Because of Lamar Hunt's interest in international soccer and making the United States a player at the sport's highest level, the U.S. men's national team spent a significant amount of time in Dallas in the 1970s.
As a sports reporter in Dallas, I was assigned to cover not only Hunt's Dallas Tornado from the now-extinct North American Soccer League but also the national team. So I got to know Dettmar Cramer, the German coach whom the U.S. Soccer Federation, with Hunt's backing, hired to coach the national team in August of 1974.
Rapidly recognizing the dysfunction within the USSF, he was gone by January of 1975, having returned to coach Bayern Munich.