DJT Killed the USFL, helped the NFL, and won $1 dollar! Make that $3 Dollars! 🤣🗽
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/sep/11/the-day-donald-trumps-narcissism-killed-the-usfl
"Beginning with the trial’s opening day, Rothman asked himself a single question: Who is my bad guy? He sought someone the jury would find difficult to believe and even harder to like. He sought someone with false bravado, with arrogance, with indifference. He didn’t want the jury to think about a sad little league going up against a powerful machine. No, he wanted the jury to see that the USFL, sympathy be damned, was its own Frankenstein. “The more I developed the strategy,” he said, “the more I wanted Donald Trump as my fall guy. I would call it Donald versus Goliath. I would make their scheme Donald’s plan, which it was. I would show that Donald Trump is not a little lightweight; he is one of the richest men in America . . . He was such a lousy witness for them, and a great one for us.”share
“The way Myerson set it up was perfect for [Rothman],” said Ehrhart. “It was big, bad Donald Trump trying to screw the poor little NFL people, who had worked so hard to build their league up.”
Early in the proceedings, the USFL called Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner, to testify as the trial’s first witness. Over the course of five interminable days, Myerson hammered Rozelle, pounded Rozelle, grilled Rozelle. In particular, he focused on Trump’s claim that the NFL commissioner promised him a franchise should he abandon/damage the USFL. There was, both sides agreed, a meeting held between Trump and Rozelle at the Pierre Hotel in March 1984. What happened, however, was of dispute.
“Didn’t you tell Mr Trump you wish he had been able to buy the Baltimore Colts and hadn’t gone into the USFL?” Myerson asked.
“No,” Rozelle replied.
“Did you tell him that if he hadn’t gone to the USFL, the USFL would have died?” Myerson asked.
“No,” Rozelle said. “Never.”
Lying under oath didn't serve DJT very well
Trump’s testimony was decidedly different. He said the hotel rendezvous was Rozelle’s idea, and recalled the commissioner saying, “You will have a good chance of an NFL franchise and, in fact, you will have an NFL franchise.” The tradeoff , according to Trump, was that the USFL remain in the spring and “not bringing a lawsuit.”
Trump insisted he and Rozelle were friends. Rozelle insisted he and Trump were certainly not friends. Trump insisted Rozelle wanted him in the NFL. Rozelle insisted he would rather have maggot-infected fungus overtaking his cranial lobe. “Rozelle told me I should be in the NFL, not the USFL,” Trump said. “At some point, he said, I would be in the NFL. Then he would reiterate that the USFL was not going to make it.”
Rozelle couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He made clear that it was Trump who reserved and paid for the Pierre suite. He told Rothman: “[Trump] said, ‘I want an NFL expansion team in New York.’ And he said, and I’m quoting him exactly, ‘I would get some stiff to buy the New York Generals, my team in the USFL.’” Unlike Trump, Rozelle was a meticulous note-taker, and he presented his documented recollections from the meeting.
Rothman’s cross-examination was a breathtaking ode to knowing your subject, and taking him apart, piece by piece. Wrote Richard Hoffer of the Los Angeles Times: “Rothman characterized Trump as the worst kind of snake who was selling his colleagues down the river so he could effect a merger of a few rich teams.” It wasn’t Trump’s words, so much as his swagger and irritability. The USFL was the little league trying to be big, but Trump didn’t seem little. Or sympathetic. Or, for that matter, believable.
“He did not do the USFL well,” recalled Patricia Sibilia, a juror. “Donald Trump and I actually got into a staring match. I would watch the people on the stand, trying to read them. So he and I started looking at each other, and he tried to stare me down. It was an obvious try at intimidation. And what’s funny, in hindsight, is that this so-called business genius ruined it for them. He was not believable in anything he said. He came off as arrogant and unlikeable.”
Rozelle’s cool, controlled testimony was Kryptonite to Trump’s apparent unhinged allergies to truth. Rothman asked, repeatedly, what motivated Trump’s actions, then showed the jury multiple documents – signed or written by the Generals’ owner – that alluded to a “merger” and “merger strategy.” Trump denied his motive was to have the USFL and NFL become one, but lacked credibility. “It was so obvious that’s what this was all about,” said Sibilia. “No question.”
When Rothman suggested Trump’s ultimate goal was to wind up with a valuable NFL organization, the reply was staggering. “I could have gotten into the NFL a lot easier than going through this exercise,” he said. “I could have spent the extra money and bought the Colts on many occasions.”
A historic level of eye rolling filled the courtroom. Trump was lying.