And the New Jersey Generals & USFL:
Donald Trump’s Less-Than-Artful Failure in Pro Football
nytimes.com
Last year, I wrote several columns about Donald J. Trump’s record as a businessman. Far from mastering “The Art of the Deal” — the title of his 1987 best seller — Trump made real estate blunders that turned billions in potential profits into mere millions. His foray into Atlantic City brought him perilously close to personal bankruptcy. As for all his claims about owning a sprawling business empire, what he actually runs these days is a licensing company that slaps the Trump name on everything from buildings to steaks to an education company that was sued by New York State in 2013 for “persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct.” My conclusion — and I say this as a grizzled veteran of business journalism — was that Trump’s business acumen (not to mention his net worth) was wildly overstated, not least by Trump himself. His core business skill is self-promotion.
It occurred to me, though, that there was one episode of his business life I had overlooked. In 1984 and 1985, Trump owned the New Jersey Generals, who competed in the short-lived United States Football League. It is worth recalling for what it can tell us about the way Trump makes decisions, hires key people, works (or doesn’t work) for the greater good and so on. Not to blow the punch line, but it is not much of an exaggeration to say that once Trump got his hands around this promising idea, he basically strangled it.The key concept behind the U.S.F.L. was that it would play football in the spring. Football fans, the league’s creators believed, wanted to watch their sport year-round, but, alas, they could not: The N.F.L. season ended with the Super Bowl and did not restart until preseason games in August.
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“It was all self-aggrandizement,” said Mike Tollin, who, as the head of a firm that served as the in-house production company for the league, spent a great deal of time in Trump’s company — but who was also close to owners who soured on Trump.
All through that second season, Trump continued to publicly push his fellow owners to move the U.S.F.L. to the fall and go toe-to-toe with the mighty N.F.L. It made no sense. Until the U.S.F.L. achieved parity on the field — and that was a long way off — it had no hope of attracting large numbers of fans and robust TV ratings in the fall. The networks airing its games expected it to play a spring schedule. Its network contracts called for the U.S.F.L. to keep a certain number of teams in major media markets. But how realistic was it to expect the Chicago Blitz to compete financially with the Chicago Bears? “To go head-to-head with them was insane,” the actor (and Tampa Bay Bandits partner) Burt Reynolds told Tollin, who made an ESPN documentary about the U.S.F.L. in 2009.
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How was Trump planning to dig the U.S.F.L. out of a hole he had largely created? Litigation, of course! The U.S.F.L. would sue the N.F.L. for being an illegal monopolist. Among other things, the lawsuit charged that the N.F.L., by having TV contracts with the three major networks (this was pre-Fox), was preventing the U.S.F.L. from signing a television deal for a fall season. It asked for $1.32 billion in damages, which in an antitrust case are trebled if the plaintiffs win. That would be more than enough not only to sustain the league, but also to enrich its beleaguered owners.
Trump then made his next mistake, bringing on a flamboyant lawyer named Harvey D. Myerson — Heavy Hitter Harvey, the news media called him, “a blustery, cigar-smoking, fancy-footwork kind of lawyer,” as Taube put it to me. Trump hired Myerson with great fanfare, saying “he’s aggressive, he’s tough-skinned and he knows how to win.”
(Myerson, who died in February, spent time in federal prison for overbilling clients, after his firm, Myerson and Kuhn, imploded spectacularly in 1989. The “Kuhn” in the firm’s name, by the way, was Bowie Kuhn, the former baseball commissioner, who fled to Florida to evade $3 million that creditors said he personally owed. But I digress.)
Alas, Heavy Hitter Harvey knew next to nothing about antitrust, which requires deep, specialized knowledge. His damages theory was, in Taube’s words, “pie in the sky.” And the N.F.L.’s lawyers found plenty of proof that the U.S.F.L.’s problems were largely of its own making. According to a memoir written by Robert B. Fiske Jr., who was the lead lawyer for the N.F.L., the evidence included a memo Taube had written to his fellow owners, quoting Pogo’s famous line, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
If you are a sports fan of a certain age, you surely remember how that trial ended. The jury found that the N.F.L.’s monopolistic practices had indeed injured the U.S.F.L. Then came the coup de grâce: It awarded damages of one dollar. Trebled, that came to $3. With interest, it was $3.76.
The U.S.F.L. appealed, claiming that the trial judge should have excluded some of the most damning evidence against it. The appeals court rejected that argument, writing, “Courts do not exclude evidence of a victim’s suicide in a murder trial.” Needless to say, the U.S.F.L. never played another down.
When Tollin interviewed Trump for his documentary, he laid out the criticism he had heard from the many people he had spoken to. Trump, of course, was having none of it. He denigrated his critics, by name, and accepted zero responsibility for the league’s demise.
“I got this league to go as far as it could go,” Trump said. “Without me, this league would have folded a lot sooner.”
Some things never change. |
