Trump, page 49
The best Ed Koch could offer to mollify him were vague renovation promises that added only 10,000 seats and ninety-eight luxury boxes. After Hess received the city’s final proposal, his protracted silence was widely interpreted as a bad omen for the city. Koch appointed former governor Hugh Carey to head a New York City Sports Commission, and his main mission was to try to convince Hess to stay. Instead, Carey freely told friends that Hess was already “gone.”
With Hess’s departure appearing more and more likely, Donald opened talks with Duncan to buy the Generals. On September 1, 1983, Trump signed a nonbinding purchase agreement with Duncan in which he agreed to pay up to $5.3 million for the team over a period of six years. On September 22, with the word out that the Jets were going to Jersey, Trump announced his purchase of the Generals at a press conference, though the transaction hadn’t actually closed. Six days later, Koch declared an impasse and announced the departure of the Jets. On October 6, Hess’s agreement with the Meadowlands was made public. On October 18, Trump and Duncan finalized their deal, with Donald making a $1.2 million initial payment and signing promissory notes of $683,333 for each of the next six years, to be paid to Duncan so long as the Generals and the USFL survived. Donald personally guaranteed the payments.
The terms of the Duncan sale weren’t made public, and, like virtually all of Donald’s deals, the purchase price was misreported over the years, encouraged by the boastful Donald. He once even told a Fortune reporter that he’d paid between $4 and $5 million for the team, provoking a “minor crisis” at the league office. The price tag on an expansion team at the time was $6 million, and the Denver club had sold for $10 million, so Donald’s understated figure devalued all USFL franchises. Trump refused to correct the Fortune quote and other friendly profiles of him, written with his cooperation, suggested the price might have been as low as a million. To make himself look smart, he would not hesitate to make his league look broke.
The terms of the Duncan contract carried a blueprint of Donald’s grand plan for the league. The document anticipated a “merger or absorption of part or all of the USFL into any other league” and even the possibility that Donald or the Generals might receive a “consideration” for arranging such a merger. The only “other league” was the NFL. Instead of paying $70 million or more for an NFL franchise, as a near USFL owner did for the NFL’s San Diego team in 1984, Trump believed from the outset that he could invest a stretched-out $5 million for a USFL team, take a few years of losses, and then force his way into the big league, either by cutting a deal with Rozelle, forcing a merger of the two leagues, or winning an antitrust lawsuit.
But Donald did not plan to own the third-string NFL franchise in Jersey. Hess had agreed to a twenty-five-year lease in the Meadowlands, while the Generals were tied to the facility on a year-to-year basis only. With the Jets out of New York, Donald saw himself as the future owner of the only football franchise in the center of the largest media market in the world. He not only envisioned owning New York’s team, he pictured himself as the builder and owner of the city’s first football stadium. Trump understood what only a handful of others did at that time—that, with the advent of luxury boxes and leased seats, the real money to be made in football was not in a team, but in a stadium. As Donald saw it, his New York Generals would play in the Trumpdome—a facility that would manufacture money and be usable for the Olympics, major concerts, the NCAA’s Final Four, and a bonanza of other possible events.
Reaching this dual goal required a careful strategy. First, Donald had to steer the USFL into playing a fall schedule. He was convinced that spring football would forever be second-rate football, with second-rate revenues. No one would invest hundreds of millions of public or private dollars to build a stadium for a team that played football when Donald, and much of the rest of the most lucrative television market, was out on a golf course. If the league moved to the fall, theorized Donald, it would either get a new network contract—in which case the far larger fall television revenues would position the USFL to compete effectively with the NFL—or it would be passed over by the networks—in which case the USFL would have a viable antitrust suit against the NFL-network monopoly. In either event, Trump believed, Pete Rozelle and the NFL would be forced to the merger table, and if any USFL teams made it into the powerhouse league, Donald’s would be certain to be one of them.
Second, Donald had to secure a New York stadium for his team. The short-term option was Shea. So, unnoticed by the local media, new language was suddenly, and somewhat mysteriously, added to the Mets’ lease at Shea, permitting the fall use of the stadium by a USFL franchise.
