Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL
By: Jeff Pearlman / Narrated By: Joel Richards
Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
Crazy players, crazy owners, just a fun and crazy ride
The United States Football League was a short-lived sports entity that was starting to become successful… but then… it met Donald Trump…!
Fear not, it’s not a Trump-bashing book but is mostly about the ups and downs of the fledgling league’s foray into professional sports with three crazy seasons during a particularly crazy times.
Here we find nutbag players living nutbag lives, all when cocaine, booze, and women were plentiful despite the fact that many of them were living on low salaries and traveling in beaten down school buses. Many a time, the teams were owned by businessmen who weren’t as flush in the pockets as they said they were, and many a time they’d be stuck after a game in a different city with no way to get back home because the airline had been stiffed.
Football For A Buck is a fluffy book, doesn’t take itself seriously, and is a good way to spend time, though it’s mostly a light listen. You’ll meet a plethora of sports heroes who went on to become football legends; you’ll meet a greater plethora of sportsmen who would’ve been parking cars were it not for the league; you’ll meet a multitude of fans who sat in the rain, the heat, in near blizzards, all for the love of a sport which gave the NFL a run for its money and which gave the NFL the 2-pt conversion, and call challenges. And at its demise, it gave the NFL some pretty whonking good players to absorb into the NFC and the AFC.
Make no mistake—Trump is indeed one of the nutbags, and his shenanigans are woefully familiar: drafting Doug Flutie and signing him to an incredibly exorbitantly priced contract and demanding that all the other owners pay for it sounds rather dismally like building a wall and demanding the other country pay for it. Bringing lawsuits and then behaving so erratically that, even though it wins it becomes a loss, well, that sounds pretty blightingly familiar too.
I enjoyed Football For A Buck, and I truly enjoyed its epilogue where Pearlman and his small yet fanatical fan of a son go out to hunt down one of the league’s most volatile players. It was touching in a funny yet sad sort of way. Kinda uplifting too.
Joel Richards is a fun narrator, pauses in all the right places just so you, the listener, can get a good hard laugh out of some of the situations.
A fun book, easy on the ears, not one that’ll make you think too hard, but it’s a good way to spend some time, especially if you’re into football or into irony (life without irony, isn’t much of a life at all, after all is said and done, right?). If you want zany? Here ya go!!!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.