The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [94]
The USFL attempted to get the jury to believe New Jersey Generals owner Trump, who testified in July of 1986 that NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had offered him an expansion franchise in the established league if he dropped the lawsuit. Trump told the jury that Rozelle also promised him a franchise if Trump would influence the USFL to keep its spring schedule and not bring suit. Rozelle denied ever offering Trump a franchise, under any terms. Rozelle said that Trump had said he had the responsibility of bringing on the lawsuit, “but I don’t want to do these things. I want an expansion team in New York in the National Football League.” Rozelle testified that he explained to Trump that day why an expansion team in New York wouldn’t work with network television deals. But Trump had a real estate mentality (location, location, location), and must have believed that three NFL teams in the New York market could work.
The jury basically had to believe either Trump or Rozelle. Trump’s story, that the NFL tried to “divide and conquer” by wooing Trump and dangling an offer to get into the NFL, seemed to have some merit. But Rozelle’s side of the story, that Trump offered to get out of the USFL and sell the Generals to some stiff in exchange for membership in Rozelle’s group, seemed more likely to be true. In MacCambridge′s book, he credits Rozelle’s successor Paul Tagliabue with steering the NFL away from settling out of court. In Tagliabue’s mind, you couldn’t encourage fly-by-night leagues to be created, in the hope of walking away with a lot of money.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Tagliabue did an awful lot right in his seventeen years as Commissioner of the NFL. It makes sense that he would have offered up sound judgment to the league as a lawyer for the league in the years prior.
EVIDENCE AGAISNT A CONSPIRACY
In John Fortunato’s book, The Legacy of Pete Rozelle, the author gives Rozelle’s account of the antitrust suit brought against him.
The failures [of the USFL] included abandoning the initial strategy of building loyalty through playing in the spring and quickly escalated the cost of doing business by signing prominent players. The USFL’s failures culminated in a hasty move to a fall schedule with the hopes of merging some of its teams into the NFL. . . . The jury thus concluded that the networks freely chose not to purchase the USFL, and that the NFL was trying to achieve through the courts what it could not achieve in the marketplace.
EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT A CONSPIRACY
In his 1987 book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald wrote that the USFL had problems playing its games in the spring, and that they didn’t present a first-class product. When Trump bought the New Jersey Generals, he was intent on spending money to sign top players and coaches, in order to create a legitimate competitor for NFL fans and TV dollars. Trump’s aggressiveness in signing NFL-caliber players like Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker nudged his fellow USFL owners to do the same. Steve Young, a future Hall of Fame quarterback, signed up right out of college with the Los Angeles Express. Trump signed Heisman star Doug Flutie. In all, USFL teams signed close to half of the top college players they went after. Trump absolutely believed that the NFL did everything they could—legally and illegally—to monopolize professional football.
Howard Cosell, despite being employed by ABC (then the network that gave a spring television contract to the USFL), testified for the USFL, believing that the NFL was engaged in a monopoly. Cosell wrote in What’s Wrong with Sports (1991), “You don’t have to be a genius to recognize that Pete Rozelle and the entire NFL were very upset