The NFL told him no, twice.

But the young, bespectacled man from Texas would not go away.

And in 1959, at age 26, Lamar Hunt formed the American Football League.

Hunt was a persistent man, as he showed the previous two years. He kept asking the established National Football League to bring a franchise to his hometown of Dallas. And the owners of the 12 teams kept telling him they wouldn't expand.

Hunt was getting a door slammed in his face. Instead of pouting, the soft-spoken visionary opened another door and made history.

Hunt used his personal fortune of $50 million and love for football to start his own team and league. His Dallas Texans and the AFL kicked off in September 1960.

Hunt (1932-2006) could have followed an easier path, one paved by his oil tycoon father, H.L. Hunt. But Lamar had other plans.

"He might have had a degree in geology for his father's oil business," Jack Steadman, a longtime friend and general manager of Hunt's team, told IBD, "but his passion was sports."

Hunt was born in El Dorado, Ark., and was raised in Tyler, Texas. He was nicknamed "Games" as a kid because he loved to invent and organize family competitions.

His enthusiasm for sports would lead to his involvement in six professional leagues and seven franchises. The arena was his true lifeblood.

Hunt attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was a third-string end for the varsity football team. He used to joke about his playing time.

"In my last year I got into five games for an average of four minutes each. . . . That's 20 out of 600 minutes," he said in his sister Margaret's book "H.L. and Lyda: Growing Up in the H.L. Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt Family."

It was also while attending SMU that Hunt started a batting cage business, Zuma Bats. It was a brief preview of what was to come.

Lamar left the oil business to his family because he felt like he was born to be a sports entrepreneur.

"I always thought if I had any skills in business, it was understanding how to sell tickets," Hunt said in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1992.

After the NFL rejected Hunt's expansion idea, he figured that if baseball had two leagues, so could football. He went around the country rounding up millionaires to help form his AFL.

The league had eight original owners who dubbed themselves the Foolish Club. That was because in the early AFL years they lost millions as the NFL tried to run them out of business.

Hunt's Texans won big on the field, but not at the box office. Not even an AFL title in 1962 filled seats. So he moved the team to Kansas City and renamed it the Chiefs before the 1963 season.

"Of all Lamar's loves in sports, his first were the Texans-Chiefs and the AFL," Steadman said.

The NFL had to compete for players with the AFL, a league that was gaining popularity, thanks to Hunt.

In an attempt to foil the new league, the NFL offered Hunt half ownership in the league's 13th franchise, the Dallas Cowboys, which had started play in 1960.

He refused because he didn't want to desert fellow AFL owners. Hunt was a loyal man.

"Hunt took on the NFL and didn't back down," Len Dawson, a quarterback on the original Chiefs, told the Los Angeles Times. Dawson went on to lead Kansas City to the last AFL title in 1969 and past Minnesota in that season's Super Bowl.

By then, the NFL was through ignoring the AFL. Three years before, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle reached an agreement with Hunt.

There would be a championship game between the two leagues, called the Super Bowl. Hunt coined the term while he and his wife, Norma Lynn, watched their daughter play with the popular 1960s toy called the Super Ball.

The second part of the agreement that spring of 1966 was that the 10-team AFL would be absorbed by the NFL in 1970. "Originally the NFL wanted just three AFL teams, but Lamar told them it was all or nothing," Steadman said. "At that point the AFL was a better league."

Hunt's persistence paid off. In 1970, the two leagues turned into one, big NFL.

But he was not done trailblazing.

Hunt is remembered for more than sparking the modern-day NFL. When he died on Dec. 13 after fighting prostate cancer, ESPN's "SportsCenter" lauded him as one of the past half-century's giants of sports.

In 1967 he co-founded World Championship Tennis, which opened the way for pro players to join amateurs in big events.

The league, which lasted until 1989, showcased some of tennis's greatest players, including Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and Boris Becker. The sport recognized Hunt's contribution by inducting him into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1993.

He also kick-started two professional soccer leagues.

Lamar's son and current chairman of the Kansas City Chiefs, Clark Hunt, calls his father pivotal to American soccer. He says the North American Soccer League, which opened in 1967, flopped because of poor financial backing. Still, his father "brought soccer into the American psyche," Clark Hunt told IBD.

When the NASL gave out in 1984, Hunt's Dallas Tornado, which won the championship in 1971, had cost him an estimated $20 million.

Still, he never stopped trying.

Lamar didn't give up on the world's top sport, helping Major League Soccer start in 1996 and initially owning the Columbus, Ohio and Kansas City franchises.

Clark Hunt says his father was involved with the NFL's Chiefs until the day he was hospitalized in Dallas last fall. That passion led to a field full of honors.

In 1972, Hunt was the first AFL figure to be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was also inducted into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame in 1982. When he landed in the tennis shrine 11 years later, he was the first person in three major sports halls of fame.

Then there was Hunt's enshrinement in the Texas and Kansas City business halls of fame.

To top it all off, Hunt's legacy will be celebrated every January. His name is on the American Football Conference trophy.

BY BRAD KELLY