Donald Trump and the Faustian Bargain That Killed a Football League

Happy Presidents' Day, I guess

The Fast Food Photo

Somewhere between two and three million words have been written about the fast food photo. It was taken by Joyce N. Boghosian as an official White House Photograph in January 2019, moments before Trump hosted the Clemson University football team at the White House as part of a longstanding tradition: You win a national title, you go to Washington D.C. for a photo-op and banquet with the President of the United States.

The banquet was atypical, to say the least. The menu was Wendy’s, MacDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and I think maybe Pizza Hut. There were quarter pounders, chicken nuggets, and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches on silver platters. There were also, as Trump put it with a strange melodicism that has to be heard to be believed, “many, many French fries.” He posed for the photo standing over all this sodium infused splendor with his signature boy-ain’t-I-a-stinker grin and that thing he does with his hands. I don’t know what you call it. Frozen jazz hands?

It’s hard to believe it’s real and not something generated in error by the earliest iteration of ChatGPT, ot the product of a Deepseek prototype piloted by David Lynch. If you told me it was a still from Inland Empire or Twin Peaks, I would believe you without question. It ranks up there with everything else in his oeuvre, even and especially the scary demonic homeless man behind the diner in Mulholland Drive.

I concede that it is beyond cliche to describe Trump-related imagery as demonic, but that’s the best adjective for the man in this particular photo. Not demonic in the animalistic sense, but in a Faustian sense. The way he spreads his hands suggests he’s offering the food to you, all the burger a man could ever want.

“All of this can be yours,” he says. “I can make all the bad things on TV go away. You’ll never have to refer to one person with a plural pronoun. I can force your children to speak to you again. All I need is your heart and your soul.”

He made such an offer once before, a long time ago in a far away land called the 1980s, in service of becoming an NFL owner.

You see, by the Reagan-era, being an NFL owner was the same as owning a great big machine connected to a printer. It comes with many buttons and no instruction manual. It’s a little scary. You don’t know what to do with it, so you hire the best engineers and technicians you can find to help you figure out how to use it. They give you all kinds of advice you hardly understand, but luckily for you, no matter what possible combination of buttons you press or how much of a stupid dumbass you look doing it, the printer does the same thing every Sunday: spit out more money than the GDP of Pedafilo, a small caribbean island nation that I may or may not have just made up.

It should come as no surprise that a man like Donald Trump tried to buy such a machine. If you are surprised by this, I have a real shocker for you: He tried to buy one multiple times. And when no one would sell him their football-team-slash-money-printer to him, he came up with a harebrained scheme to finesse his way into the uppermost echelon of sports capitalists.

The United States Football League

The first step was buying the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League in September 1983, paying $10 million for a franchise valued at $8.5 million. Trump claims to have overpaid because he had to win a bidding war; there was no bidding war.

The USFL had just finished its first season when Trump joined up. There had been competitors to the NFL before. The most successful one, the AFL, had merged with the NFL almost fifteen years prior to the establishment of the USFL.

The novelty of the USFL laid in the strategy of the original founders. This doctrine was called “The Dixon Plan,” named for its designer, David Dixon, a Louisana-based sports executive who spearheaded the creation of the New Orleans Saints, New Orleans Superdome, and the World Championship Tennis. Key to his plan was adhering to a strict budget, having team owners wealthy enough to afford a $1.3 million line of credit for emergencies, and playing games from March to June so as to not interfere with the NFL. This pro-league was an additive experience, not a replacement or direct competitor.

The inaugural 1983 season is generally considered a success. TV ratings exceeded expectations, the style of play was interesting, and fans were passionate. Many players were NFL caliber, and the championship game a close 2-point affair won by the Michigan Panthers, a team owned by A. Alfred Taubman, a shopping mall connoisseur, auctioneer, namesake of the University of Michigan’s architecture school, and future convicted felon for price fixing.

Taubman’s future legal issues was emblematic of the league’s central problem. Its team owners were not high character people. They did not adhere to Dixon’s strategies, deliberately overspending to woo NFL stars and, consequently, wildly exceeding the league’s previously agreed upon salary cap.

The pre-Trump New Jersey Generals, for example, signed Herschel Walker, a Heisman-winning tailback and future failed Republican Senate candidate, to the tune of $4.2 million dollars. This overspending created a downward spiral where nearly every team was trying to outspend the other in order to ensure their ability to compete with each other on the field, and to attract fans with marquee names.

