Don Shula almost made a horrible mistake in 1983, to jump to the USFL and coach for Donald Trump. He did not, and Trump eventually brought down a promising league with his inane idea of going head-to-head with NFL

Shula told Trump to jump into the East River

Photo: WPTV

… Trump blew a major “deal” with Shula

Don Shula is being widely revered today as a man of character and success, on and off the football field. However, he almost fell victim to the lure of big money in the 1980s when he was coaching the Miami Dolphins. 

Fortunately for him, he made the right decision and stayed in Miami, but the story has come to light again after his passing on Monday. 

The offer — and stupid move

ESPN put together a piece in 2015 when Donald Trump was first considering running for president. In it, the details were outlined about Trump’s move to attract Shula. 

First, some background. The United States Football League was formed with the idea of playing in the spring at a time when NFL fans would still be craving some football. 

The idea caught on because it was flashy and interesting with some interesting innovations. However, the league made some major mistakes, and one of them was allowing Trump to become involved in the league,

But the owners made two early mistakes. Eager to recoup some of their losses, they decided to expand to 18 teams for their second season, allowing them to pocket franchise fees of $4 million per team from the six new owners. It was too much too soon; from that point on, franchises folded, merged, moved — it bordered on chaos. And second, they let the Generals’ owner, an Oklahoma oilman named J. Walter Duncan, sell the team to Trump. The price was reported to be $9 million. (Trump later claimed it was only $5 million.)

Joe Nocera, “Donald Trump’s Less-Than-Artful Failure in Pro 

Football,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 2016

Trump immediately set his sights on Shula, the highly-successful coach of the Dolphins. The Dolphins had lost to the Washington Redskins the year before, but Shula was having difficulty persuading owner Joe Robbie to spend money to obtain top players. 

And, he was earning just $400,000 a year, which for that time was not bad, but was not a million-dollar deal. As ESPN wrote,

After buying the Generals, Trump made a serious push to hire legendary coach Don Shula away from the Miami Dolphins. The deal, according to Trump, hinged on Shula's demand for an apartment in Trump Tower, which Trump didn't want to do despite agreeing to pay the coach at least $1 million per season over five years.

Trump, however, overplayed his hand when he publicly declared he was in negotiations with Shula and mentioned his demands during a clip that aired during halftime of a Dolphins game in October 1983. The comments and subsequent questions turned into a distraction, and Shula pulled his name from consideration.

Arash Markazi, “5 things to know about Donald Trump’s foray 

into doomed USFL,” ESPN, July 14, 2015

The first part of this is that Shula has never talked much about this, and the allegation by Trump that he was holding out for a freebee in Trump Tower does not sound realistic. 

However, Trump was clueless and thought that his breaking this during a Dolphins TV game would bring Shula around. 

Shula pulls the plug

Instead, the Art of the Deal loser lost again. Shula pulled out, the Dolphins parlayed rookie QB Dan Marino into a Super Bowl the following year, and the decision proved to be right since the league folded after three years — a situation that most people blame on Trump. 

The first problem was that Trump was just trying to sell Trump himself and not the league. Second, his idea of playing head-to-head in the fall was just insane from a business and athletic perspective,

At first, many of the owners were glad to have him play this role because it put a spotlight on the new league. But many U.S.F.L. observers soon came to believe that he did not necessarily have the best interests of the league at heart. “He was a dynamic figure, but he was dynamic on behalf of the Donald Trump interests, not the whole league,” said Keith Jackson, who broadcast U.S.F.L. games for ABC.

“It was all self-aggrandizement,” said Mike Tollin, who, as the head of a firm that served as the in-house production company for the league, spent a great deal of time in Trump’s company — but who was also close to owners who soured on Trump.

All through that second season, Trump continued to publicly push his fellow owners to move the U.S.F.L. to the fall and go toe-to-toe with the mighty N.F.L. It made no sense. Until the U.S.F.L. achieved parity on the field — and that was a long way off — it had no hope of attracting large numbers of fans and robust TV ratings in the fall. The networks airing its games expected it to play a spring schedule. Its network contracts called for the U.S.F.L. to keep a certain number of teams in major media markets. But how realistic was it to expect the Chicago Blitz to compete financially with the Chicago Bears? “To go head-to-head with them was insane,” the actor (and Tampa Bay Bandits partner) Burt Reynolds told Tollin, who made an ESPN documentary about the U.S.F.L. in 2009.

Joe Nocera, New York Times, Feb. 19, 2016

The other owners went along with the idea, but most felt from the start that they were wrong, and Trump was interested more in a merger than in keeping the USFL as a viable entity,

As he has all his life, Trump yearned to be in the big arena, and in sports, there was nothing bigger than the N.F.L. Rather than seeing the genuine possibility of building a stand-alone league by steering clear of the N.F.L. — and hitching its wagon to ESPN, which itself was not ready for the N.F.L. — his model was the A.F.L., which had ultimately forced a merger with the older league.

Would a merger mean that the more fragile U.S.F.L. franchises would be tossed aside? Sure. But that wouldn’t happen to the Generals! In the middle of Trump’s lobbying effort, Trump’s main opponent among the owners, the Tampa Bay Bandits’ John Bassett, found out that he had brain cancer. With the respected Bassett suddenly sidelined, Trump persuaded a majority of the owners to throw in their lot with him.

“He manipulated them,” Chuck Pitcock, a former Bandits guard, told Tollin. “There were four or five of the owners that were broke, and they figured if they rode with Donald, they might end up with something.” Before the 1985 season began, the league announced that it would move to the fall in 1986.

“I felt it was the wrong decision,” Taube told me, and he wasn’t the only one. “The declaration to move to the fall,” said Young, who was quarterback of the Los Angeles Express, “I think everyone sensed that that was not going to go well.”

Joe Nocera, New York Times, Feb. 19, 2016

Then, the infamous lawsuit that won $3.76

When the league folded after Trump’s second year, he did what has been his mantra: He sued, but with disastrous results,

How was Trump planning to dig the U.S.F.L. out of a hole he had largely created? Litigation, of course! The U.S.F.L. would sue the N.F.L. for being an illegal monopolist. Among other things, the lawsuit charged that the N.F.L., by having TV contracts with the three major networks (this was pre-Fox), was preventing the U.S.F.L. from signing a television deal for a fall season. It asked for $1.32 billion in damages, which in an antitrust case are trebled if the plaintiffs win. That would be more than enough not only to sustain the league, but also to enrich its beleaguered owners …

If you are a sports fan of a certain age, you surely remember how that trial ended. The jury found that the N.F.L.’s monopolistic practices had indeed injured the U.S.F.L. Then came the coup de grâce: It awarded damages of one dollar. Trebled, that came to $3. With interest, it was $3.76.

The U.S.F.L. appealed, claiming that the trial judge should have excluded some of the most damning evidence against it. The appeals court rejected that argument, writing, “Courts do not exclude evidence of a victim’s suicide in a murder trial.” Needless to say, the U.S.F.L. never played another down.

Joe Nocera, New York Times, Feb. 19, 2016

Conclusion

After Trump’s debacle, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle told Trump to his face that he would never own an NFL franchise: “Over my dead body.”

And he never did. 

And thankfully, Don Shula ran away from the lure of big bucks to end his hall-of-fame career in Miami.