But Donald’s long-term objective was to position himself with top state and city officials so that he would be able to push the concept forward and then take over the development of any stadium project. By the time Leon Hess formally announced his departure, the city and state had already actively begun to consider the construction of a new stadium. Hess had expressly sent that message—i.e., the necessity of one—as both an ultimatum and an invitation.
Hess hated leaving New York almost as much as he hated the thought of remaining at Shea. So when he declared his intention to move to New Jersey, he wrote Koch an open public letter, promising to return to New York in five years if a new stadium—a football stadium—was built. He concretized his intention to return by putting up a $10 million bond with the Meadowlands, which he would forfeit if he opted out of his lease there. He built a window of opportunity into the Meadowlands lease, giving New York until February of 1986, twenty-seven months in the future, to come up with “all necessary permits, detailed plans, authorizations, approvals and financing” for a stadium. If New York complied, Leon Hess, who considered his reputation as a man of his word a stodgy asset, “pledged to return.” Hess was so serious about this promise that the Jet offices and Jet practice field remained in New York; so did the team name.
The Hess window of opportunity made it imperative that Donald insinuate himself inside any New York stadium planning process so he could direct it in ways that maximized his own—rather than Hess’s—interests. As foreboding as a possible Jet return might be for his ultimate strategy, Donald recognized that the promise of it was a mixed blessing. The lure of a possible Jet return provided the impetus for public investment in a new stadium. The widely publicized Hess letter compelled some sort of concrete response from new governor Mario Cuomo, who’d succeeded Carey at the start of 1983, and from Koch, who was so angered by the Jets’ departure that he wrote Hess a letter threatening “an aggressive effort to negotiate with teams from the new leagues.”
Hess’s pledge had in effect created the stadium opportunity that Donald planned to expropriate, but bringing the Jets back was the government’s initial motive, never his own. Trump might have been willing to accept the Jets as a secondary tenant at his stadium, but it is the primary tenant in a football facility that reaps its greatest financial benefits. For example, the Mara family, owner of the Giants, was given control over seventy-two luxury boxes when the team became the first, and primary, tenant in the Meadowlands. At $40,000 apiece, the Maras collect $2.8 million a year that they don’t have to share with the visiting team or with anyone else. As a secondary tenant, Leon Hess receives nothing. The Maras controlled those boxes, even for Hess’s games. But the only way the Giant monopoly on luxury boxes could become an incentive for Hess to move to the Trumpdome was if he, not Donald, got a similar prime tenant package.
Donald, however, wanted prime tenancy for his Generals and, while he might be forced by circumstances to live with the Jets and share the facility, he never, over the course of the two-year stadium discussions, did anything to try to entice them. His objective was his own stadium for his own team.
These dual goals were mutually reinforcing. His NFL strategy had to succeed for his stadium strategy to succeed—meaning that he had to get the Generals into the NFL to get the city and state to go ahead with the stadium. Clearly, New York was unlikely to back the construction of a stadium for a struggling franchise in a struggling league. So even before he closed his deal with Duncan, he went public with a blast at the NFL, urging a USFL switch to a fall season in a September 30 New York Times story, the same day the Jets’ departure dominated the sports pages. Within two or three years, he said, the USFL would reach parity with the NFL and could “perhaps go head-to-head” with it. Adding that some USFL teams could already beat NFL teams, he said he was “talking to large numbers of people” and that “more NFL players” would be “coming over to the USFL.” It was the first time a USFL owner had openly talked about abandoning the spring concept and inducing NFL players to join the new league.
USFL Commissioner Chet Simmons was left with the responsibility of countering Donald’s brash statements, noting that “for the moment we are concentrating on building the league in its present format” and that the USFL “would be foolish to challenge an organization as well established as the NFL.” He branded Trump “an active young guy who is doing a lot of thinking, some of it off the cuff.” Little did Simmons realize that his newest owner had just announced what would—within eleven months—prove to be precisely the timetable and strategy adopted by the league.
