Maintaining professional discipline in journalism is usually black and white. We might like or admire somebody personally, but business is business and we all endeavor to keep personal feelings out of it.
A reasonable dose of professional detachment is a must-have tool in every reporter's belt.
Still, every now and then, somebody seriously challenges your ability to meet those strict terms of objectivity. I know Lamar Hunt always did for me.
I had the pleasure of working with the Hunt Sports Group patriarch going back to my earliest days at The Dallas Morning News as I wrote a weekly soccer column starting in 1991.
Dallas was bidding to become a World Cup city and Hunt was involved. I developed a warm, admiring relationship with the man over the next 15 years through various exchanges in soccer, college sports or some of his other sports dealings around Dallas.
Everyone's first life lesson courtesy of Hunt is always about humility. His was extraordinary, and I took careful notice. Coming out of college, I always wanted to stand tall alongside the captains of sports industry, determined to never be ruffled or intimidated. Sometimes it was easier than others for a cubbie reporter.
With Hunt, it was a piece of cake. Conversations were quite relaxed, mostly because he was so congenial and immediately disarming. Interviews weren't as much question-and-answer as coffee shop conversation.
Each and every time I saw Hunt through the following years he always asked "How are you doing?" And it was never a perfunctory salutation. He meant it.
I once interviewed SMU soccer coach Schellas Hyndman about Hunt. Hyndman told me something I'll always remember. He said he could be in a room with high-level soccer officials, NFL honchos and maybe even some important politicians. Then Hunt would wander over to say hello.
"And doggone it, he'd somehow make you feel like the most important person in the room," Hyndman said.
"Lamar Hunt is a model for how every human being should conduct his life," Hyndman told me more than once. And he meant it.
Through the years, it was always nice to know that Hunt was paying attention to everything soccer related. And not just the big picture, but the details, too.
Factual errors happen now and again in my business. I can honestly say that I had two primary motivations for avoiding mistakes regarding Major League Soccer. First, obviously, I simply wanted to get things right.
But I sure didn't want to get one of Hunt's hand-written notes, with the clipping attached and a big red circle around the error. The notes were always very polite. He would send greetings, then a simple acknowledgement of my error and perhaps a little bit of explanation of the situation to help clarify matters.
If he had wanted me to be in trouble, he would have picked up the phone and called my editor - or the newspaper's publisher. He certainly had the access. But that wasn't the point. He just wanted me to be better informed.
So how does all this tie into being a professional journalist? Well, organizations, like people, aren't perfect. And sometimes my job means taking a critical stance. So my challenge is always to remain objective, to keep that imperative professional distance. But, honestly, how can any of us, when it comes to soccer, challenge a man who has given so generously? How to poke a verbal stick at a man who has done more for soccer in this land than anybody else, by a long way?
That's no disrespect to Alan Rothenberg or Phil Anschutz or any other domestic soccer pioneers. It's just that none of them had such influence over such a prolonged period.
Walking into Hunt's downtown Dallas office is like discovering a private museum, wall-to-wall with story-telling pieces from NASL, MLS and of course the NFL and AFL.
And talk about a man so seemingly unaware of his own place in history. I went last summer to see the movie "Once in a Lifetime," about the New York Cosmos and the NASL. As we walked in, who do we see sitting in the theater? Hunt's family had asked what he wanted to do for his birthday, and that was it.
I'm thinking to myself: "Lamar Hunt helped create this league. How in the world hasn't he seen this movie already? Heck, he should have been consulted for the documentary, then had it screened privately. He shouldn't be here on some random Wednesday night, watching it with the likes of me."
Afterward, his wife and son Dan stopped to say hello to my girlfriend and I. Lamar was alight with memories. Then he said something that was quintessential Lamar Hunt.
"That was just great! I've never seen a movie where I knew all the stars!" he said.
And, of course, he asked how we were doing.
One of my final, non-interview conversations with Hunt took place just before last summer's World Cup. I ran into him outside Pizza Hut Park days before my own departure for Germany. Hunt had been to all but one World Cup since watching the 1966 final on TV. (Safety concerns, mostly over his young sons, dissuaded him from attending World Cup '78. He later said he deeply regretted not going.)
Hunt visited every venue in 2002. But by 2006, slowed by various ailments, he was simply afraid that he couldn't manage all the walking involved with a World Cup excursion.
Of course, Hunt had the cash and connections to get into a World Cup match pretty much any way he wanted, short of a helicopter drop onto the midfield circle. But he loved the pageantry and fan passion and wanted do the World Cup more as a spectator than a haughty dignitary. I respected that a lot.
If there was any pretense about Lamar Hunt, if there was even a morsel of ego, he did a spectacular job of hiding it. He drove reasonable cars and wore economical shoes. His humility achieved absurd, nearly comical levels when it came to his legacy in soccer.
"I guess that Hunts have been important," he once told me when asked about his substantial influence in Major League Soccer, "but nothing like Phil Anschutz."
How can anybody hear something like that and still try to maintain the requisite professional objectivity?
Steve Davis is a freelance writer who has covered Major League Soccer since its inception. Steve can be reached at BigTexSoccer@yahoo.com. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author's, and not necessarily those of Major League Soccer or MLSnet.com.
