PRO FOOTBALL ’86 : IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE USFL? : Not for Fusina, Who Made the Stars the Most Successful Team on the Field in the Short Life of the Other League

In a swift double stroke on July 29, six jurors damned the NFL but doomed the USFL. They probably never imagined the ramifications of their findings.

Their conclusion that the USFL’s antitrust victory over the NFL was worth only $3 hit more than 500 lives like a cruel good news/bad news joke. Chuck Fusina recalled the moment.

“I’m in graduate school at LaSalle,” said the quarterback of the Baltimore Stars. “I was in a finance class and a guy comes up to me and said, ‘Hey, Chuck, you guys won the trial.’ I said, ‘Hey, that’s great.’

“I ran up to the teacher and said, ‘Let me use your phone.’ I wanted to call my wife and tell her the good news. I called her and she was kind of down.

“I asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’

“She said, ‘Did you hear the settlement?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘It was one dollar.’ ”

Fusina felt as if he’d been blind-sided by a freight train. There went his league, his team, the three years worth about $1 million remaining on his contract--maybe his career. First-and-10 the other way. He suffered the rest of the class in a daze, then went home to try to reinflate his life.

Why should Fusina worry, with his credentials? Only 29, he was the USFL’s fourth-rated passer with 66 touchdowns and only 33 interceptions during his pro career. He directed the Stars’ offense in all three USFL championship games, winning the last two. He was the Sporting News’ USFL Player of the Year in 1984, when the club was based in Philadelphia, and the most valuable player in the title game. His record as a starter with Penn State and the Stars was 48-13-1. The guy’s a winner. Some NFL team will call.

Any day now.

“It was pretty depressing,” Fusina said at a cafe near his home in West Berlin, N.J., a suburb of Philadelphia. “The last couple of weeks I’ve been down because I thought there’d be interest. I really did. I thought I earned that the last three years.”

But the nearest thing to a uniform he wears these days is a golf shirt from the “Scott Fitzkee Fitness Camp.” Fitzkee, a wide receiver with the Stars, signed last week with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League.

Former Stars seem to be signing more contracts than autographs these days. About 10 will be in NFL uniforms this weekend. Carl Peterson, the club’s president and general manager, can’t understand why Fusina won’t be among them.

“I’m as perplexed as anybody, unless the NFL is still hung up on the prototype thing, that a guy has to have a certain size, certain weight, great arm,” Peterson said. “He’s as good as or better than 75% of the backups in the NFL.

“He’s a clone of a Bob Griese. He plays within his abilities, but he finds a way to win.”

Peterson said that five or six NFL teams called him to ask about Fusina and that he told them the same things. Still, nothing has happened.

Fusina said: “Unfortunately, I’m the kind of guy who has to go out and prove himself all the time.”

At Penn State he was runner-up to Oklahoma’s Billy Sims for the Heisman Trophy but he wasn’t drafted until the fifth round by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

“It’s just the way people see me,” he said. “I guess because I was released four years ago (by the San Francisco 49ers) people don’t think I can play in the NFL.”

Part of the problem this summer was the timing. When the bottom fell out of the USFL, NFL teams were already in training camp and presumably didn’t have time to teach their systems to new quarterbacks.

Peterson, though, said that Fusina is bright. “He could go to any NFL team and know the offense in a week.”

He already knew the offense at New Orleans, where Jim Mora, his former coach with the Stars, landed on his feet as the new coach of the NFL’s Saints.

Mora’s 45-man roster has nine players from the USFL, five from the Stars, but he wasn’t interested in Fusina, either.

Fusina said he last spoke to Mora after the USFL title game in July 1985, the last game he played. Before the verdict came in, a Saint official called Fusina’s agent to ask about negotiating rights.

“But they didn’t get back,” Fusina said.

Later, Fusina said, one of Mora’s assistants phoned. “He said that they were thinking of bringing me in, but Coach Mora didn’t want to. He didn’t want to disrupt the team.”

Mora already had three veteran quarterbacks: Dave Wilson, Richard Todd and Bobby Hebert, another former USFL player.

Mora cut Todd last week. A Saint spokesman said: “(Todd) wouldn’t feel real comfortable being No. 3.”

Mora said: “We want a quarterback in that No. 3 spot that is young and has the potential to be a better player. The guy we’re talking about is younger than Chuck in years and younger in experience. Chuck is probably as good as he’s going to get.”

Peterson believes that Mora might have been caught in a bind with Hebert. How could a new coach bring in his own quarterback to compete with a Louisiana favorite son who got a fat contract when he came over from the USFL a year ago?

Or maybe Mora doesn’t think Fusina could play in the NFL.

Peterson said he even had to sell Mora on Fusina with the Stars. “I said, ‘Stay with him, let him get into the system and he’ll produce.’ ”

The word on Fusina is that, at 6 feet 1 inch and 195 pounds, he doesn’t have the strongest arm in the world. “A lot of coaches go by that,” he said.

Bob Rose, the USFL’s former director of public relations, recalled Fusina as “probably the most efficient quarterback in the league, and he didn’t have the best talent at wide receiver.”

He did have Kelvin Bryant, an All-USFL running back who is now with the Washington Redskins.

