The “futures contract” Trump used to lure Taylor outraged Giants management, but they weren’t willing to let the public drama go on long. The Giants essentially bought out Taylor’s contract with the Generals, giving him a new deal with the Giants and a hefty raise, and paying Trump back the $1 million he gave Taylor, plus another $750,000. (Technically, Taylor bought himself out of the contract by giving Trump $1.75 million from the Giants. This spared the NFL team the indignity of having to pay Trump directly.) The deal made Taylor a lifelong Trump fan: “He has certainly always known how to use the media. It was a brilliant publicity stunt.”
On the field, Trump’s mad-scientist off-season paid off. The Generals went 14-4 in 1984, made the playoffs, and lost in the first round. But off the field, some other USFL owners were having second thoughts about their new colleague. Trump had effectively become the face of the league, and his mouthing off did not sit well with other team owners. Trump casually told reporters that he thought the USFL should fold at least four of its eighteen teams, the ones with “weak ownership.” Then came a steady drumbeat of stories citing anonymous “USFL sources” saying, falsely, that a switch from spring to fall play was imminent. After a Times story trumpeted a move to a fall schedule based on information from two “prominent USFL executives,” league commissioner Chet Simmons was apoplectic. Simmons, a former president of ESPN, was trying to keep the peace between owners who wanted to switch seasons and those who didn’t, and now it appeared that one owner was trying to tip the scales by placing anonymously sourced news stories. Simmons had a pretty good idea who that was.
The day after the Times story, Simmons sent a memo to all owners: “To air the league’s business in the press is unwarranted and unconscionable and to distort the truth is malicious.” He called Trump, who neither confirmed nor denied being the source. Trump reacted calmly to Simmons’s scolding, but got his revenge later that week. A column in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner was headlined, “Trump to Simmons: You Are Useless . . . You Just Sit There,” which Trump purportedly told Simmons after the commissioner’s angry call about the Times story. (Trump told Simmons he’d never said those words.) A few months later, when Simmons developed a pinched nerve, doctors told him the ailment was likely stress related. He took to calling it his “Trump nerve.”
The fight over whether to switch to the fall boiled down to an argument chiefly between two men: Trump and John Bassett. A Canadian film producer previously involved with the failed World Football League, Bassett owned the Tampa Bay Bandits, one of the few USFL teams to turn a profit. Like Trump, Bassett had a flair for the dramatic; he enlisted Hollywood star Burt Reynolds as a celebrity part-owner and ran halftime events at games, including bikini contests and mortgage burnings. Bassett liked Trump at first. At that early 1984 New Orleans owners’ meeting, Bassett said Trump had boosted the league’s credibility. But Trump’s needling of his opponents changed Bassett’s opinion. In August, he sent Trump a sternly worded letter: “Dear Donald: . . . I have listened with astonishment at your personal abuse of the commissioner and various of your partners if they did not happen to espouse one of your causes or agree with one of your arguments. . . . You are bigger, younger, and stronger than I, which means I’ll have no regrets whatsoever punching you right in the mouth the next time an instance occurs where you personally scorn me, or anyone else, who does not happen to salute and dance to your tune. . . . Kindest personal regards, John F. Bassett.”
A few weeks later, USFL owners gathered to hear the results of an important study by the consulting firm McKinsey, which the league had paid $600,000 to determine its best financial course forward. The consultant, Sharon Patrick, realized that no matter what season it played in, the USFL was in trouble. Seven of the eighteen owners told Patrick they could not stay afloat over the next two years based on the league’s current television revenue, and four more said they’d be able to keep playing only with “great difficulty.” Trump’s plan to boost television income by moving to the fall assumed a series of events the consultant couldn’t foresee happening. Moving to the fall before 1987 would violate the USFL’s contract with ABC. And Patrick hadn’t heard anything to convince her that a move would result in a better contract for the USFL. NBC told her it had no interest in the USFL, period. CBS said it wouldn’t be interested until 1987, and then only if the league’s ratings improved. If the USFL tried to move before 1987, Patrick said, the league could end up without any major-network contract.
