30 for 30 running thread

I think the fact that when I was 10 I could get home from school and watch the replay of a football game on ESPN stuck with me.

Didn't they used to play on nights other than just Monday?

 

He handed it to Trump.

 

It was a central focus of the show. It's in a safe deposit box in, I believe, Memphis. The host showed it to Trump and Burt Reynolds during their interviews.

And, btw, Reynolds came across as not being all there mentally to me.

 

Yeah, they did. I always enjoyed watching that. They also would show game replays early in the morning. I'd be eating breakfast and my parents would tell me to hurry up and finish getting ready for school instead of watching some taped football game.

 

I think the only reason Trump joined the league was to try to force a quick ABA/NBA type merger where he joined the NFL at the expense of the rest of the league. I've heard he'd previously tried to buy into the NFL and been rejected, he saw the USFL as a way to jam his way in and stick it to the NFL in the process.

That's the ony way his outspending/direct competition strategy makes sense. He knew the USFL had no hope of legitimately competing with the NFL on fall sundays and he knew the other USFL owners couldn't survive with that kind of spending, but he also knew the NFL would never see the league as a sufficient threat if it remained an off-season low-budget league. His plan was simply to become such an annoyance to the NFL by driving up players' salaries and cutting into their market share that they'd offer a lucrative buyout just to get rid of the league. And he didn't give a shit if every franchise but his own died in the process.

 

I went to a USFL exhibition in Charlotte. I guess I was in the fourth or fifth grade at the time. I remember one of the teams was the LA Express, but for the life of me can't remember the other one.

I thought the piece was pretty good television, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Baltimore Band. That was the best hour of television I've seen in quite a while.

 

If you want more details on the USFL, or you want a good sports business story, find a copy of "The $1 League," by Jim Byrne, who was the league's PR director. In the book, if he pops up, he refers to "the league PR director."

As for some of the other USFL franchises collapsing even without Trump's helping hand, that's true -- but the league was founded on the idea that it needed owners with deeper pockets and stronger stomachs to suck up large initial losses. (Although I think the Denver Gold made a profit its first year.) Obviously, it didn't have those everywhere, and bringing in Trump probably seemed like a good idea at the time. He had the deep pockets, but he wasn't committed to the league's vision. Still, the end game was going to be some kind of merger, because the USFL wouldn't have lasted forever in any event.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Dollar-League-United-Football/dp/0133317609

 

One anecdote that summed up the USFL to me.

At one of the title games in Tampa Bay, the league's commissioner (Chet Simmons?) supposedly had an injured neck and either couldn't meet with the media at a scheduled session or showed up with a neck brace and begged off in short order. Anyway, that night, a bunch of reporters (on expense accounts, remember those?) were dining at a popular steak house in Tampa (Bern's). Lo and behold, there is the commish, wining and dining his big shot pals ... sans neck brace. Seemed embarrassed to run into the same group of wags he had just blown off.

What a league.

 

I'm enjoying the Holmes/Ali doc right now - a lot of docs enjoy playing "gotcha" pulling old film or tape that makes people look foolish in hindsight (Hello, Michael Moore), what I like about these ESPN docs is that they are really taking viewers back to that time. In most cases you don't need the second-guessing narration.

 

The earlier parts of Ali's career have been well-documented, as has his later prime (including in "When We Were Kings"). But I'm too young to remember Ali's downfall firsthand. It's striking to see him in this film, and how his eyes have completely lost all focus and light.

 

What I saw of tonight's doc was incredibly good and very sad. Holmes comes out of it very sympathetic, Ali not so much.

 

Even though I knew what happened, I found myself almost rooting for Ali to pull something off. That's how effective it was at "taking me back in time."

It did make me like Holmes, too, and I loved the ending. A perfect ending for a documentary.