But Peterson said: “Kelvin Bryant didn’t play 10 games for us in three years. He was always hurt or something. It’s because of Chuck that we won.”

Bad timing seems to haunt Fusina’s dealings with the NFL. He arrived at Tampa the year after they drafted Doug Williams in the first round.

“I threw five passes in three years,” Fusina said. “I didn’t get on the field. I didn’t improve. I sort of deteriorated as a player.

“In my fourth year I asked Coach (John) McKay to trade me and I went to San Francisco. I was there on a Wednesday or a Thursday and they had me in a game on Saturday. Then they said they had decided to keep only two quarterbacks and released me. That was the strike year (‘82), and I signed up with the Stars two weeks later.”

In that case, the timing was right. “I had a great time, enjoyed the game again and I made a good living,” Fusina said.

Even without the media exposure of the NFL, he never thought he was pursuing his career in a vacuum.

“I didn’t miss that at all,” he said. “I enjoyed playing. I enjoyed being successful. We were winning. It never meant anything to me whether there was an N or a US in front of the FL.

“I can remember playing in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday and there were maybe 3,000 in the stands. It was kind of funny to look up and see no one there, but once the game started it didn’t matter.

“My goal was to continue playing (in the USFL). I was comfortable. It gave those guys a chance because, let’s face it, the talent wasn’t there when it was starting, comparing it to a 60-year-old league, but it was coming. It was really coming. Anyone who watched it would know that it was.”

Fusina, who earned a marketing degree at Penn State, said that premature expansion and escalated salaries brought down the USFL. Was his own salary escalated?

“Not in the beginning,” he said. “In my first two years I was probably one of the lower paid starting quarterbacks (at $60,000 and $80,000). I did get a real good contract (worth $225,000) my third year and would have made it my fourth, fifth and sixth. But I understood when I signed that it might not be much longer.”

His contract was guaranteed only if the USFL continued to play.

So Fusina spends some of these days working out with a couple of former Star teammates.

“We throw the ball around and complain,” he said. “Every day it seems longer (since the last game). As far as I can, I’m staying in shape. It wouldn’t be too hard (to play) if I get a call.

“There are some guys I know that are gonna have some trouble coping with this because they thought the USFL was forever. It’s been depressing for me, and maybe a blow to my ego, but I have a boy, a wonderful family, and it can get me down for only so long. The last two weeks have been bad, but I’ve been kicked around before. I’ll get over it.

“It was tough times for some players and their families, constantly becoming optimistic, then hearing another story and going down. You’re going with it day by day, not knowing what was gonna happen. After 11 weeks of that you just wanted something to happen, good or bad. It didn’t matter anymore. You just wanted to get on with your life.

“I never put all those eggs in one basket. I’ll find a way to get money. I’ll work. I’m lucky with the financial situation I’m in now because of football. It really isn’t that bad for me.”

Fusina is no stranger to hard times. He grew up in eastern Pennsylvania--quarterback country--in the Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks. He was an only child and was fatherless after he was 4.

“I could see Three Rivers Stadium from my home on Mt. Washington,” he said. “It was just my mother and myself. (She) didn’t push me into anything, but she didn’t try to hide me away.

“A lot of mothers of an only child, if the father died, they’d say, ‘I don’t want you to go out there and get hurt.’ She was a big backer of mine. Still is.”

What Fusina finds most frustrating now is that somebody else is calling the plays.

“I’ve learned I’m not gonna wait for phone calls anymore,” he said. “I’m gonna make the phone calls and I’m gonna dictate what I’m gonna do from now on. I was being dictated to by other people, and that’s not gonna happen anymore.”

Fusina said that he visited Montreal and was offered a three-year contract by the Alouettes.

“I just wanted to see what the CFL was like, but it wasn’t for me,” he said. “I want to stay in the States. Going up there, I’d have fun. I’d be throwing the ball a lot. I’m not uppity about playing in the CFL, but I just had a gut feeling that that wasn’t the best thing for me at this particular time.”

If he has to face the rest of his life without football, though, he says he is ready. “I am if I have to. I’m upset that I have to. Every athlete wants to end a career when he’s ready and not when they tell you.

“I think I’m good enough. I’ll put what I did against what anyone else in our league did the last three years. That’s what disappoints me: that I didn’t even get that shot.”

Fusina said he may accept a job he has been offered, or he may just finish graduate school first. With those options, he is better off than most USFL refugees, except perhaps Doug Flutie.

Flutie is perhaps even less likely to play football again, considering the guaranteed $8-million deal with Donald Trump that he would have to forfeit.

“He’d be a fool if he did,” Fusina said. “He’s not gonna make that in the NFL. But he’s the least of my worries. He’s the only one of the 500 I don’t feel sorry for.”

Fusina said he feels sorriest for “the guys that have gone to schools where they didn’t stress academics. They’re either gonna have to go back to school or get some manual labor. Some people have some big mortgages and kids on the way.”

Outside the cafe, Fusina dropped some coins into a newspaper box, pulled out a paper and offered some dark humor.

“I want to see who got cut today,” he said.

Then, seriously: “It bothers me when these guys on TV joke about it. They don’t realize they’re talking about people’s lives.

“Anyone concerned with playing professional ball when they’re younger or going to college should prepare for this day. Sooner or later, it happens to everyone.”