She recommended cutting costs, launching an ad campaign to improve ratings, and remaining a spring league through 1986. Only after that, when the NFL’s TV contracts would be up for renewal and the USFL would be a free agent, should a move to the fall be considered. Trump termed Patrick’s report “bullshit.” Eddie Einhorn, the new owner of the USFL’s struggling Chicago franchise, agreed, saying he doubted network executives would speak candidly with a “girl” from a consulting firm. Einhorn was convinced he could get two major networks into a bidding war for a fall USFL. If that didn’t work, Einhorn and Marvin Warner, another owner, agreed the next step should be an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. The owners voted to ignore Patrick’s recommendations. Fourteen of the sixteen owners present backed Trump’s drive to move to the fall. Commissioner Simmons told reporters, “We’re going to take the NFL on head-to-head beginning in the fall of 1986.”
Before the 1985 season, Trump made another splashy, impulsive signing. A year after throwing $800,000 at quarterback Brian Sipe, Trump drafted Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback Doug Flutie out of Boston College, signing him to a five-year deal worth up to $7 million. At a press conference, a humble Flutie said he was unsure he was ready to start and looked forward to learning from the veteran Sipe. Trump had different plans, declaring, “Doug Flutie will be the Joe Namath of the USFL.” A few weeks later, according to a fellow owner, Trump asked him to have his team take it easy on Flutie, an idea that the fellow owner rebuked. Trump denied having made the request. When Flutie struggled early in the season, Trump suggested that other USFL owners reimburse him for the quarterback’s contract. Trump conceded he had overspent, but said he was selflessly generating publicity for the league. (USFL officials noted a name they didn’t recognize speaking on behalf of Trump in news coverage of that incident—John Barron, the fictitious spokesman Trump occasionally pretended to be.)
Trump’s Generals again finished with a winning record, 11-7, and again were bounced in the first round of the playoffs. But off the field, the USFL, without a new television contract, faced great uncertainty. As the consultant had predicted, NBC and CBS didn’t appear interested, and ABC was furious that the USFL intended to break its contract. It became increasingly clear the league’s only chance of survival would come in the courtroom. USFL owners voted to sue the NFL, and again Trump stole the show. As USFL executives were about to fly to Florida for a league meeting, Simmons got a message: Trump planned to hold a surprise press conference the following morning, speaking on behalf of the USFL about its case against the NFL. By his side would be the lawyer Trump had picked for the case, without consulting anyone else: Roy Cohn. (Years later, Trump biographer Harry Hurt would report that Trump had promised Cohn the case as partial payment for his work renegotiating a prenuptial agreement with Ivana.)
The USFL v. NFL trial was scheduled for late spring of 1986 in New York federal court. Many sportswriters viewed the lawsuit as a desperate move by the USFL. But lawyers for the NFL knew that an internal NFL document would significantly bolster the upstart league’s case that its established rival had broken federal law in an effort to put its competition out of business. And a secret meeting that had taken place between Trump and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1984 would rock the trial—depending on who was telling it straight and who was cheating the truth.
• • •
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’S MANAGING EDITOR, Mark Mulvoy, was playing a round of golf with Trump on Long Island one morning when the skies opened. When the rain let up and the
men returned to the green, Mulvoy noticed a ball ten feet from the hole that he didn’t remember seeing before the storm. “Who the hell’s ball is this?” Mulvoy said.
“That’s me,” Trump said, according to Mulvoy.
“Donald, give me a fucking break,” Mulvoy replied. “You’ve been hacking away in the . . . weeds all day. You do not lie there.”
“Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time. I have to cheat just to keep up with them.”
