Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018 - Business & Economics - 366 pages
From a multipleNew York Times bestselling author, the rollicking, outrageous, you-can't-make-this-up story of the USFL

The United States Football League--known fondly to millions of sports fans as the USFL--was the last football league to not merely challenge the NFL, but cause its owners and executives to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, 1983-85. It secured multiple television deals. It drew millions of fans and launched the careers of legends. But then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner--a New York businessman named Donald J. Trump.The league featured as many as 18 teams, and included such superstars as Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Reggie White, Doug Flutie and Mike Rozier.

InFootball for a Buck, the dogged reporter and biographer Jeff Pearlman draws on more than four hundred interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America. From 1980s drug excess to airplane brawls and player-coach punch outs, to backroom business deals, to some of the most enthralling and revolutionary football ever seen, Pearlman transports readers back in time to this crazy, boozy, audacious, unforgettable era of the game. He shows how fortunes were made and lost on the backs of professional athletes and also how, thirty years ago, Trump was a scoundrel and a spoiler.

For fans of Terry Pluto'sLoose Balls or Jim Bouton'sBall Four and of course Pearlman's own stranger-than-fiction narratives,Football for a Buck is sports as high entertainment--and a cautionary tale of the dangers of ego and excess.
 

Contents

1 Origins
1
2 Albert C Lynch
17
3 Herschel
39
Act One
51
4 Seasonal
53
5 Weathering a Storm
69
6 Title Dreams
82
Act Two
101
12 Movement
205
13 Wobbling
224
14 Blank Guns
238
15 Hookers Have Business Cards?
262
16 Cancer
280
17 Legal Eagles
292
18 Suspended
310
Act Four
323

7 Craziness
103
8 The Saviors
120
9 Wild Fields
142
10 Gerbils and Snowballs
163
11 Falling
177
Photographs
203
Act Three
204
19 Reunion
325
Back Matter
329
Back Flap
367
Back Cover
368
Spine
369
Copyright

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About the author (2018)

JEFF PEARLMAN is the New York Times best-selling author of eight books, including Gunslinger, Showtime, Sweetness, Boys Will Be Boys, and The Bad Guys Won.

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