Jeff Pearlman has written eight books, and along that line, he’s turned into one of my favorite sports book authors. Despite that output, though, there are just two ways to classify his books: One is biographies, and the other is narratives about extraordinary teams with players of both incredible skill and questionable character. Football for a Buck, Pearlman’s eighth, is new territory for him, and it has a clunkiness and a brokenness which doesn’t put it among his best works. Now, I’m not saying it’s BAD; it’s quite entertaining, and as far as Pearlman’s work goes, it’s not the worst of his output. (That would be The Rocket that Fell to Earth. Pearlman admitted that the Clemens bio was painful territory for him, and that he hated writing it.)
Football for a Buck is an ambitious venture by Pearlman’s standards because he’s not looking to tell the story of a single person or team. He’s looking to tell the story of an entire league, the United States Football League. Unfortunately, telling the story of a sports league can be difficult because there’s more than the usual stories to tell. Trying to write a book about a league consists of getting viewpoints from the league boardroom, the individual team boardrooms, the individual team locker rooms, and the various media outlets that covered it. One of the things they teach you in rudimentary writing classes is that all stories have to have focal points to create a way to ground them and get everything else to circle it in some way. This can be tricky if the subject is a sports league, but it’s still doable. The supreme masterwork on NFL history, Michael MacCambridge’s America’s Game, used eight of the league’s oldest teams as a way to center the story. Brett Forrest’s Long Bomb, a history of the XFL, was centered around the Las Vegas Outlaws and their enigmatic running back, known as He Hate Me. (It probably helped that Forrest was also working with a much smaller sample size; the XFL only lasted for a single year.)
The biggest problem with Football for a Buck is that it lacks such a grounding. What it has is a handful of characters that pop up throughout – Herschel Walker, Donald Trump, Bill Oldenburg, Jerry Argovitz, John Bassett, and a few others – but as an entity, you’re not really going to get to KNOW the USFL. As far as a narrative history goes, Football for a Buck is clunky, and the lack of a real base means Pearlman regularly goes off on weird, seemingly offhand tangents. He spends two random chapters covering the Arizona Outlaws and the San Antonio Gunslingers, constantly yanks lights from the New Jersey Generals and Los Angeles Express, tells too little about the Philadelphia/Baltimore Stars, and frequently doesn’t go into enough detail to let you sufficiently know these teams. We don’t get to know a whole lot about the Denver Gold or the Oakland Invaders or the Boston/New Orleans/Portland Breakers, and there are countless moves which get left out. The Chicago Blitz is woefully underdeveloped despite a general manager and head coach who moved on to build Super Bowl teams in the NFL. Pearlman shines his best in this book when he goes into depth about the Outlaws and Gunslingers, and that makes me think Football for a Buck would have been most effective had each chapter told the story of one of the league’s individual teams. Of course, I suppose a format like this would have cut out some of the more unique aspects of the league’s boardroom history.
Sports history veterans know at least something about the history of the USFL. It featured a lot of players who moved up to dominate in the NFL, including Steve Young and Jim Kelly. Donald Trump owned a team and was trying to use the league as a stepping stone to ownership of an NFL franchise. (According to this book, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle not only rejected Trump’s attempt to own an NFL team, but was very blunt about doing so.) The NFL has seen a couple of professional football leagues rise up and try to challenge it over its existence – most notably the AFL and the AAFC – but the USFL holds a special place in the hearts of those who remember it. Then again, the USFL was never meant to compete with the NFL. It was conceived as a quirky, fan-friendly football alternative that ran during the spring. Then Donald Trump got ahold of the New Jersey Generals and blew the whole thing to hell when he tried to get the league on a fall schedule.
Anyone who reads my Every Team Ever blog knows that I refer to the developmental years of a nascent sports league as the Crazy Cousin Years. The USFL was a league that was all Crazy Cousin Years, throughout its whole three-year existence. Teams moved every which way, there was one instance when an entire franchise got swapped, projected superstars got signed to giant contracts which they didn’t live up to, marquee teams were ignored, and small market teams like the Jacksonville Bulls and Memphis Showboats drew. Since there’s no main focus, it’s tough to get ahold of what was doing what and when. The story of the Pittsburgh Maulers, for example, is presented in a way which leaves readers thinking the team was cancelled right in the middle of its only season. If you’re looking for any sort of groove during the narration, good luck finding it. Pearlman’s style is as breezy as it ever was, but try not to get too comfortable with anything Pearlman looks like he’s starting to cover at length, because a switch will be coming soon.
The parts of Football for a Buck where Pearlman is the most comfortable is when he falls into the tropes that have defined his authorship career: Vices and the absurd. Although there is a little bit of writing about the nice perks that come with high-level professional athleticism, the the parts that stick out come at the expense of the eccentric band of team owners. They included Donald Trump of the New Jersey Generals, Bill Oldenburg of the Los Angeles Express, and Clinton Manges of the San Antonio Gunslingers. The Gunslingers have a richly-deserved chapter all to themselves because the Gunslingers were such a two-bit operation. Pearlman is usually at his best when he describes off-field vices, but in Football for a Buck, he’s best when it comes to writing about big, rich egos. The stories he tells about Oldenburg and Trump are a little jarring, especially in the case of Trump, who has the lion’s share of blame for destroying the USFL. It was Trump who sold the league on moving to a fall schedule, Trump who dreamed up the idea of suing the NFL for monopolist practices (the USFL won the case but the NFL was forced to award it just $1 – one dollar), and Trump who started handing out huge contracts to players and ended up jacking up the payrolls of most teams.
It’s only within the last few chapters that Football for a Buck finally discovers its narrative. That’s the story of when the other owners in the league decided to cave in to Donald Trump and take on the mighty NFL head to head. This is where the story comes together and finds cohesion because at that point, almost all of the major players in it are on the same page. And the NFL, which is basically a ghost through most of the book, is able to emerge and become a proper villain. Pearlman even gives us a list of the various ways the NFL started to prepare for combat against the USFL.
For all its flaws, though, Football for a Buck is ultimately an enjoyable read because of its haphazard presentation rather than in spite of it. Most of its flaws can be easily forgiven because its general essence is that of a raving fan. The USFL was a fan-friendly league that had a lot more influence than one would think a league that ran for three years would have. (The USFL created the two-point conversion which is now standard at every level of football.) And much of Football for a Buck comes off like Pearlman is writing it as a USFL fan who misses the league and its odd little quirks. And he makes it clear that the USFL did a lot of things right: It went out and uncovered untapped and unlikely markets. It discovered and signed some of the greatest players to ever be employed in the NFL. And most of all, it could have evolved into a great league which served as a nice spring compliment to the regular NFL and NCAA seasons. And various little bits and pieces of this book allow Pearlman to write about the morbidly fascinating in the way that he does better than anyone.
If you’re looking for a book about the USFL which is good, you may want to keep looking. But if you want one that’s fun and entertaining, Football for a Buck is a real treat that will make you suddenly go fishing around on Amazon for some old Houston Gamblers togs.
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