Kansas City Chiefs in the fourth round of the NFL-AFL draft

"Fan response for our match against Manchester United has been tremendous," Wizards President Robb Heineman said. "The great crowd we are expecting Sunday will reinforce that Kansas City is a premier soccer city and that the New Arrowhead Stadium will make an ideal host venue if the FIFA World Cup comes to the United States in 2018 or 2022."

The list of international superstars coming to Kansas City includes legendary midfielders Ryan Giggs (Wales) and Paul Scholes (England), as well as Edwin Van der Sar (Holland), Nani (Portugal) and Dimitar Berbatov (Bulgaria). Giggs is the only player in English football history to win 11 Premier League championship medals. This record is the equivalent of an American football player winning 11 Super Bowl rings or a baseball player capturing 11 World Series titles.

The Manchester United match provides another opportunity for Kansas Citians to show their passion for the sport as part of the highly successful Summer of Soccer. Over 30,000 soccer fans gathered for World Cup watch parties in the Kansas City Power & Light District. The crowd for the USA-Ghana Round of 16 match was shown live on ABC's game broadcast and seen by over 15 million people in the U.S.

Fans can show their support for the bid to bring the World Cup to Kansas City by texting "KansasCity" to 22442 or signing the petition online at www.goUSAbid.com/KC. Kansas City is one of 18 cities still in the running to host matches should the USA bid to host the 2018 or 2022 FIFA World Cup be successful. FIFA will select the host nation for both 2018 and 2022 on December 2, 2010.

"If he wasn't the best athlete we had at TCU, he was one of the best," said Frank Windegger, who was the Horned Frogs' baseball coach when McCarty attended TCU and later became the school's athletic director. "He was a big, fun-loving guy, and everyone thought the world of him."

Windegger recalled McCarty joining the TCU baseball team after the basketball team's final game and the next day winning his first start, a three-hit shutout against Sam Houston State.

Longtime Rockets executive Carroll Dawson was unable to recruit McCarty to attend Baylor in the 1960s but became a lifelong friend.

"He was such a physical specimen — an Adonis of an athlete," Dawson said. "We have a lot of memories that we would talk about all the time. He loved to rehash the old stories."

After a brief pro football career, seeing action in three games Derrick Johnson with the AFL's Chiefs in the 1969 season in which they won Super Bowl IV, McCarty became a recreation director in Pasadena and toured with a slow-pitch softball team before suffering a stroke in 1981 and two "piggyback" heart transplant operations in 1986 and 1997 in which a donor heart was implanted to assist his failing heart.

"I've had two lives, if you want to break it down that way," McCarty recently told the Glenn Dorsey Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "An athletic life and a medically experimental life."

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer nine months ago and underwent chemotherapy before beginning hospice care earlier this month. McCarty's son, Cody, who played football for TCU from 2000 through 2004, said his father handled his medical setbacks with courage and grace.

"His attitude was always that nothing was going to stop him," he said. "He always had an upbeat attitude and was positive about everything."

Adrian Jones, a six-year veteran who played for the New York Jets jerseys and new Kansas City Chiefs jerseys, signed a one-year contract with the Steelers. Colon, who had surgery to repair a torn Achilles tendon last month, will not play this season.

Jones stands 6-4 and weighs 330 pounds. The Jets drafted him in the fourth round in 2004 and he started 44 games for them before they waived him late in the 2007 season. He started 10 games at guard for the Chiefs in 2008 and spent time last year on Houston's practice squad before the Texans released him.