In Trying Shortcut, USFL Finds Nobody Gives a Damage

All right, places, everybody, this is a quiz. One answer and one answer only. Papers will be graded for neatness and originality. No prompting from the audience. Ready?

All right, for 100 autographed photos of Harry Usher, who are, or were, the Orlando Renegades, and is there a product connected with what they do? Is what they do, or did, done on ice, on roller skates, horseback or under water?

How about the Portland Breakers? Care to take a guess as to what they do for a living?

What’s a Baltimore Star? Do you fight the Jacksonville Bulls with a sword and a cape or what? Is Denver Gold subject to London price fixing?

Give me a break!

These unidentified non-flying objects above are entities in something called the United States Football League. A collector’s item. An endangered species.

They just “won” what may be the lowest damage settlement in the history of American jurisprudence. Three whole American dollars. They could have taken it to small claims court. Judge Wapner would have given them more in a suit over a chicken.

You know, I always thought when you started a new sports league in this country that the old rules of good old American gamesmanship applied. You know, protect yourself at all times. Fight a little dirty, if you have to. Make it on your own.

I mean, leagues have been warring since the invention of the ball, but one never went to court to get the other to pay its bills before.

Established leagues have never welcomed an upstart with open arms before. Why should they? They broke the ground. They pushed into the unknown, fought the Indians, so to speak, braved the floods, stood the heat, cleared the land.

Newcomers can’t come in and say, ‘Excuse me, would you mind moving over?’ They have to earn their place, too. There’s even a uniquely American term to describe them: Johnnies-Come-Lately.

Consider the turn of the century, when the National League was the summit of all baseball.

An audacious ex-sportswriter, Bancroft (Ban) Johnson, dared to form a rival league, the American. He didn’t go to court. He fought dirty. He scrapped the so-called “National agreement,” which bound players to one club and put a $2,500 cap on salaries.

He raided, blustered, moved the Baltimore franchise to New York and made off with immortal National League players like Cy Young and Napoleon Lajoie. The National League, which had scornfully refused a postseason playoff with the upstart league, was forced to capitulate, and the World Series was born.

I always thought that was the way it was done. Not that the leagues weren’t litigious. Lajoie had to be spirited out of Pennsylvania when he jumped from the National League Philadelphia team to the American League, and he had to be kept out, since a court had ordered his return to the National League club.

The “outlaw” Federal League in 1914 perished because of bad timing. It came into being the same time as World War I. It did go to court to have the entire structure of major league baseball broken up, but it had to strike its colors after losses in the millions.

An abortive Continental League was envisioned in the late ‘50s by the late Branch Rickey, but it died on the drawing boards after failing to enlist Congressional aid. It did, however, pave the way for expansion. The Mets are Rickey’s last legacy to baseball.

The National Football League, which appeared in court haughty and smug, was itself a new kid on the block once. Founded on the running board of a car in a showroom in Canton, Ohio, it was a pass-the-hat, find-an-empty-lot game.

It was a despised offshoot of the college game, and the contemptuous universities wouldn’t let it near their cavernous stadiums. As late as 1946, when the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles, the city was against letting the pros use the Coliseum, a public facility, for fear of offending the local colleges.

But the NFL itself moved smugly into the grandfather position when a new league, the All-America Conference, was formed. “First, let them get a football,” sneered the then-commissioner of the NFL, Elmer Layden of Four Horsemen fame.

They got a football, all right. And the best football team in the universe, as the Cleveland Browns proved to be when the NFL cannibalized the junior league and plucked the Browns, San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts out of its bankrupt ranks.

It was the public’s first lesson that new didn’t mean inferior. But it didn’t take. When the American Football League came along a generation later, financed by the Texas Big Rich, it took the football fan three Super Bowls to realize that the upstart league was not only equal but superior to the lordly NFL.

The AFL didn’t sue for parity, it fought for it. It didn’t seek subsidy, it sought a scrap. It hired Al Davis, a gut-fighter with a zest for combat, as commissioner, and before he was through, the NFL was glad to have the referee stop it. They sued for peace terms.

Davis didn’t want any. He wanted to keep his troops going right into Berlin, so to speak, but his general staff, Paul Brown, Lamar Hunt and others, counseled merger.

The latest new outfit, the United States Football League, did not fight the good fight. It tried to shortcut its way to legitimacy. You build a franchise in the sports pages, not the courts. You hire Joe Namath, a quarterback, not a lawyer.

It took decades for the Chicago Bears to become the Monsters of the Midway, the Dallas Cowboys to become America’s Team.

Starting out a new league is hard--as George Halas, Curly Lambeau, Tim Mara, Art Rooney and George Preston Marshall found out all those years ago when they bankrolled the NFL over a lot of losing years. Looks to me as if the jurors didn’t think they should be required to do it all over again for another league now.