Jim Spence, former senior vice president of...

Jim Spence, former senior vice president of ABC sports, emphatically denied during testimony in New York that he was ever pressured by the NFL to abort the network’s contract with the United States Football League or to keep it off television in the fall.

During intense and often hostile grilling by USFL attorney Harvey Myerson, the former second-in-command to Roone Arledge kept responding, “No,” to a series of questions implying that the USFL’s problems with the network stemmed from NFL pressure.

Television is the central issue in the $1.5-billion antitrust suit, and one of the USFL’s primary demands is that the NFL be ordered off at least one of the three major networks. The four-year-old league, which had a contract with ABC for spring football, has so far been unable to get a network contract for its switch from spring to fall.

“From the beginning, we never had any intention of putting the USFL on in the fall,” Spence said.

Spence acknowledged, however, that ABC had made money on the USFL and had lost on the NFL. He said that ABC had made $12.3 million on USFL games in 1983 and $15 million in 1984 but that the network’s NFL telecasts had lost $10 million in 1984 and projects a loss of $16 million for 1985.