The New York Times Book Review - Jay Jennings
…Football for a Buck…fully earns its label of sports/humor/business/law/current events. Pearlman's enthusiasm for his subject is infectious and dates to the 1983 inaugural season of the United States Football League, a start-up spring professional league, featuring a team from his own home state of New Jersey…Pearlman was not quite 11 at the time. Thirty-five years later, he has channeled his youthful affection into a raucous, well-reported, supremely entertaining ripsaw of a story.
From the Publisher
Pearlman’s enthusiasm for his subject is infectious . . . He has channeled his youthful affection into a raucous, well-reported, supremely entertaining ripsaw of a story.”—New York Times Book Review “Endlessly fascinating . . . Pearlman proves to be the perfect person to write [the USFL’s] history . . . Football for a Buck is a hilarious, engrossing roller coaster of a book.” —NPR.org “Pro football is ripe for revolution. Luckily, Jeff Pearlman’s Football for a Buck offers a blueprint for change . . . The book will also please readers who sip bad ink about Donald Trump as if it were the finest wine.” —Wall Street Journal “Engrossing, eerily relevant.” —Time.com “Every bit as fantastic as you’d expect a Pearlman book to be, and you honestly don’t need to have spent time as a devoted USFL fan (as Jeff and I both were) to enjoy.”—Mike Vaccaro, New York Post “A wonderful, thorough, insightful look at a deeply weird moment in American football history. And it’s also a primer of sorts for this current deeply weird moment in American political history.” —Yahoo! Sports “Every bit as fantastic as you’d expect a Pearlman book to be, and you honestly don’t need to have spent time as a devoted USFL fan (as Jeff and I both were) to enjoy.”—Mike Vaccaro, New York Post “Tells in delightful detail the story of a long-gone pro football league. To call it just a sports book, though, sells it way short. Football for a Buck far transcends other sports books, making it contemporary and fun for anybody to read . . . The book is nothing less than painstakingly thorough, with dozens of zany and colorful stories about players and executives in a renegade league that quickly made its mark, frightening the mighty NFL . . . It is a thorough, funny, fascinating, and entertaining sports book.”—Forbes.com “As we’ve come to expect from Jeff Pearlman’s books, Football for a Buck is deeply reported, deftly told, smart, hilarious, sad, riveting — and prescient. Through the stories of USFL businessmen, coaches, benchwarmers, and stars who later became household names — Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, and yes, Donald Trump — Pearlman captures the troubled lavishness of mid-80s America and foreshadows so many of the issues that professional football — and the country — are experiencing today. Oh, and there’s a lot of sex and drugs.” —Seth Wickersham, ESPN The Magazine senior writer “If foreshadowing was passing yards this book would be Jim Kelly. A definitive history of a wild and wooly football league fondly remembered three decades after its demise; but also a definitive preview to the 45th president.” —L. Jon Wertheim, Sports Illustrated “When I started this book, I wasn’t interested in the USFL. By the time I fished it, I wanted a sequel, a USFL movie, and Tampa Bay Bandits action figures. Jeff Pearlman’s joy for this wild old league is contagious as hell. Great read. I’m in. GO MAULERS!!” —Kyle Brandt, cohost of NFL Network’s Good Morning Football “Wonderful anecdotes . . . Fascinating and hilarious reading on a half-dozen levels. Just great for football fans who like to laugh.”—Booklist, starred review
Kirkus Reviews
2018-07-30
Scathing, action-packed account of the rise and fall of spring football in the 1980s, with a familiar villain to the piece.
In 1961, writes Pearlman (Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre, 2016, etc.), a New Orleans-based art dealer and entrepreneur named David Dixon wondered why it was that the National Football League was so resistant to expanding outside of its existing franchises. His solution: to build a league for play in the "vast sports wasteland" of spring in those years before March Madness. Five years later, the United States Football League was born, though it would take another decade and a half before anything substantial came of it. The newborn league had rules meant to level the field among rich and poor teams, including caps on salaries and limits on how they were distributed among star players and workhorses. Said one team owner at the time, "we had a gentleman's agreement," adding, "of course, that's only OK as long as you have gentlemen agreeing." Enter Donald Trump, owner of the New Jersey franchise, who immediately began breaking those agreements and demanding that other owners subsidize him even as he revealed the depths of his ignorance about the game. Trump also began to press for the USFL to play not in spring but in fall, going up against the NFL and prompting speculation that he was really after an NFL franchise to call his own. In the end, the USFL collapsed—though, as Pearlman notes, it lives on in unexpected ways, including Trump's arrival in the White House. "Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie," writes the author, "he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall." If nothing else, Pearlman's fluently told story provides context for why the sitting president holds the NFL in such contempt—and why the sentiment should be richly returned.
Gridiron fans of all stripes will find this a fascinating exercise in the collision of money, entertainment, politics, and ego.
