Houston Grabs a Professional Sports Franchise: The Founding of the AFL Sets the Stage For the Coming of the Oilers (Part 2 - May 24, 2025)

by Scott Sosebee

The next in a series on the founding of the Houston Oilers

Kenneth Stanley “Bud” Adams, Jr. was the son of an Oklahoma oilman, “Boots” Adams, who worked his way up the corporate ladder to become the chairman of the Phillips Oil Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. His unique nickname came from accounts of his efforts to help victims of the Tulsa flood of 1907. Wearing bright red waders, Adams waded out into flooded streets to help rescue those caught in the raging waters. After attending Kansas University, he would take an entry-level job with Phillips 66 and rise through the ranks to become president of the company when he was thirty-eight, succeeding company founder Frank Phillips. Adams, Jr. came along in 1923. Adams, who lettered in three sports at Culver Military Academy, where he attended high school, would also attend Kansas, where he briefly played football on a team that included future U.S. Senator Bob Dole.

Adams joined the Navy in early 1945 after his studies at Kansas. He was an engineering officer, and when the war ended in September 1945, he was discharged at the rank of lieutenant. Upon his discharge, Adams—a huge football fan—decided to head to New Orleans to watch Oklahoma State and St. Mary’s battle in the Sugar Bowl. He never made it to the game. Fog grounded his plane in Houston, so he decided to look around. Apparently, he liked what he saw, and he elected to make Houston his home. According to Bud Adams, when he made the decision to move to Houston “Boots” had given him a modest stake of $18,000 cash and—depending on when he was asked—somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000 in stocks. Adams may have thought that modest, but perhaps he did because it paled in comparison to the worth of what else his father gave him: he made him the exclusive distributor of Phillips 66 refined products on the booming Texas Gulf Coast.

Bud Adams used that to begin a service station empire in Houston and the surrounding area. His timing was fortuitous because in the postwar years, Houston and Texas were booming, and few places were growing in both wealth and population like the Lone Star state. He used his station profits to then start Ada Resources, and thus he became a driller and producer. He built an empire worth multi-millions, and also became a leading member of the growing Houston community of oilmen who were transforming the city. But Bud Adams was not content to be “just” an oilman. He—like a number of other wealthy men during the period—wanted to own a sports franchise, and in his case, Bud Adams wanted to purchase an NFL team.

Adams had tried to buy the Chicago Cardinals in early 1958, but the Birdwell family rejected his offers—according to Adams, because they did not really want to sell but sought leverage to do what they eventually did, which was to move the team to St. Louis. Another Texas oilman who also sought to buy the Cardinals and move them to Texas was a man with a notorious name that most Texans knew well. Lamar Hunt was the youngest of Howard Lamar Hunt’s family he shared with first wife, Lyda Bunker. Lamar, unlike his brothers Nelson Bunker and William Herbert (he also had four sisters, Margaret, Hassie, Caroline, and Lyda), moved away from the family business and risky ventures. Lamar, an athlete himself, wanted to make his stake in the entertainment of professional sports, and by the mid-1950s, the sport he thought had the most potential was professional football.

Hunt had approached NFL Commissioner Bert Bell in March 1958 about the possibility of buying a new franchise from the league and placing it in Dallas. Bell—certainly aware that the Birdwells had just turned down Bud Adams’ bid—counseled him to buy an existing franchise, and he suggested the Cardinals. They then also turned down Hunt, and he also learned that two other Texans—Adams, of course, but also Clint Murchison, Jr. of Dallas had also tried to buy the Cardinals with the same intention of moving them to Texas. He also caught wind of the fact that several wealthy young men, such as Barron Hilton, heir to the Hilton Hotel chain, Denver’s Bob Howsam, Max Winter who owned a successful restaurant in Minneapolis, and of course Adams, wanted to become a part of professional football but the “old guard” of the NFL were refusing to entertain ideas about expansion or sell them all or parts of current teams. So, Hunt had another crazy idea: why not just start another, competing professional football league?

Hunt understood that if he was to take on the National Football League, he had to not only find potential owners who shared his passion but also ones with deep enough pockets to withstand the almost certain financial losses that would come in the initial years of such a venture. But, he also had correctly gauged that professional football was a product that was about to transform into something that would capture the public’s attention as it never had before. Television was transforming how the game was delivered, and professional football was poised to become a national product, but much of that potential success depended on whether the product could truly grow. The “old men” of the NFL—as Hunt referred to them—did not seem ready to embrace expansion and capture that potential progression. So, if they were not willing, Hunt and his new league could step into the void.

Lamar Hunt would eventually convince many wealthy men to join him, and the first of those he contacted was Bud Adams. Hunt knew that Adams was also frustrated by his inability to join the NFL, so he and Adams arranged to meet. Lamar Hunt flew to Houston in March of 1959, and he and Adams shared dinner at the posh Shamrock Hilton. During that dinner, the two began to make a framework of what would become the American Football League. The league would eventually, in addition to Hunt’s Dallas Texans and Adams’ Houston Oilers, include the Los Angeles Chargers (owned by Barron Hunt—they would move to San Diego after one year), New York Titans (owned by Broadway mogul Harry Wismer, they would become the Jets in 1964), Buffalo Bills (Ralph Wilson, Jr.), Denver Broncos (Bob Howsam), Boston Patriots (Billy Sullivan), and the Oakland Raiders (Wayne Valley). It is almost self-evident about how and why this league would succeed when one looks at the teams and owners; the cities in which they placed teams were underserved by the NFL—the majority were west of the Mississippi where the NFL had only two teams, the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers—and they all had young, wealthy owners (the average age of these new AFL chieftains was just over 40), and at least three of them, Hunt, Adams, and Hilton, had been spurned in their efforts to acquire NFL franchises. They were hungry and looking for success. That success would change the face of professional football.

Next week, the series concludes with the first years of the Oilers, a team that would dominate the early years of the AFL

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.