Every so often, the latest college sports scandal arrives and makes us long for the days when sports were played with purity. You know, for the love of the game.
Like all the way back on the eve of the 1983 Sugar Bowl, when Heisman Trophy-winning running back Herschel Walker gathered with execs from the upstart United States Football League in a New Orleans hotel room.
Nah, wait, who are we kidding. It was always about the money.
In Jeff Pearlman’s meticulously researched “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL,” Pearlman tells the story of the quirky USFL, which spanned three seasons from 1983 to 1985, launched the careers of several future NFL stars, including Walker, then met its demise at the hands of the man who would become America’s forty-fifth president.
As part of the fledgling league’s strategy to gain relevance, the USFL, against considerable odds, enticed Walker to defect a year early from the University of Georgia. The league lavished him with an embarrassment of riches that included, in addition to a pile of cash, partial ownership of an Oklahoma oil well.
Despite the overwhelming guilt placed on Walker by legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley and a last-ditch effort by the Dallas Cowboys to circumvent the NFL Draft and sign Walker to a contract, Walker pledged his allegiance to the USFL and was assigned to the New Jersey Generals. The USFL coveted the symbolism of having Walker in the New York-New Jersey market, as it drew parallels to Joe Namath’s decision to spurn the NFL and sign with the AFL’s New York Jets in 1965.
Walker’s commitment started a trend as the USFL binged on young stars. Jim Kelly snubbed the Buffalo Bills to sign with the Houston Gamblers. Steve Young rebuffed the Cincinnati Bengals to ink a deal with the Los Angeles Express. Another Heisman winner, Nebraska running back Mike Rozier, joined the Pittsburgh Maulers. Defensive end Reggie White, long before he was known as “The Minister of Defense,” terrorized quarterbacks as a member of the Memphis Showboats.
Well before the USFL came along, in the 1960s and ‘70s, several sports leagues challenged their more established brethren. The AFL may have been the most successful of them all, with all 10 its franchises getting absorbed by the NFL in 1970 (and all 10 still in existence in one location or another today).
In basketball, the ABA existed from 1967 to 1976. It featured the likes of Dr. J, George Gervin and Rick Barry. It gave America a red-white-and-blue ball, the slam-dunk contest and the three-point line. When all was said and done, the NBA welcomed four of the ABA’s teams: the New York Nets, Indiana Pacers, San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets.
In hockey, the WHA existed from 1971 to 1979. It featured the likes of Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull. Teams came and went like roadside fireworks stands. When all was said and done, the NHL absorbed four of the WHA’s teams: the New England Whalers, Quebec Nordiques, Winnipeg Jets and Edmonton Oilers.
The USFL, meanwhile, gave us fistfights on commercial flights, hookers with business cards and daytime fireworks at an empty L.A. Coliseum. (As well as the two-point conversion and instant replay, to be fair.) When it was all said and done, the NFL took exactly zero of the USFL’s teams. Even if one Donald J. Trump had passionately argued otherwise.
In 1984, after the completion of two modestly successful spring seasons, USFL owners fiercely deliberated then reluctantly agreed to move to a fall schedule starting in 1986. The strategy was devised and championed by none other than Trump.
Although he was not one of the league’s original owners, Trump had entered the picture by purchasing the New Jersey franchise after the 1983 season. He did so with designs on forcing a merger between the USFL and the NFL, thereby granting him entry to a club that otherwise wanted nothing to do with him. He planned to use an antitrust lawsuit as the catalyst.
The bombast, bluster, narcissism, deception and flat-out steamrolling of opponents that would come to characterize his presidency 30-plus years later were on full display as Trump drowned out the protests of the USFL’s founding fathers, as well as consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which had recommended sticking with a spring season.
“Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie, he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall,” Pearlman writes. “Thirty-three years after being accused of cozying up to Pete Rozelle, he was accused of cozying up to Vladimir Putin.”
And speaking of it being about the money, the USFL technically won its antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. And was subsequently awarded by the jury the princely sum of $1. That’s right: one freakin’ dollar. The league, already squeezed for cash after abandoning its football-on-a-budget roots, and now crippled by Trump’s reign, was dead.
Pearlman chronicles it all – from the raunchiness to the barbarity to Trump’s destruction of the league – with pure glee, making the reader wish they could go back in time and be a San Antonio Gunslingers season ticket holder in the mid-80s.
“Think of your favorite Looney Tunes episode,” writes Pearlman. “inject it with a line of coaine, then stir in some really hideous uniforms, a senile seven-fingered coach, a wackadoo owner, a decrepit stadium, bouncing checks, speeding cars, murderous defensive linemen, and a football. Toss in bad judgment, ego, and clinical insanity, and you have the Gunslingers.” Uh, sign me up?
While we can sit around and breathlessly bicker over whether Trump made America great again, there is no debate that Pearlman makes sports fun again every time he picks up the pen. “Football for a Buck” is a boisterous and enjoyable tome about a league that deserves to be remembered, even if only for the sheer absurdity of it all.
