Feb 27, 2016 4 min read

Back in 1985, when he was in the process of destroying the United States Football League, I had planned to predict that Donald Trump would be president of the United States some day, but I forgot.

In case you’ve forgotten, or weren’t around at the time, the USFL was a major professional football league that played its games in the spring. The first season was 1983 and there were 12 teams.

It expanded to 18 teams for the 1984 season and one of those new teams was the Pittsburgh Maulers, owned by Edward DeBartolo,who also owned the Penguins.

I was rooting for the USFL to succeed for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was my belief that the NFL’s monopoly was un-American and unnecessary.

I also like football and was perfectly happy to watch the best players in the world play in March, April and May, and after the USFL signed players like Herschel Walker, Jim Kelly, Steve Young and Reggie White, its games were fast becoming as entertaining as the NFL.

The USFL had two-point conversions and replay challenges long before the NFL.

The plan by the league’s founders was to take it slowly and create a good product that could, over time, compete for star players and possibly even merge with the NFL.

Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals in 1984.

According to a piece in Esquire Magazine called, “How Donald Trump ruined a football league,” Trump, who was only 37, “made a media-inhaling, savior-is-born entrance, surged beyond expectations, then went all in on his attempt to upend the entrenched NFL.”

You might have noticed that Trump has taken the same subtle approach to running for president.

I’ve been wondering why his opponents haven’t asked him about ruining the USFL, about which he said, “We’ve got to make this league as great as it can be.”

Trump went along with the spring schedule for about 15 minutes before saying, “If God wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have invented baseball.”

Say this for the Donald: He didn’t fool around.

He signed Doug Flutie, who had just won the Heisman Trophy, to be his quarterback.

He signed Lawrence Taylor to a future contract while he was still under contract to the New York Giants and deposited a million dollar interest free loan in Taylor’s bank account.

This was at a time when Taylor owned New York City.

The Giants held on to Taylor but had to quadruple his pay and send $750,000 to Trump.

Don Shula was the highest-regarded coach in the NFL at the time and Trump almost signed him away from the Dolphins. His inability to keep his mouth shut about it caused a distraction and Shula backed out.

While the league was going through what every upstart league has gone through – failing teams in some key markets, disagreements among owners about how to compete with the established league – ESPN, the new cable network, was doing a good job of promoting the games and giving them a big-league feel.

It looked like an idea that might work.

But Trump was too big for the USFL. He wanted to be an NFL owner and the only way that was going to happen was by forcing a merger.

It happened for the American Football League 20 years earlier and Trump decided that the only way to force the merger was to start playing games in the fall.

So, Trump used his charisma and his money too convince the majority of the owners to make the move in the summer of 1986.

He also convinced them to file an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL and hired his attorney to plead the case.

The league decided to postpone the 1986 season and wait for the resolution of the lawsuit. The USFL won but the jury set the damages at $1. Since it was a federal antitrust case, the damages were tripled.

The Donald and the other owners appealed but had to settle for splitting $3.

The USFL was dead.

Charley Steiner was the radio voice of the New Jersey Generals. He told Vice Sports, “The (USFL) founding fathers, such as they were, had a pretty good idea. And when you have a guy come in and right away say, ‘If God wanted football in the spring, he wouldn’t have invented baseball,’ I’m like, why are you coming to this dance? He crashed our party pretty hard.

Fortunately, it was only football.”

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday sports column for the Observer-Reporter.