After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”
But Trump continued to play golf through the years, often touting his skill at the game as evidence of his athleticism. Trump claimed eighteen club championships, which he said were “really like majors for amateurs,” referring to the most important, prestigious tournaments for professional golfers. Many experienced golfers who hit the links with Trump found him to be talented, albeit with an unorthodox swing, but stories of Trump’s cheating became legion. “When it comes to cheating, he’s an eleven on a scale of one to ten,” said sportswriter Rick Reilly. In one afternoon of golfing with Trump, Reilly said, he witnessed the developer write down phony scores, award himself close putts by raking balls into the hole, and call a gimme—usually reserved for shots two feet or closer to the hole—when his ball was at least a few yards away. “He took the world’s first gimme chip-in,” Reilly said. Despite repeatedly taking do-over balls, Trump told Reilly to “make sure you write that I play my first ball. You don’t get a second ball in life.” (Trump steadfastly denied any shenanigans: “I’ve never cheated in golf.” And he disputed Reilly’s recollection: “I absolutely killed him, and he wrote very inaccurately. . . . I never took a gimme chip shot.”)
When Trump bet big on Atlantic City, sports played a vital role in bringing people to his casinos. In 1989, acting on an idea pitched to him by college basketball commentator Billy Packer, Trump sponsored the Tour de Trump, a bicycle race billed as America’s answer to the Tour de France. The race covered 837 miles through five states, ending in the shadow of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Trump sponsored the race for two years—it eventually became the Tour DuPont—and many cyclists were happy that a prominent American businessman was investing in their sport. Powerboat racers were less thrilled when Trump waded into their sport. Traditionally held in sunny Key West, the World Powerboat Championship races were moved to Atlantic City in 1989 after Trump put up $160,000 to host the event, beating bids from groups in Key West and Honolulu. Almost immediately, some racers questioned the logic of holding a race off the New Jersey coast in October, when the waters can be much choppier than off South Florida. Those concerns proved prescient. Rain and high seas forced cancellation of multiple days of racing. When the boaters did race, the results were disastrous: several boats sank, and accidents caused one driver to break his back. On another day, when the waters were calm, a racer was killed when his boat flipped over.
One of the few who didn’t complain about the weather that weekend was Trump, who crowed to reporters that the rain only ensured that the racers spent more time in his casinos: “From a truly cynical financial standpoint, I walked through the [Trump] Castle today and it’s Boomtown, USA. The worse the weather, the better for business.”
One sport above all others helped Trump rake in millions in Atlantic City: boxing. Trump’s move into Atlantic City coincided with the emergence of one of the most electrifying fighters in the sport’s history, a Brooklyn native with a distinct lisp and a knack for delivering knockout blows with blinding speed. In 1986, twenty-year-old Mike Tyson became boxing’s youngest heavyweight champion, and Trump tried to ensure every big Tyson fight happened at one of his properties. For a while, Trump nearly single-handedly relocated America’s boxing capital from Las Vegas to Atlantic City, culminating in Tyson’s June 1988 fight against Michael Spinks. Trump put up $11 million to host the fight, a record price. Tyson knocked out Spinks in ninety-one seconds, less time than it took to introduce Trump’s family and many celebrity friends who were ringside that night. Still, the fight was a windfall for Trump and other casino owners. Trump Plaza grossed more than $18 million that weekend, and the combined gross from the city’s twelve casinos topped $40 million. Trump’s competitors took out a full-page ad in the local paper: “Thank you, Mr. Trump.”
Trump took more than a passing interest in Tyson’s career, trying to act as his personal financial adviser, even offering marital advice when Tyson was about to divorce the actress Robin Givens. When Tyson was convicted of raping eighteen-year-old Desiree Washington in 1992, one of his first calls was to Trump. A few weeks later—before Tyson was sentenced—Trump held a press conference to put forth an unusual proposal: Tyson should not be incarcerated for his rape conviction, but rather should be allowed to remain free and fight, with the proceeds going to benefit victims of sex crimes and Desiree Washington. The proposal was, not surprisingly, resoundingly criticized, with many people pointing out that Trump’s plan would let him continue to benefit financially from Tyson’s career. Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison. Years later, one of Trump’s biographers would notice a boxing championship belt in his office. The belt had belonged to Tyson, Trump explained, and was payment for an unexplained debt.
