field and off — than Lamar was, at least in his later years.

“His, I’ll call it, ingenuity and creative, competitive spirit — Clark clearly has that,” says Goodell, whose early years in the NFL were spent as an assistant to Lamar Hunt. “But Clark’s business sense and his ability to understand complex situations, particularly things that have very strong financial components — he is a very quick study.”

Hunt walks toward the room’s exit, back down that windowless corridor, and heads into the light. During the players’ warm-ups, he walks over to a Ravens defensive back. It’s Foxworth, who takes Hunt’s hand and hugs him; they smile and talk for a moment before Foxworth jogs away and rejoins his teammates.

“When we were yelling and cussing and fighting with each other,” Foxworth says a short time later, “I didn’t think I’d ever like those guys again. But we got to where we got. It wasn’t easy getting there, but when I saw Clark, kind of the first guy that I’ve seen since we got it done, a sense of relief and pride washed over me.”

No, Hunt might never accomplish all that his father did, but he did help to influence the future of the league his dad helped to form, and he says he’s proud that the schedule wasn’t interrupted.

“There were a lot of days,” he says, “where I’m sure people on both sides thought there’s no way that’s happening.”

He stands under the lights as the Chiefs run from here to there, football surrounding him the way it always has. Maybe someday, if all goes right, he’ll do something his father never did: lift the trophy with Lamar Hunt’s name on it.

“I haven’t set about a course of trying to accomplish more,” he says. “Just with the opportunities that I’ve been given, my approach is: Work hard and do my best and let the chips fall where they may.

“When he passed away, some folks pointed out that, boy, you’ve got some big shoes to fill. Really, the approach I’ve taken is to try to make my own tracks.” This article was written by Kent Babb and appeared in The Kansas City Star.