Of Pilgrims, Turkeys and Wayward Rams

Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.

End over end, neither left nor right.

Kick me, Lord, kick me through those righteous uprights.

Drop-kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.

--From a hymn by Paul Craft

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With Thanksgiving but a day away, it’s only proper to talk a little football. This, of course, is a sore subject in Los Angeles, home of the Empty Stadium. Still, tradition is tradition and, somewhere along the way, the National Football League has taken possession of Thanksgiving, just as it previously locked up the rights to Sunday afternoon and Monday night.

Tomorrow, in homes across America, the traditional family dinner will be preceded by the now equally “traditional” family sit-down in front of the tube. Together as one, the nation will feast on John Madden’s zip-bam-boom shtick and make belching noises whenever Deion Sanders and his millions come up. To do otherwise would desecrate the memory of the original Pilgrims, who, after all, braved an ocean in order to relocate their franchise.

Not wanting to join the Turkey Day party empty-handed, I paid a visit earlier this week to a friend named Harry Usher, a participant in one of the land’s more telling football sagas. To citizens of Los Angeles, Usher is familiar: He managed the wildly successful 1984 Olympics. To football fans, he is a trivia piece: the former commissioner of the not so wildly successful United States Football League.

It was the USFL--the “upstart” USFL, to employ the obligatory sports page modifier--that made the last serious attempt to loosen the National Football League’s monopolistic control over professional football. In due time, the league was crushed. Hardly anyone wept for the upstarts at the time, a decade ago. They might, however, consider weeping now--especially in cities, such as Los Angeles, which have watched their NFL teams wander away, chasing the lucre needed to keep a squad supplied in fancy-footed cornerbacks.

*

While running the USFL, Usher had a provocative, if simple, theory, and he shared it with anyone who would listen: U.S. senators, journalists, federal jurors. He maintained that the problem facing professional sports, especially football, was not over-saturation, as the established leagues sometimes claim. Rather, it was scarcity. Football, and the nation, needed more teams, not fewer.

The NFL, naturally, did not agree. NFL officials and owners knew that, by limiting franchises, they accomplished many things at once. They inflated the value of teams, ensuring a future windfall for owners who sold. They made team-less cities lust crazily after them; municipalities too poor to field a decent police force would promise fortunes to secure a squad of pigskin-chasers. They could tease members of Congress with vague promises of future expansion, thus greasing the way for valuable antitrust exemptions.

Television networks would pay outrageous sums for broadcast rights to the only show in town. Only the best of the best athletes would be able to play, theoretically improving the product. And over time, what once was regarded a sport of louts, on a par with pro wrestling, would take its place as one of the nation’s most popular religions.

A second league would wreck the whole deal. And so--in the theory of a subsequent USFL lawsuit--the NFL and its owners set out to destroy the heretics, effectively forcing the USFL off television, out of the sports pages and into oblivion, drop-kicked. And thus was the Mother League saved. Except . . .

*

Except, a decade later, Usher’s warnings about artificial scarcity have begun to come true. Franchise lust by cities has gone over the top. Fevered by fantastic offers, owners who once banded together have begun to break ranks and chase the bucks willy-nilly. Television executives and advertisers are nervous, as teams abandon top market cities for lesser ones (sorry, St. Louis). Athletes marketed as gods have begun to demand, and get, ungodly salaries, increasing the financial pressures.

In short, things are unraveling a bit for the NFL. Would it have been different if the USFL had survived? Usher isn’t positive: “If the league had succeeded, perhaps the pressure on various cities to bid for NFL teams--disrupting the stability of the league--would have been lessened.”

Perhaps Phoenix would have learned to love its USFL franchise. Thus, the Cardinals would have made do in St. Louis, leaving the Rams in Anaheim. And so forth. Perhaps, too, a greater abundance of teams would have made football seem a more modest pastime, less holy. Players, even Deion, might have found themselves on a slightly lower pedestal. The problem with this scenario, of course, is that no one would have made as much money. And in the church of the NFL, that’s a mortal sin. Zip, bam, boom.