Dixon observed this and admonished the owners, insisting that they reduce their spending. Virtually everyone ignored him and, in need of cash infusions (and fast), added more teams to the league in order to pocket expansion fees from new owners. Expansion fees was standard practice, as was the devaluation the league’s television contract. There was one big pot of money being divided equally between them—more mouths, smaller portions.

Knowing which way the wind was blowing, Dixon sold his stake in the Houston Gamblers and walked away from the USFL completely. It’s unclear to me how the sale went, but I’m sure it did not involve much paperwork. The staff running the USFL did not properly vet the people it was getting into business with.

Take the San Antonio Gunslingers as an example. They were owned by Clinton Manges. The USFL did not examine his financial situation before giving him ownership of the franchise, deciding that his application for ownership carried no risk based entirely on his reputation as an oil baron. If they had done their homework, they would have seen that Manges’s finances could be politely described as a FEMA-level disaster zone.

The Gunslingers a were notoriously cheap football operation, but everyone simply assumed Manges was just being frugual. The team was transported from game to game in an old school bus. The front office was staffed by Manges’s friends and family, and headquartered in a double-wide trailer in the stadium parking lot. The stadium, by the way, was a New Deal-era construction intended for high school football games. It only seated a few thousand people so Manges supplemented that with 14,000 folding chairs.

When the price of oil tumbled in 1985, Manges’s fortune evaporated. He fired the secretaries, the PR department, the scouts, and the practice squad. The IRS put liens on the team due to back payroll taxes. Manges solved this problem by not making payroll for several weeks.

Somehow this was not the worst ownership situation a USFL team endured. In 1984, J. William Oldenburg purchased the Los Angeles Express. He claimed a net worth of $100 million, and the USFL took him at his word. In the middle of the season, the FBI, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the USFL discovered he did not have the money to buy the team. A man named Jay Roulier stepped up to take over the team. There was just one problem: He was also lying about his net worth.

The Tragic Figure of John F. Bassett

The closest thing to a white hat in this cadre of hucksters, liars, and crooks was the Managing General Partner of the Tampa Bay Bandits, a Canadian tennis player, journalist, film and TV producer, software company owner, real estate developer, and serial sport-epreneur named John F. Bassett.

Bassett was the son of a newspaper and television magnate, and I suspect that Bassett’s wealth, or at least his ability to accumulate it, was in some way supplemented by his father. Most of John’s ventures in life ended up being, at best, mediocrities.

His tennis career was accomplished if not impressive. He won the Canadian Open Junior Doubles Championship at age 15. He appeared in the the U.S. National Championships at age 19, but did not advance beyond the main draw. The same year, he was named to the Canadian National Team that would compete for international men’s tennis highest honor, the Davis Cup; he did not see game action.

In his 20s, he began to work as a journalist for the Toronto Telegram, a conservative rag and financial black hole owned by his father. The paper folded in 1971 ahead of a strike and after posting a loss of nearly a million Canadian dollars for the second year in a row. Bassett’s father then gave us evidence that entrepreneurs have no ideological loyalty: He sold his publication’s subscriber list to a liberal paper for CA$10 million.

That same year, Bassett produced his first film, Face-Off, which, per The Montreal Gazette, “couldn’t be more of a Canadian movie if it featured a Mountie with a pet beaver.” It followed love life and hockey exploits of a rookie on the Toronto Maple Leafs, the crown jewel of Canadian sports. Cameos from the team’s real life roster are peppered throughout the movie, no doubt facilitated by the team’s owner: Bassett’s dad. Much like Toronto’s recent playoff runs, the film was a critical and commercial failure.

In 1973, Bassett and 26 partners purchased the Ottawa Nationals, a team in the World Hockey Association, the NHL’s first major competitor since the 1920s. Bassett moved the team to Toronto. By this point, his dad had lost control of the Maple Leafs after a series of corporate maneuverings by Harold Ballard, the most petty Canadian to ever live.

Unable to sign a lease with another arena in the city, Bassett struck a deal with Ballard to share the Toronto Gardens, but the terms were onerous. Ballard removed seat cushions from the home bench, required Bassett to build new locker rooms, and charged a rent of $15,000 per game. Oh, and if they wanted to use the arena’s lights, that would be $3,500 extra, thank you very much.

The same year, Bassett invested in the World Football League, a gridiron football league that played in the fall and operated under the delusion that they could compete with the NFL. Bassett’s team was slated to be the Toronto Northmen, but Canada’s Parliament passed the “Canadian Football Act” in April 1974 which effectively blackballed any American-based football league from operating in Canada. When Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau threatened to sign it into law, Bassett took the hint and moved the prospective team to Memphis, renaming them the Southmen.

