I was just watching the 30 for 30 documentary Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL? and they had a scene about a publicity stunt that was held at a USFL game in 1985. Apparently the Tampa Bay Bandits had a contest where if they sold out the stadium, one random audience member would win a million dollars. As it turned out, there was one sell-out after this contest started.
The movie had already established the league was having financial problems and some teams were going broke. So the winner didn’t actually get handed a million dollars - he was given an annuity that would pay him $50,000 a year for a period of twenty years. Not bad except there was an additional catch - the start of the annuity was delayed for twenty years.
John Bassett, the owner of the Tampa Bay Bandits who started the contest, sold the team and died later that same year. And the league itself collapsed at the end of the 1985 season.
I did a little research and the winner was George Townsend. But I couldn’t find out if he received his first check in 2005 as scheduled.
A contest like that is usually insured, so I suspect, though I cannot be sure, that the guy is getting paid, assuming he is still alive. When you see big money contests like that or the typical halftime hit-it-from-halfcourt contests it’s a company contracted to cover the costs should it actually happen.
Also, there is at least one person who was still getting paid from the USFL recently. Steve Young signed a personal services contract with the owner of the LA Express rather than a standard player contract and got a long-term annuity that was still paying 20+ years after the league folded.
EDIT: Or not. Wikipedia says that Young took a lump sum of a million dollars to buy out the annuity. Too bad. The news was reporting on that annuity a few years ago, I thought he was still getting it. Guess not.
That’s what I was wondering. If the Bandits had been required to set up an annuity with an outside company or if they were contracting to provide the prize money out of future assets (which presumably would make Townsend one of the creditors who got nothing after the team went bankrupt). From the Bandits’ point of view, I’m sure they would have preferred the latter alternative back in 1985 when finances were tight. But they might have been legally mandated to follow the former.
Interestingly, it appears the USFL is not completely dead. A company has bought the rights to the league and has announced it plans on reviving the league in the next year or two.
This time, they’re working with the NFL rather than going the independent route. Of course, the WLAF tried that and they failed in the end (although they managed to struggle along for seventeen years).
Some speculations is that’s what killed the USFL. Rather than trying to maintain a strong league, some USFL owners (Trump) just wanted to create a strong enough team that they could make the jump to the NFL.
In the ESPN film “Small Potatoes”, broadcaster Keith Jackson says he thought the big mistake was the second year when they expanded from 12 to 18 teams. In the 1960s, the AFL kept the same number of teams for 6-7 years so they could concentrate on finding out which markets worked and which didn’t (Dallas, Los Angeles).
It is impossible to feel sympathy for a doofus like Donald Trump but I always find it interesting that he and the USFL owners WON their anti trust case against the NFL. The thing was, they didn’t get the huge money you associate with winning such cases. Just a token $1 that was tripled.
I enjoyed watching the USFL games, they were entertaining and the league wasn’t as stuffy (Wide receiver Anthony Carter was allowed to wear “1” as he did at University of Michigan. later on when he went to the NFL he was forced to wear “81” under the uniform numbers policy the NFL has. But at 18 games the season was too long.
Also history shows that spring/summer leagues such as the WFL and Arena Football ultimately fail. Maybe doofus Donald is right when he says football is an autumn sport.