Usher: USFL to Decide Future Monday

Commissioner Harry Usher, whose eight-team United States Football League may be history by Monday, returned to Los Angeles Friday, taped a TV show, met with reporters and then planned to spend a restful weekend with his family at his home in Tarzana.

During a taping of Channel 2’s “Newsmakers” show, which will be shown at 10 a.m. Sunday, Usher said that USFL owners will decide Monday whether to play football or not.

“The way we’re set up now, with training camps scheduled to open Aug. 13 and 14, and the season scheduled to begin Sept. 13, we have to make a decision Monday.”

Conjecture has been that since a federal court jury in New York awarded the USFL damages of just $3 after ruling last Tuesday that the National Football League had violated antitrust laws, the USFL cannot afford to stay in business. Usher would not speculate on how the USFL owners would vote.

“We’ll lose money, whether we play or not,” he said. “But we’ll have to look at the legal ramifications as well as the financial ramifications of not playing, and then decide what to do.”

Usher said he was not sure what he would recommend. “I’ll do a lot of studying on the plane back to New York Sunday night,” he said.

While talking with reporters after the taping of the show, Usher said: “We came within an eyelash of a major victory.

“Some jurors (reportedly, three of the six) wanted to award us $300 million. Treble that and you have a $1-billion award.”

Usher, a practicing attorney for 16 years who specialized in entertainment law and a former president of the Beverly Hills Bar Assn., said the USFL has a good shot at getting a new trial.

He said a motion for a new trial will be submitted Aug. 15 and a hearing on the motion will be held Sept. 3. “If we don’t get it, then we will appeal,” Usher said.

Usher cited two reasons for believing that a mistrial should be declared. First, he said, the jurors weren’t instructed properly on the key issue, and, second, jurors have publicly said they believed that the judge would award “proper” damages, that their low award would be a signal for him to act.

Usher outlined for reporters what he thought was the key issue. “There are 28 NFL teams that play 14 games each week,” he said. “All 14 games are televised and all the television money is shared equally.

“They can pool the money because of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which gave the NFL antitrust exemptions. At the time, the NFL was on CBS and the AFL on NBC.

“Then came the merger in 1966, and then ABC got in on the act in 1970.

“At the time the Sports Broadcasting Act was enacted, there were stipulations about the creation of an anti-competitive situation, which is what we have now.

“The NFL has the three networks locked up. I don’t know if there is a conspiracy or not, but the fact is you can’t break in.

“When we decided to move from a spring to a fall schedule, the basic answer we got from the networks was that they were, quote, full up, and had no room for us.

“That is an anti-competitive situation.

“I cannot criticize Judge (Peter) Leisure until we’re through with legal maneuvering, but nowhere in the 152 pages of instructions to the jury were the jurors asked to address this issue.

“In presenting its case, the NFL did two things. It painted (New Jersey General owner) Donald Trump as a bad guy, and it tried to show merger (with the NFL) was what this whole thing was about.

“It diverted attention from the real issue.”

As for jurors thinking the judge would set higher damages, Usher said: “The law doesn’t work that way. But apparently they thought it did.”

The USFL has played three seasons. It was a 12-team league in 1983, an 18-team league in 1984, and a 14-team league in 1985.

Usher said that ABC made $30 million off the USFL during its first two years. “We were a bargain product,” Usher said, noting that ABC paid $9 million in rights fees each of those first two seasons.

ABC was supposed to pay $14 million in 1985 but held back $7 million after franchises in major markets, among them Los Angeles, either folded or moved. The USFL is now suing ABC to get the $7 million it believes it is owed.

Usher said that the networks cater to the NFL because they all want the Super Bowl and they all want the affiliation for prestige.

Asked by “Newsmakers” co-host Warren Olney if there was a deliberate conspiracy on the part of the networks, Usher said: “The networks are unwitting participants.”

Olney asked: “Didn’t the USFL owners make mistakes all along? Aren’t they the ones responsible for the losses?”

Usher answered that by saying that the NFL, by raising its salary levels and luring players away from the USFL, intentionally damaged the upstart league.

Usher did admit that playing a spring schedule had been a mistake. “On paper, it looked OK,” he said. “But spring football was a slow death. Fans don’t want to sit in 100-degree weather in June and July and watch football.”