His Memphis squad went 24-7 in the two years it played, never losing a home game. Perhaps more importantly, and in contrast to every other WFL team, it was financially stable. When WFL collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions halfway through its second season, Bassett appealed to the NFL, asking that they take the Memphis Southmen into the fold as an expansion team. The NFL considered it but rejected the request. Bassett responded by filing a lawsuit on antitrust grounds that I cannot make heads or tails of because I did not go to law school.

There were briefs, counterbriefs, discovery requests, requests for dismissals, and an appeal. The case dragged on for years. In the ensuing period, Bassett moved his doomed WHA team from Toronto to Birmingham, Alabama and renamed them the Bulls. When the WHA went belly up in 1979, the NHL absorbed many of the surviving clubs—with the notable exception of Bassett’s, presumably because the American South is the biggest hockey desert in the world.

He also produced a sports film, Spring Fever, which advertised itself as a salacious spring-break-sploitation flick but is nothing of the sort. It was a failure with critics and perverts and probably at the box office too.

After eight years of legal shenanigans, judges Collins J. Seitz, John Joseph Gibbons, and Max Rosenn of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in 1983 that no, the NFL was not a monopoly and they did not have to let Bassett’s team into their fold. Bassett may not have liked being told to pound sand, but by then the case was a moot point. He had a new football team to run, the Tampa Bay Bandits of the USFL.

The team and the league was not a gigantic financial success, but it was close enough. The Bandits boasted one of the highest attendance rates in the league, a thriving merchandising arm, and far more success on the field than their NFL rival, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The latter was thanks to an innovative offense devised by a young and wildly funny coach named Steve Spurrier. His style would eventually be dubbed the “fun’n’gun,” and he would quip after a fire destroyed 20 books at an Auburn University library that “the real tragedy was that 15 hadn’t been colored yet.”

Bassett was thrifty but not cheap with the Bandits, adhering strictly to the architecture that David Dixon developed for the league. And for all his faults, almosts, and clear failures, Bassett seemed to care about the community that sprung up around the Bandits, or at the very least understood fans were not just money spigots.

Ken Tomasch, a Florida broadcaster, is quoted online as saying, “the thing about the Bandits that still resonates today was how much FUN it all was. That was even their marketing slogan: ‘All the Fun the Law Allows.’ They were colorful, they threw the ball all over the place. They burned a guy’s mortgage during a halftime promotion. They had cheap tickets. They were real outlaws.”

But his past failure in sports haunted him. In a videotaped interview with reporters around the time of the USFL’s founding, he explained that “we’ve been very conservative [financially] because nobody’s going to be a bigger loser if this league doesn’t work than me. I’m going to look like the biggest jerk in America having done it twice.”

His tone is congenial but with the pazazz of a used car salesman. From this clip alone, he feels like the type of man who would come up to you with two questions, how’s your mother and what do I have to do to put you into this used winnebago. It’s charming and authentic in its own way, and it’s easy to see how and why Tampa Bay’s roster and coaching staff of the Bandits held him in high regard.

The Faustian Bargain

At Donald Trump’s insistence in 1984, the USFL explored moving their calendar from spring to fall. The purpose, however, was not to co-exist with the NFL. The goal of this change, along with a proposed lawsuit on antitrust grounds, was to force a merger. As an 18-team league, there were clearly too many teams for the NFL to absorb, but Trump argued that the teams that did survive would see the value of their owner’s investment more than double

Bassett vehemently opposed this strategy. It was true that his Tampa Bay Bandits had no place in the NFL as the small city already had the Buccaneers, but his stance was no doubt also influenced by his experience with the WFL’s failure and being left out in the cold when the NHL absorbed virtually every WHA team but his Birmingham Bulls. He was backed by the USFL’s own directors of operations and marketing, and also an outside consulting firm who the USFL hired for $600,000 to study the feasibility of a fall calendar but came back with a report recommending the league maintain its spring calendar.

The debate was fraught and became personally acrimonious. In a letter dated August 16, 1984, Bassett delivered to Trump a scathing message: “On a number of occasions over the past meetings, I have listened with astonishment at your personal abuse of the commissioner and various partners of yours if they did not happen to espouse one of your causes or agree with one of your arguments… while others may be able to let your insensitive and denigrating comments pass, I no longer will. You are bigger, younger, and strong than I, which means I’ll have no regrets whatsoever punching you right in the month… I really hope you don’t know that you are doing it, but you are not only damaging yourself with your associates, but alienating them as well.”

