Football for a Buck

Starred review from July 30, 2018
Pearlman (Gunslinger) wonderfully recounts the story of the spring professional football league that enthralled fans, frustrated the NFL, and withered to the dismay of the players who fought for the game they loved. The United States Football League played its first season in 1983 as a cadre of businessmen tried to cash in on the financial boom of televised football. Starring a smorgasbord of luminaries such as Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, and Steve Young, as well as NFL has-beens and third-tier college stars, the USFL was far more than the joke that the NFL wanted to believe it was. In addition to providing a rough history of the short-lived league, Pearlman illustrates how hubris led to the league’s abrupt demise, as team owners—including a young Donald Trump, who owned the New Jersey Generals—began to believe the spring league could move to the fall and challenge the NFL’s supremacy, resulting in an antimonopoly case that virtually bankrupted the league in 1985 and led to owners abandoning their teams while players jumped to the NFL or faded into obscurity. Pearlman’s hundreds of interviews with former players and coaches shine a light on this almost forgotten league. This is an excellent book for football junkies, but it’s just as enthralling for a general audience.

August 1, 2018

The U.S. Football League (USFL) began in 1983 as a springtime league with modest ambitions of filling a niche for football fans unhappy that the season ended with the Super Bowl. That modesty didn't last long once Donald Trump and other ego-driven owners got involved and pushed to move the league to the fall to compete directly with the NFL. The result was that the USFL won a lawsuit against the NFL but was awarded just $1 in damages and went out of business after three seasons. During its brief existence in the 1980s, the USFL was awash with drugs and alcohol. Pearlman (The Bad Guys Won!) covers it all with verve and relish in an approach that differs from that of Paul Reeths in The United States Football League: 1982-1986, which offers a much more all-encompassing view of the league. VERDICT Pearlman is known for presenting an unvarnished look at sports heroes with lively prose. This should be popular with a wide audience.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2018
Scathing, action-packed account of the rise and fall of spring football in the 1980s, with a familiar villain to the piece.In 1961, writes Pearlman (Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre, 2016, etc.), a New Orleans-based art dealer and entrepreneur named David Dixon wondered why it was that the National Football League was so resistant to expanding outside of its existing franchises. His solution: to build a league for play in the "vast sports wasteland" of spring in those years before March Madness. Five years later, the United States Football League was born, though it would take another decade and a half before anything substantial came of it. The newborn league had rules meant to level the field among rich and poor teams, including caps on salaries and limits on how they were distributed among star players and workhorses. Said one team owner at the time, "we had a gentleman's agreement," adding, "of course, that's only OK as long as you have gentlemen agreeing." Enter Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey franchise, who immediately began breaking those agreements and demanding that other owners subsidize him even as he revealed the depths of his ignorance about the game. Trump also began to press for the USFL to play not in spring but in fall, going up against the NFL and prompting speculation that he was really after an NFL franchise to call his own. In the end, the USFL collapsed--though, as Pearlman notes, it lives on in unexpected ways, including Trump's arrival in the White House. "Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie," writes the author, "he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall." If nothing else, Pearlman's fluently told story provides context for why the sitting president holds the NFL in such contempt--and why the sentiment should be richly returned.Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and ego.

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Starred review from August 1, 2018
The United States Football League was an early-1980s attempt to establish professional football in the spring, the rationale being that there was a growing national appetite for the sport, and going head-to-head with the NFL was a fool's errand. More on fools later. The first couple of years were rocky, but the league had two young players who would eventually end up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?Steve Young and Jim Kelly?as well as many others who would eventually be stars in the NFL after the USFL folded. Pearlman (Boys Will Be Boys, 2008) delivers wonderful anecdotes about the high jinks in the freewheeling league's early days: a head coach smoking pot in his room, naked; a semi-official pipeline of hookers available for one team in the Pacific Northwest. There were underfunded owners who couldn't pay their charter airline bills and left players stranded, even a bus driver who stopped midroute and refused to go an inch farther until he was paid. For all of that and spotty attendance, the league had a chance. Now we get to the fool part. One owner, through force of personality and self-interest, hijacked the league and decided if the games were played in the fall, perhaps he could leverage his team into the NFL. The hell with the rest of the league. That fool's name? Donald Trump. Fascinating and hilarious reading on a half-dozen levels. Just great for football fans who like to laugh.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)