A few weeks later, Trump went to Houston for the annual meeting of the league’s owners. Addressing his colleagues for the first time, Trump announced that he hadn’t joined the USFL to become a “minor league” player, and immediately launched his campaign for a switch to the fall, insisting that the TV dollars were there. The owners, who had cautiously carved out this spring niche for themselves, weren’t ready to accept his proposals, but they did vote to put this challenging new owner on their executive committee.
Donald next took the dramatic step of signing a string of first-rate players—Kansas City All-Pro free safety Gary Barbaro, Seattle cornerback Kerry Justin, and Cleveland quarterback Brian Sipe, the NFL’s most valuable player only three years earlier. On December 20, 1983, Donald announced the hiring of former Jet head coach Walt Michaels, a mortal enemy of Leon Hess. By the beginning of 1984 Donald had recruited six active starters from a variety of NFL teams, making a bigger splash than anyone in the USFL had in the league’s first two years of existence. Part of the league’s economic plan had been to keep salaries low, minimize superstar acquisitions, and slowly build a league. Donald was not about to be patient.
Myles Tannenbaum, one of the league’s founders and owner of the Philadelphia Stars, confronted Donald about the spending spree in mid-December. “I’m in the media capital of this country,” Donald replied. “When you’re in New York, you have to win.”
“Donald, in Philadelphia you have to win, too,” Tannenbaum retorted. “You have to win everyplace.”
“I need to win more,” Trump insisted.
At the end of December, Ted Taube, one of the USFL’s most vocal and successful owners, wrote Trump and two other leaders of the league a joint letter suggesting that the USFL could not “allow individual owners to pursue plans which are suited to their perceived best interests or whims” and citing Donald as his only example.
“It may be in Don Trump’s best interests,” Taube wrote prophetically, “to pursue a strategy which gains him leverage, politically or otherwise, to move to Shea Stadium and become the NFL franchise which the City of New York is apparently ready to underwrite at any price. But Don’s best strategy for the Generals could be devastating for the USFL as a whole.”
Donald plunged on, announcing on New Year’s Eve the signing of Giant All-Pro linebacker Lawrence Taylor, the NFL’s top defensive player. There was a catch—Taylor’s contract with the Giants ran until 1988, so Donald was only staking a future claim on him. The Taylor contract with the Generals had an option, however, permitting the Giants to buy it out, which they immediately moved to do, paying Trump a quarter of a million dollars and signing Taylor to a brand-new, six-year deal. The episode stirred a bonanza of publicity for Trump, as well as a tidy profit.
The only drawback was that Myles Tannenbaum, according to USFL rules, had the league’s exclusive rights to deal with any players out of the University of North Carolina, Taylor’s alma mater. Tannenbaum was furious, particularly since Trump had not even bothered to speak to him. Despite the concerns about Trump that were being voiced by some of the owners, his money and his media attention were still viewed as a plus, as were the ties he claimed to the top ABC brass. In early January, the executive committee abruptly stripped Commissioner Chet Simmons of his negotiating role with the network and made Donald the lead man. An owner for barely three months, Trump had already become the dominant force in the league’s bargaining with its key source of revenue.
Donald also wasted no time in launching his stadium campaign. On January 4, Governor Cuomo announced in his State of the State address that he wanted the Urban Development Corporation, the superagency that helped build the Hyatt in the seventies, to “undertake a comprehensive statewide study of the need for sports facilities.” A top Cuomo aide, Bill Eimicke, began a series of calls to UDC president Bill Stern, urging the creation of a Sportsplex subsidiary that would undertake the feasibility study sought by the governor, as well as begin to plan a city stadium and several upstate sports facilities. In these initial conversations, Eimicke suggested only one name for the new Sportsplex board: Donald Trump. Although Eimicke did not mention it to Stern, Trump had already spoken directly to Cuomo about building the stadium, and the governor was said to be “certainly interested in any ideas Trump has,” Eimicke told Stern. Eimicke also made it very clear that the governor wanted his administration, not the city’s, to take the lead on this project, putting it squarely on a fast track.