• • •
TRUMP AND HIS FELLOW USFL owners had every reason to be optimistic. The first few weeks of the trial in Courtroom 318 at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan had belonged to the underdog league. Its new attorney—Harvey Myerson, who had replaced the ailing Cohn at Trump’s behest—made a strong case alleging that the NFL’s antitrust violations had cost the USFL hundreds of millions of dollars. The jury of six—one man, five women, none football fans—listened as the bombastic Myerson, who often reeked of his omnipresent cigars, hammered away at the NFL. He produced two internal NFL exhibits: a document titled “Spending the USFL Dollar,” which advocated that NFL teams poach lower-priced USFL players, forcing the cash-strapped league to spend more; and a slide show in which a Harvard Business School professor urged the NFL to use tactics inspired by Sun Tzu’s military-strategy classic, The Art of War, such as dissuading ABC from keeping its contract with the USFL, surreptitiously encouraging unionization in the rival league, and luring away the most “influential USFL owners with promises of NFL franchises.”
When Trump took the stand on June 23, 1986, testimony focused on a secret meeting between him and Rozelle in March 1984 at a suite in Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel. Now the two men could agree on only three facts about their meeting—the date, location, and who paid for the room (Trump). According to Trump, he and Rozelle had been friends for years—Trump had attended parties at Rozelle’s home and knew his wife well—but when rumors circulated that Trump might buy a USFL team, Rozelle strongly discouraged him from getting involved. After Trump bought the Generals, Rozelle treated him “like I had the plague.”
In Trump’s version, Rozelle promised that if Trump did all he could to keep the USFL from switching from spring to fall and prevented the USFL from filing an antitrust lawsuit, he’d get an NFL franchise. Trump testified he couldn’t possibly take that deal: “I had some very good friends in the United States Football League; . . . there is no way that I am going to sell out people.”
When Rozelle took the stand, he directly contradicted nearly everything Trump had said. “He was an acquaintance,” the commissioner testified. “He was not a friend. He was not even on my Christmas card list.” By Rozelle’s account, Trump informed him that he was bringing two new owners to USFL franchises in Miami and Chicago: strong, wealthy men. “Then he said, ‘But I don’t want to do these things,’ ” Rozelle testified. Rather, what Trump really
wanted was an NFL expansion team in New York, and Trump offered to arrange for a new stadium to be built for that team. Rozelle continued, “And he said, and I quote him directly, ‘I would get some stiff to buy the New York Generals.’ . . . Then he said, and again I quote him exactly, ‘If I were to leave the United States Football League, it would be psychologically devastating’ ” for the USFL.
Rozelle supported his account with a summary of the meeting he had typed up immediately after it happened. Trump had no notes from his discussions with Rozelle. “I would have considered notes to be a very unnatural thing to do,” Trump explained. “People don’t go around making notes of conversations in my opinion.”
Trump’s testimony marked a turning point in the trial. A few days later, Frank Rothman—the NFL’s reserved, grandfatherly attorney—argued that the USFL’s financial struggles were its own fault. The league had lost its television contract when it moved to the fall at the behest of one owner—Trump—who wanted to force his way into the NFL. Rothman introduced the posthumous testimony of John Bassett, Trump’s rival owner who had fought to keep the league in the spring. Bassett had succumbed to brain cancer the week the trial started, but in a deposition, he said the fall move for the USFL was premature, and it was all Trump’s idea.
When the six jurors started to deliberate, it quickly became clear there was an even split. Two jurors thought the NFL had obviously harmed the USFL, which deserved hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Two other jurors thought the NFL had done nothing wrong, and that the lawsuit was a desperate ploy by a rival struggling to stay alive. The two remaining jurors fell somewhere in between. Patricia Sibilia, like the rest of the jury, knew little about football or television contracts. She concluded that the NFL had acted as a monopoly and was guilty of predatory action toward the USFL, but she also thought the USFL’s owners had overspent, moved teams from city to city seemingly at random, and prematurely lurched from spring to fall in violation of their TV contract. Sibilia decided she didn’t like Trump, whom she’d barely heard of before the trial. “He was extremely arrogant and I thought that he was obviously trying to play the game,” Sibilia recalled. “He wanted an NFL franchise. . . . The USFL was a cheap way in.”
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