When I asked him about reports that the USFL's hidden agenda was to eventually merge with the successful National Football League or at least pressure it into admitting some of the upstart franchises, he responded genially, "I hadn't thought of it to be perfectly honest," adding, "I don't think it's in the cards for many years."
Of course, Trump turned out to be the leader of a group of owners pushing the new league to shift its games to the fall, a direct challenge to the NFL. An anti-trust lawsuit against that league followed, ending in a Pyrrhic victory. The USFL received a judgment of $3 and collapsed, having lost tens of millions of dollars in the process.
It was all so Trumpian, so much the shape of things to come. Maybe I didn't take him seriously enough then because we both came from Queens, a scorned outer borough of New York City, or because he was already a well-known publicity hound and classic boldface tabloid name. But I did come away with two insights that helped me in later interviews with him (when the subject was real estate or politics): first, that he would always respond to a question, even a needling one, as long as he was its subject, and second, that he had a gift for what I came to think of as predatory empathy. He was remarkably skilled at reading what his interviewer wanted to hear and then reshaping himself and his answer accordingly.
Once he read me as a liberal with a weakness for pop philosophy, he typically answered a question about the moral responsibilities of sports owners by offering this supposed credo: "I tend to think that you should be decent, you should be fair, you should be straight, and you should do the best you can. And beyond that, you can't do very much really. So yeah, you do have a responsibility." Then, as if adding a note in the margins of his own bland comment, he added, "I'm not sure to what extent that responsibility holds."
Typically, he had swallowed his own tail and who knew what he meant, including him. Through the 1990s, as the host of a local PBS public affairs show and then back writing columns at the New York Times, I watched his mean-spirited pomposity swell as he filled airtime and notebooks. But what more could a journo ask?
Once, for reasons I can't recall, I returned to that supposed sense of "responsibility" of his, asking him if he'd like to "run the country as you have run your organization."
"I would much prefer that somebody else do it. I just don't know if the somebody else is there," he replied, as if already imagining January 20, 2017. "This country," he added ominously, "needs major surgery."
"Are you the surgeon?"
"I think I'd do a fantastic job, but I really would prefer not doing it."
I've thought about Donald Trump ever since -- he did have that effect on you -- and have come to realize that he's an avatar of the worst aspects of jock culture. (He had, in fact, been a good high school athlete.) His kind of boastful, bullying, blowfish persona is tolerated in locker rooms (as in sales offices, barracks, trading floors, and legislatures) just as long as the big dog can deliver. Which he has done. It's no surprise that his close pals and business associates in SportsWorld include two other notorious P.T. Barnums, boxing's Don King and wrestling's Vince McMahon (whose wife, Linda, is now Trump's pick to head the Small Business Administration).
Another typical jock culture trait is rolling over for the alpha(est) dog in your arena, be it the team leader, coach, owner, or even the president of Russia. One wonders, had Trump become a successful NFL owner, would he have wimped out as completely as New England Patriots' owner Robert Kraft did when Russian President Vladimir Putin pocketed his Super Bowl ring in 2005 and walked out of their Moscow meeting room with it. It was never returned. Under pressure from the George W. Bush White House, according to Kraft, he claimed it was a gift, only to change his story years later. Kraft is a Democrat, while his coach, Bill Belichick, and his quarterback, Tom Brady, are friends of Trump. The Patriots, the best team of our era, will, of course, be playing the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl.
A Jock Spring?
Colin Kaepernick, alas, won't be getting a Super Bowl ring, at least not this year. The 49ers, long a successful and lucrative franchise, ended up with a 2-14 record this season. The 29-year-old Kaepernick is a scrambler with a powerful arm. Once an exciting prospect who led his team to the Super Bowl in 2013, only his second pro season and first as a starter, he seemed to have lost some of his mojo in recent years.
He's still an interesting character, though: biracial, raised by white adoptive parents, smart, and curious. His torso and arms are tattooed with religious phrases, and he ostentatiously kisses the "To God the Glory" tat on his right biceps after any touchdown, which became known as "Kaepernicking."
His emergence as a progressive hero, however, surprised even Harry Edwards. "Nobody saw [Muhammad] Ali coming, nobody saw Kaepernick coming," Edwards told Elliott Almond of the San Jose Mercury News. "He was in the tradition of people who tend to open up new paths. Nobody saw Dr. [Martin Luther] King coming."
Putting Kaepernick in such a league may be a tad premature, but he has stimulated what might be called a Jock Spring, and not just because he promised to distribute his first million dollars in salary this season to community charities. Women soccer stars, high school football players and their coaches , National Football League and Women's National Basketball players all began going down on one knee as the national anthem struck up. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the gesture "dumb and disrespectful" before professing regret for her remark. Time put Kaepernick on its cover. Trump blamed him, in part, for a decline in the NFL's ratings.
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