Eimicke’s calls were quickly followed by his statement to a New York Daily News reporter that the state was considering three possible sites for a New York City sports facility to compete with the Meadowlands. Trump’s name appeared in the same story—quoted as being in opposition to the three proposed sites and disclosing not only that he preferred another, unspecified site but that he planned to build the stadium himself. The notion of Trump building the stadium, and the Sportsplex concept itself, had debuted in the same story, just as he would have wanted it. The two ideas would remain linked in the public mind from then on.
When Stern called Donald to ask him to join the Sportsplex board, the developer said yes immediately. The day after their first conversation, on January 19, Stern and Trump held a perplexing press conference to announce the formation of the Sportsplex corporation and to name a single member of its new board. By the time the press conference was over, Donald was wearing three hats. In addition to his public role as a member of the board that would plan the stadium, he had already advertised his interest in building it—a possibility that Stern openly acknowledged could very well happen. Trump added that his Generals might become the stadium’s primary tenant, saying “one day you might want to ask me to move the team” to New York, but that otherwise he would not “instigate it.” No one in the media or the government seemed to notice the blatant conflict—sitting on an advisory public body charged with determining the need and viability of a stadium project was a man who wanted to both build it and install a team in it. Over the next month or so, ten other members were named to the Sportsplex board, including George Steinbrenner, who stalked out of the first full-board press conference in February when Donald started answering press questions, snapping, “This isn’t going to be a one-man show, or I’m not going to stick around.” Curiously, the board included one other USFL owner, whose team played in Michigan, but the only member with NFL ties was a former Jet player. Spurred by Donald’s behind-the-scenes recommendation, the board quickly hired Laventhol & Horwath as its primary consultant on a million-dollar feasibility study, and L&H retained the architectural firm of Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum. L&H had long been Donald’s accountants, and HOK would become Donald’s architects for his proposed stadium.
Meanwhile, Donald was proceeding inside the top ranks of the USFL with his campaign for a fall schedule. Two days before his press conference with Stern in January, Trump wrote letters to every USFL owner reiterating his arguments for a switch to the fall, invoking endorsements from Howard Cosell and Jimmy the Greek, both of whom, he said, gave the league “virtually no chance of failure” if the change of seasons occurred.
The letters, which anticipated that a fall season would “create psychological havoc with the NFL,” were delivered the same day the owners gathered in New Orleans for their annual meeting, where Trump quickly took the floor again. Urging that the owners not repeat his comments to the newspapers, Trump said a fall schedule would lead either to a league with television contracts that would make it just as strong as the NFL or to a merger—“and the merger is going to take place sooner rather than later.” Trump was so adamant, and the debate so acrimonious, that Commissioner Chet Simmons had to promise to appoint a committee that he euphemistically said would look into “long-range planning.”
The Philadelphia owner, Myles Tannenbaum, wrote a postmeeting letter to other owners assailing Donald’s “grand plan”—a forced merger—and warning that Trump “will do virtually anything to have his way.” Donald, he wrote, “came into the league knowing full well our direction and he is now trying to reshape it.” Tannenbaum also reported that the New York attorney installed by Donald as president of the Generals had told him that “obviously” not all the USFL teams would make it into the NFL as part of any merger and that the league itself would have to work out an arrangement to compensate the teams not included. “I have this vision of being patted on the head with an offer of thanks and perhaps something more if Donald has his way,” concluded Tannenbaum. Trump went away from the January meeting frustrated, but the desperate tone of Tannenbaum’s letter suggested that the tide was clearly running in Donald’s direction.
A profile of Donald that ran in an early February edition of Sports Illustrated certainly fed the fears about Trump—within the USFL and in the NFL. Labeling Trump “the biggest wheeler-dealer in all of sport” since his purchase of the Generals several months earlier, the article quoted Donald as saying he “could have had four or five NFL teams” but went to the USFL instead because he liked a “challenge” and because “the NFL is very vulnerable.” The article concluded with flat predictions that he’d build a stadium in New York and swing the USFL to the fall; it was only a matter of how soon.
