Excerpted from Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL. Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Pearlman. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Following a rocky debut season in 1983, the USFL had high hopes for its championship game between the Philadelphia Stars and Michigan Panthers at Denver’s Mile High Stadium. Everything went perfectly right—until something went horribly wrong …
Back in the 1980s, the Super Bowl was something of a joke.
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It’s an easy little detail to forget decades later, but of the seven Super Bowls played between 1977 and 1983, five were decided by 10 points or more. The games were often dull and sloppy, featuring one team far superior to the other. Every time a Super Bowl turned into a snoozer, Pete Rozelle knew the critics would be lurking, anxiously waiting to take a bat to the multibillion-dollar league.
Chet Simmons, sports television impresario before all, considered this to be one of the biggest chinks in the NFL’s armor. So, in the advance to the first-ever USFL championship game (nicknamed “the Game with No Name” by members of the media), to be held on July 17, 1983 at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, the commissioner committed the league to putting on the greatest show imaginable. No, he couldn’t influence the on-field quality of Michigan-Philadelphia. But he could make the weeklong lead-up to the event exciting, interesting, engaging. The two teams arrived in Denver on Monday, July 11, and Simmons was determined to have the experience feel exactly like the Super Bowl. That’s why he arranged for beat writers to travel on team planes to Denver (alas, as they prepared to board a handful of Panther scribes were bumped because of overcrowding and forced to find their own transportation). That’s why he headquartered the working media at the beautiful Regency Hotel at a drastically reduced rate. It’s why the league rented a fleet of vehicles for working reporters, and featured an around-the-clock press center fully loaded with food, drinks, assistants. It’s why there was a swank pre-championship-game cocktail party on the 72nd floor of a new downtown high-rise. (The building, still under construction, led Simmons to note: “Just like our league. Not quite finished, but a marvelous, marvelous view.”) This was followed, one night later, by an open-to-the-public-for-$100 black-tie gala with some of the league’s superstars. More than 700 people attended. For many, the week would serve as an introduction to the USFL as a major-league sports and entertainment entity. Everything had to be right.
And then . . .
The calls to reporters came late Monday night, from one sports editor after another. The news had just been leaked that Stanford quarterback John Elway, the No. 1 overall pick in the recent NFL Draft, would be reporting to his new team, the Denver Broncos, for his first day of training camp in Greeley, Colorado, on Tuesday morning. The orders were clear: to hell with the USFL — get to Elway. “So all of those cars we rented the media were used to go to Greeley,” said Doug Kelly, the USFL coordinator of information. “Meaning we were paying money to help people cover the NFL.”
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“Every single one of us got in our cars and drove to see Elway for a day and a half,” said Harvey Araton of New York’s Daily News. “During that small time period the USFL got zero attention. It didn’t exist.” Elway stole any and all coverage, so much so that the Associated Press began the article, headlined ELWAY MAKES BIGGEST SPALSH AS CAMPS OPEN, with, “The first huddle at the Denver Broncos training camp was a massive one and only one player was in it. The rest were media types clawing over each other.”
Were that not dispiriting enough, on the same day the AP story led off sports pages across the nation, a smaller piece USFL TITLE MAY RESEMBLE REGULAR GAME, also ran. The theme: nobody much cared about the championship clash.
It was true. The vast majority of journalists assigned to the event didn’t want to be there (“It was a case where the paper needed somebody — and I was somebody,” said Araton), and knew nothing about the Stars and Panthers. The City of Denver hardly helped, refusing the USFL’s request to place sod on worn parts of Mile High’s field.
Yet as the week progressed, intrigue built. There was tons and tons of color. When reporters covered a Super Bowl, they were shackled by the rigid NFL media mechanisms, which meant almost no potential for one-on-one time with participants. The USFL, on the other hand, was all-access, all the time. The league’s PR staff desperately sought attention, and would give journalists everything they requested.
In the lead-up to the title game, much of the media focus was devoted to the two starting quarterbacks—contrasting narratives that offered riveting insight into alternate paths toward professional football. Chuck Fusina, the Stars’ signal caller, epitomized the football lifer gifted one last shot by a new enterprise. Back in 1978, he wrapped his career at Penn State (one that saw him go 29-3 as a three-year starter) by finishing second to Oklahoma’s Billy Sims in Heisman Trophy voting. Although his successes were undeniable, his mediocre arm strength and genteel nature turned off NFL scouts. By the time Tampa Bay selected Fusina with the 133rd overall pick in the fifth round, the label was clear. He was a lifelong caddy, and little more. “(Fusina is) a go-fer,” wrote Alan Goldstein in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “who wears the headset and carries the clipboard.” In three years as Doug Williams’s backup with the Buccaneers, Fusina attempted five passes, completing three. In the lead-up to the 1982 season he was traded to San Francisco. “But they had Joe Montana,” Fusina said. “I played in the last preseason game, but they told me they could only keep two quarterbacks, and I was third.”
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San Francisco released Fusina, but urged him to hang tight until the beginning of the season. “I started wondering if I could play anymore, or if I really wanted to,” Fusina said. “I was seriously thinking of going back to school and getting my master’s degree in business.”