No matter how awful Trump’s behavior, though, the prospect of doubling their money in a short amount of time was too much for USFL owners to resist. They voted to move the league to a fall calendar starting in 1986. There are conflicting reports as to the exact vote count, but the decision was almost assuredly made by ratio of 6-to-1, with Bassett and one to two other owners being the only holdouts.

Without a clear plan of his own, Bassett looked to yank his Bandits from the USFL and continue operations elsewhere. There just wasn’t anywhere else to go. The CFL wouldn’t take them since they weren’t based in Canada. The NFL certainly wouldn’t take them, even if they were a better organization than the Buccaneers. In the midst of this search for a backup plan, one of the Bandits’s co-owners, a Miami-area attorney named Steve Arky, was indicted for fraud as part of the Reagan era’s savings and loan scandal and subsequently shot himself.

With his physical and mental health deteriorating, Bassett began making sweeping claims about how he would start another spring league, and it wouldn’t just be for football. The teams would play other sports too. He sounded like Futurama’s Bender: “I’m going to make my own theme park! With blackjack! And hookers!”

When he came back down to Earth and realized this was an absurd idea, he began talking to the owners of the two other Florida-based USFL teams, seeking to merge the Bandits with them. When there was no interest from either the Orlando Renegades or the Jacksonville Bulls, he threw in the towel and looked for someone to buy him out. In the end, a local architect named Lee Scarfone bought Arky and Bassett’s stake in the Bandits and then gave an interview to the St. Petersburg Times about how optimistic he was about the future.

Immediate Complications

The calendar change created headaches almost immediately. They fell into three categories: logistical, contractual, and structural.

The logistical question was pretty simple. When and where were teams going to play? College football owned Saturday and the NFL owned Sunday. In some cases there were no stadiums available. Trump’s New Jersey Generals shared Giants Stadium with the New York Giants and the New York Jets. The venue’s general manager insisted there was no way to accommodate a third, but Trump insisted on staying put rather than moving to then vacant Shea Stadium. He also suggested that the Generals, Jets, and Giants should all play each other. The Jets’s president, Jim Kensil, said he wasn’t interested. I can’t find evidence that the Giants ever publicly commented on the offer, but given they had just had to pay Trump $750,000 to get star linebacker Lawrence Taylor out from under a predatory loan Trump had given him, it seems pretty like they told him to stick it where the moon don’t shine.

On the contractual side, the USFL’s deal with ABC specified that the games would be played and televised in the spring, not the fall. The move put them in breach and susceptible to legal action. A Senior VP of ABC Sports implied to The New York Times that the network was considering it, but no lawsuit would be filed because the USFL had another TV partner on the hook no matter what time of year the games were played. This was ESPN, a quirky Connecticut-based cable network that ABC had recently acquired. The USFL’s ESPN contract was worth considerably less than ABC’s contract, so, while it messed up their broadcast inventory a bit, the American Broadcasting Company technically saved money at the expense of the USFL.

This mattered very little in the long run because the league was in the process of self-immolating. The move to the fall set off a slew of corporate maneuvering by owners looking to be in the best possible position when the NFL merger happened because teams in cities that already had an NFL team were obsolete. The Pittsburgh Maulers closed up shop completely. The New Orleans Breakers moved to Portland. The Philadelphia Stars moved to Baltimore. The Denver Gold were absorbed by the Jacksonville Bulls, as the Jacksonville Jaguars did not exist yet but the Denver Broncos very much did. Donald Trump bought the Houston Gamblers and shut them down. A. Alfred Taubman closed the Michigan Panthers, bought the USFL’s Oakland franchise, and then imported the Panthers’s roster. The Chicago Blitz elected to not field a team until the move to the fall was finalized.

The upshot was that the USFL no longer operated in six markets, including the third, fifth, and sixth largest cities in America. This evaporated the USFL’s long term prospects as an independent league, but that didn’t matter to the owners. They were going all in on getting acquired by the NFL, and they were going to borrow from John F. Bassett’s playbook to make it happen.

Ash Meets Mouth

In April 1986, the USFL filed a lawsuit against the NFL, its commissioner, and 27 of its 28 teams (The Los Angeles Raiders were left out in exchange for testimony). Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, Trump’s attorney and an extremely closeted gay man, held a press conference to explain they were suing on antitrust grounds, that the NFL had established a monopoly on TV broadcasting rights, and that the NFL was conspiring to eliminate the USFL. They sought damages amounting to $1.7 billion and to dissolve at least one of the NFL’s contracts with the three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The case went to trial the same day the news broke that John F. Bassett had passed away. A USFL attorney asked about Bassett by a TV reporter reacted with muted sadness, seemingly unaware that the man had been on death’s doorstep.

