Donald Trump’s Less-Than-Artful Failure in Pro Football
Far from mastering “The Art of the Deal” — the title of his 1987 best seller — Trump made real estate blunders that turned billions in potential profits into mere millions. His foray into Atlantic City brought him perilously close to personal bankruptcy. As for all of his claims about owning a sprawling business empire, what he actually runs these days is a licensing company that slaps the Trump name on everything from buildings to steaks to an education company that was sued by New York State in 2013 for “persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct.” My conclusion — and I say this as a grizzled veteran of business journalism — was that Trump’s business acumen (not to mention his net worth) was wildly overstated, not least by Trump himself. His core business skill is self-promotion.
.. All through that second season, Trump continued to 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 it achieved parity on the field — and that was a long way off — the U.S.F.L. had no hope of attracting large numbers of fans and TV ratings in the fall.
.. 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,”
.. How was Trump planning to dig the U.S.F.L. out of a hole he had largely created? Litigation, of course!
.. Trump then made his next mistake, bringing on a flamboyant lawyer named Harvey D. Myerson — Heavy Hitter Harvey, the media called him, “a blustery, cigar-smoking, fancy-footwork kind of lawyer,” as Taube put it to me. Trump hired Myerson with great fanfare, saying “he’s aggressive, he’s tough-skinned and he knows how to win.”
.. Alas, Heavy Hitter Harvey knew next to nothing about antitrust, which requires deep, specialized knowledge.
.. The jury found that the N.F.L. 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 no exclude evidence of a victim’s suicide in a murder trial.”