2026 Sweetheart Ball Unites 40 Championship Trophies

Tavia Hunt brought 40 championship trophies together under one roof Saturday night, raising money for UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Department of Cardiology while likely setting a record nobody had thought to set before.

“There actually wasn’t an existing world record for something like this,” Hunt said. “But we ended up with 40 championship trophies across professional sports.”

The 2026 Sweetheart Ball drew guests through a room stacked with hardware most sports fans don’t see in a lifetime. A Stanley Cup. Five Dallas Cowboys Lombardi Trophies. A Larry O’Brien Trophy. A Commissioner’s Trophy. Trophies connected to Scottie Scheffler, Bryson DeChambeau, and Lee Trevino. All of it tied, one way or another, to North Texas.

Hunt, wife of Kansas City Chiefs Chairman and CEO Clark Hunt, chaired this year’s ball. The chair picks the theme. Her first instinct was to spotlight recent championship wins, which in the Hunt household are not in short supply. Her husband pushed back. Clark Hunt told her he didn’t want the night centered on their own family’s trophies. That conversation cracked open a wider idea: what if you gathered every piece of championship hardware with a genuine North Texas connection, whether through team ownership, a home city, or a single defining moment in the region’s sporting past?

Her first call went to a contact connected to Justify, the Triple Crown-winning racehorse. Then came Jerry Jones. The Cowboys owner said yes, and all five Lombardi Trophies made the trip.

“After that, it just snowballed,” Hunt said.

The Stanley Cup drew the longest lines of the night. It doesn’t travel without supervision. The National Hockey League has never made a duplicate of the original, so every public appearance comes with a dedicated handler who flies in from New York. Dallas Stars fans, many of whom spent years waiting for this franchise to feel relevant again, weren’t rushing past it.

Golf added complications nobody anticipated. The Masters was running that same weekend, and Augusta National Golf Club attached a condition to its cooperation: photographs of certain trophies couldn’t go public until after the tournament wrapped. The hostess agreed. The embargo held.

The full franchise display stretched across the room in a way that let you trace the shape of North Texas sports history without a program. The Mavericks’ Larry O’Brien Trophy stood within a few feet of the Rangers’ Commissioner’s Trophy. FC Dallas brought its Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, named for Tavia’s late father-in-law, a detail that gave that particular trophy a weight the others couldn’t quite match for the Hunt family specifically.

Then there’s the trophy that wasn’t a trophy, not officially.

Somebody made a “Preston Road Trophy” for the occasion. It’s a handmade piece that commemorates the running competition between the Hunt and Jones families, two of North Texas’s most prominent sporting dynasties sharing a highway and a decades-long rivalry that’s never been entirely serious. No league authorized it. No engraver was commissioned by a governing body. It stopped guests cold anyway and drew more photographs than some of the real hardware in the room.

The proceeds from the 2026 Sweetheart Ball went to UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Department of Cardiology, the same institution that’s treated North Texas patients for generations. Hunt didn’t announce a total raised as of press time, but the room wasn’t short on people accustomed to writing large checks.

Forty trophies. One night. Nobody had done it before, at least not in any way that left a record.