On July 29, after 42 days of listening to lawyers argue the nuances of the Sherman Antitrust Act, contract law, and internal NFL memos, the jury returned a verdict in the USFL’s favor.

Yes, the USFL succeeded where the recently departed Bassett had failed ten years earlier. They had gotten a court agree that the NFL had an illegal monopoly.

The trouble was with where the court disagreed with the USFL. Specifically, they did not believe that this monopoly had sabotaged the USFL’s entreprise. They felt USFL team owners had done a perfectly good job of doing that all by themselves. Damages were caused, not by the NFL, but by overpaying for players, moving their schedule to the fall, and stumbling over one another with business maneuvers so nakedly done in the expectation of a merger. The jury awarded $3 in damages, $1,699,999,997 short of the USFL’s goal. They likely would have awarded less but this was the smallest amount they were able to give.

The USFL filed an appeal, but it wouldn’t matter. In 1988, the Court of Appeals upheld USFL v. NFL. The six USFL teams that still existed (on paper anyway; no one had fielded a team in three years) voted to dissolve the league. The NFL filed its own appeal to shake free from its responsibility to cover legal fees and the cost of litigation. They lost, and paid close $6 million to the USFL’s attorneys. Roy Cohn never saw any of that money. He died 3 days after the initial verdict from AIDS-related complications, having denied to his dying breath that he was HIV-positive.

Finally, in 1990, the USFL received its check for $3.76, with the extra change representing interest that had accrued. No one bothered to cash it, and it sat in a safe deposit box until filmmaker Michael Tollin retrieved it in his 2009 episode of ESPN’s 30 for 30 docuseries called “Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?”

The Root of the Matter

Tollin’s 2009 interview with Trump appears to have been argumentative from the jump. The Donald was dismissive of the league’s meager accomplishments before he bought the New Jersey Generals. He described the Tampa Bay Bandits as nice but insignificant. He conceded that the USFL may have continued to exist if they hadn’t embarked on his gambit to force a merger but “it would have been small potatoes.”

The size of the potato didn’t matter to John F. Bassett. The size of the potato didn’t matter to the fans. The size of the potato didn’t matter to the players Tollin and others have interviewed. Some of them were incredible talents who would go on to make an impact in the NFL—Steve Young, Doug Flutie, Jim Kelly, Anthony Carter, and, yes, that asshole Herschel Walker—but many more were replacement level athletes who couldn’t hack it at the highest levels but could nevertheless say they got to live out their dream as professional football players.

But because the USFL potato wasn’t generating money hand over fist, the logic of capitalism meant that it was going to die. If it wasn’t Donald Trump who did it, it would have been someone else. The entrepreneurial classes need to see exponential growth to find merit in something. That was why USFL owners overspent in every conceivable way, to quicken the growth of their potato.

You see this all the time, entrepreneurs trying to amputate, graft, and transplant their way to a big potato. If the surgery renders their potato dead and rotting, that’s fine. They can just bilk some fool into buying the corpse or, failing in that, drop it into a garbage dump. Concepts like personal meaning are unquantifiable, and thus anathema to the worldview animating our lives.

The postwar economic and cultural boom that came to America was partially a result of the rest of the developed world being a smoldering, radioactive ruin (in some cases literally), but it was also a result of the New Deal, when America’s entrepreneurs were made to understand—by government policy and powerful labor unions—that they could not treat their country like it was something to be extracted from. They could not hoard. They had to relent and offer compromises, however paltry.

Few if any such compromises exist today. American elites resemble the USFL owners and their self-interested scrambling and mismanagement of their potato. Their embrasure of self-interest has trickled down to all classes of Americans as a consequence, rendering the country little more than a crabs-in-a-bucket fever dream. Our culture suffers for it.

That is actual small potatoes, but it is true. Our music, our movies, and our sports are duller and more inorganic and only becoming more so. They’re hyper-processed, born in labs and factories, designed to be as efficient and rational as possible, delivered to us in plastic wrappers atop silver platters atop a polished table. There is no man standing over it all, no one person in charge, only squabbling gamblers betting on which burger will sell the most, and fetus boys building easily hacked government websites because it turns out techno-fascists aren’t good at technology or fascism.

But so many men and women cannot help but hallucinate un duce. In their minds he is a man but in truth he can only be met while sleeping, where his tie is unnaturally red and long but not quite as unnatural as his grin or as round as his gut. Every time the nightmare recurs they look at him from across the table and he spreads his hands and fingers wide and they scream in terror as he says, “There are many, many french fries.”