The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [95]
Trump wrote, “It was obvious to me that the NFL was putting enormous pressure on the networks not to do business with us [the USFL] in the fall—particularly on ABC, with whom we already had a contract for the spring.”
In February of 1986, the USFL reduced its number of teams from fourteen to eight, in an effort to consolidate costs. The League had one remaining hope, which was to convince the six jurors that the NFL had operated illegally. Trump was the only USFL owner to testify. Howard Cosell and Raiders owner and league agitator Al Davis also testified for the USFL. The NFL was able to score points with the jurors because Trump was painted (as he put it in his book) as “a vicious, greedy, Machiavellian billionaire, intent only on serving my selfish ends at everyone else’s expense.”
On July 29, 1986, the NFL was ruled to have violated antitrust laws by conspiring to monopolize pro football, and that they did illegally damage the USFL. They were found guilty on one of the nine counts, anyway. But even The Donald doesn’t get everything he wants. The USFL was seeking $440 million in damages (which could have been trebled). What they were awarded was $1, trebled to $3. They won, but they lost. The rebel league had hoped to receive enough money to keep their league alive, and force the NFL owners to treat them as honest competitors. On August 1, the USFL owners voted to suspend the 1986 season.
How did the NFL escape without paying for their conspiracy? In Trump’s 1987 book, he wrote that a juror named Miriam Sanchez had “favored giving us damages of $300 million, but said that she’d misunderstood the mechanism for doing so. ‘I didn’t understand the instructions, so I had to put my faith in the judge, hoping he would give the USFL more money.’”
Cosell wrote in 1991 that Sanchez said there was a hung jury. “Ms. Sanchez said openly—and this is key—that the jury chose to set damages at $1 because they were unsure about how high the damages should be, and they wanted Judge Peter K. Leisure to set the damages for them. Judge Leisure had the right to do this, but to the delight of the NFL, he refused.”
In Fortunato’s book on Rozelle, he writes, “One juror, Miriam Sanchez, described the award verdict as a compromise. She said, “One dollar is all we could do, or we’d have [had] a hung jury.”
So, it appears that three of the six jurors adjudicating the case favored giving the USFL money, which would have kept the league in business. At the very least, the history of the NFL would have been different, if Sanchez could have swayed one of the other three opposing jurors. As it turned out, it seemed a thankless task portraying the exceedingly wealthy Trump as the poor man’s underdog. So the jury ruled that there was a conspiracy, with the NFL engaging in a monopoly, but that they deserved only a slap on the wrist.
Two decades have passed, and it appears that both sides had their points. Trump was correct about the move from the spring to the fall. The Arena Football League has existed for more than twenty years, operating in the NFL′s off-season, and it has never gotten a fraction of the television ratings or advertising money that the NFL gets. It has sent a handful of players to the NFL—most notably Kurt Warner, who won a pair of MVPs and a Super Bowl with the Rams—but was mainly seen as a minor football league (and financial problems forced it to suspend operations). Maybe fans are burnt out with football by February. Everything has a season, and football has the fall. Baseball is not as popular as the NFL these days, but Major League Baseball in the spring and summer sure beats football—especially football that isn’t top-notch.
Trump was also