re: Malcolm Jenkins is butthurt

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Trump is keeping it in the news for two reasons. First, payback because the NFL owners rejected his desire to buy the Buffalo Bills.

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It goes back even further than his attempt to by the Buffalo Bills. Trump went behind the backs of his fellow USFL owners & tried to broker a deal to force a merger like the NFL/AFL. Trump went against the wishes of the majority of USFL owners concerning a merger. Trump also angered the original commissioner Pete Rozelle during their meeting to the point where Rozelle told Trump he would never own a NFL team. Almost 40 years later, it still seems like Trump is holding a grudge against the NFL.

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It was Trump's undying need to get into the NFL that drove the billionaire to buy his way into the upstart league in the '80s, the author said. But the big league wasn't a fan.

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In the course of Trump's NFL pursuit, he made a fair number of enemies at the USFL and helped shuttle the league to an early grave. He convinced other USFL owners to challenge the NFL directly in the fall, and then led the charge on an anti-trust lawsuit against the football giant that netted a massive...three dollars. The USFL was dead by '85. 

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The USFL started, its first season was 1983, but the planning was a little earlier and they were initially trying to get owners for different franchises; they knew obviously they needed a New York team. Their thinking was: “We need New York, we need Chicago, we need L.A.” They went to Trump, after he expressed interest. And [in] one of the very early owner meetings in San Francisco, a bunch of the owners met in a room to go over league plans. Trump wasn’t there but he was going to check in via conference call. So they’re all gathered around and the phone rings and it’s Trump. He basically says, “Yeah, so, um, I decided I’m not doing this. Sorry. See ya. Bye.” That was it.

He did not get involved then, initially, and they really felt they were screwed for a while because they needed a New York team. They got a guy named J. Walter Duncan, who was an Oklahoma oilman, to run the New York franchise. So the Generals existed the first year under J. Walter Duncan. And then Duncan didn’t want to do it anymore because he was literally flying every week from Oklahoma to New York for football. So he put the team up, Donald Trump bought it and that’s how he got in.
The thing that’s important is: His motives were ridiculously awful in hindsight. I mean, his goal was to have an NFL franchise. He tried buying the Baltimore Colts a couple years earlier, didn’t get them. He wanted an NFL franchise and he saw this as a way to do it. He talked all happy-happy about the USFL and spring football until he got the team. And as soon as he got the team he was angling in every way possible to move them to fall to take on the NFL, so his team, somehow, would be absorbed by the NFL.

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He didn’t give a shite about the other owners. Like, at all. Did not care. No interest, whatsoever. His goal was to get in the NFL. If it took a merger, so be it. If it took the entire USFL collapsing and he gets an [NFL] team, that’s fine too. 

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First he had the Colts, which didn’t end well. But he was very young then, so, whatever. Then, this is kind of funny actually, [in] 1988 the New England Patriots were for sale. And the Sullivan family actually sort of gave him the first chance to bid on the team. He decided against it because he didn’t want to inherit the debt that the Patriots owed. So basically Victor Kiam of Remington, the razor company, ended up buying the New England Patriots. And not that long after that [current owner] Bob Kraft bought them. It would have been the greatest investment in Donald Trump’s life because the Patriots now are the second-most-valuable team in pro football. But he didn’t do it.
Then the Bills [in 2014]. He low-balled the Bills offer. He could have had the Bills and he got outbid. The winning bid was $1.4 billion and he bid $900 million and he lost out.

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He’s clearly not a guy to let slights go and the NFL has rejected him repeatedly.

So, this is kind of a big thing that a lot of people didn’t know about. Trump held a secret meeting with Pete Rozelle, who was commissioner of the NFL, in 1984. At the Pierre Hotel in New York City, Trump paid for the suite, told Rozelle he wanted to meet to talk. Rozelle had known him casually over the years. They meet and Trump is basically offering to do whatever it takes, “I’ll leave the USFL, I don’t need them, blah blah blah, to join the NFL."

Rozelle didn’t know that’s why they were meeting. I interviewed a guy who was at the meeting and he was like, “Rozelle said to him, ‘You will never be an owner in the NFL. As long as I’m affiliated with the NFL or my family is affiliated with the NFL, you will never have a team in the NFL.’” Because they just saw him as this scumbag huckster. He was this New York, fast-talking, kind of con-man. You know? He was just a huckster and they didn’t really want that.

It’s almost like that line in Titanic, “Old money, new money,” where Molly Brown was like new money so nobody wants to talk to her. Trump was new money and he was classless. 

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Trump, the USFL, the NFL & Pete Rozelle