Then, one day, Carl Peterson called. The Stars’ general manager had been urged by Joe Paterno, Fusina’s coach at Penn State, to give him a shot. “The guy doesn’t have the greatest arm strength,” Paterno said. “He doesn’t throw a tight spiral, he’s not real fast, he looks bad in a uniform. But he finds a way to win, and he keeps guys like you and me employed.” Peterson heard enough. He reached out to Fusina and spoke about this new league, with cool duds and inventive ideas and a team — the Stars — located in his home state. “You’ll get an opportunity to play,” the general manager said.
“I’m in,” Fusina said. “That’s all I need to hear.”
He captured the starting job, and played with the pedestrian gusto of an accountant. Fusina threw for 15 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, and the most exciting thing about him was his ode-to-John-Oates mustache. Otherwise, his game was slants and timing patterns and screens. “Chuck couldn’t throw the ball 80 yards down the field,” said Scott Fitzkee, his No. 1 wide receiver at Penn State and with the Stars. “But he had the smarts, he had the feel, he read defenses very well. Maybe he didn’t have NFL intangibles. But he was the perfect USFL quarterback.”
The Stars were the USFL’s most intriguing franchise. The offensive line featured the six-foot-seven, 300-pound Irv Eatman. Kelvin Bryant, the magnificent halfback, had a diamond stud in his left ear and a game just as ashy. Sam Mills was the USFL’s answer to Dick Butkus; he paired him with fellow linebacker Vince DeMarinis to give Philadelphia two starters from tiny Montclair State. “We played in front of 150 people a game in college,” said DeMarinis. “On a good day.” Even the Stars’ sales office would prove noteworthy — sitting at side-by-side desks, charged with selling tickets, were former Eagles wide receiver Vince Papale and future Villanova men’s basketball coach Jay Wright. “It felt like starting something great, where we were all in it together,” said Wright. “I played on the Stars basketball team, I hung out with Vince. I even met my wife (Patty, a Stars cheerleader). Best time ever.” There was also a pair of brothers on the offensive line, Brad and Bart Oates, who lived together in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and commuted to practice in a junky Chevrolet they bought for $300. “One day in South Philly the tires caved in,” said Brad, a starting tackle. “We got out, looked at the car, grabbed our stuff, and just left it there abandoned in the middle of the road. That was quite a moment.”
In Denver the attention went toward Fusina, as it did his 180-degree opposite—Bobby Hebert (a.k.a. the Cajun Cannon) of the Panthers. If the Philadelphia quarterback’s arm was a tricycle, Hebert’s was a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. If the Philadelphia quarterback’s story was rags to riches, Hebert’s was slums to even greater riches. He was born and raised 32 miles south of New Orleans in the town of Cut Off, Louisiana (population: 3,500), and after leading South Lafourche High to a state championship, he attended Northwestern State–Louisiana, a Division II school in Natchitoches. Because 1983 was the year of the quarterback (five were selected in the first round of the NFL Draft), Hebert fell between the scouting cracks. Teams came to Natchitoches to watch him throw, but the competition was suspect and the other available quarterbacks (beginning with Stanford’s Elway and Pittsburgh’s Dan Marino) dazzling. “I went to the NFL Combine in Florida,” Hebert said. “Gil Brandt was there, and he told me if I did well I might be drafted in the second or third round.”
“Well, is there anything the NFL can guarantee me?” Hebert asked. Brandt laughed. “That’s not how it works,” he replied.
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When the Panthers selected Hebert with their third-round pick, then offered an $80,000 signing bonus and $70,000 contract, he jumped. There were 13 quarterbacks at the team’s Daytona, Florida–based training camp, almost all of whom had played at bigger college programs. Yet Hebert was, literally, hungry. He and his wife, Teresa, had an infant daughter, Ryan, and lived on food stamps. “I was broke,” he said. “My father’s a civil engineer and my mother’s a schoolteacher. My daddy would have supported me but I believe when you get married you should break away from your family.”
Jim Stanley, the Panthers coach, named Hebert the starter based on his otherworldly arm strength and linebacker size (six foot four, 210 pounds), but his rise came accompanied by a unique problem. Like many Cajuns, Hebert’s family was largely French-speaking. His grandmother Birdie was incapable of communicating via English and his father, Bobby Senior, did not learn the language until reaching elementary school. “My dad graduated from LSU, is a wizard in trigonometry, calculus,” Hebert said. “But you hear him speak and wonder if he even went to high school.” As was the case with his father, words from Bobby Junior’s mouth appeared to be spoken in some far-removed Klingonian dialect. His roommate with the Panthers was Mike Hagen, a fullback out of the University of Montana. At the end of his first day in camp, Hagen called his wife, Ann, and said, “It’s weird. The guy plays football but he’s not from America.” In the huddle, wide receivers and halfbacks stood irregularly close to their quarterback, and often broke without a clue of what to do next. In the case of an opposing defense’s safety blitz, for example, Hebert was supposed to yell, “Snake! Snake!” Only he was unable to enunciate the s before the n, and “Snake! Snake!” became “Nake! Nake!”
“What the hell is a nake?” said Derek Holloway, a Panthers wide receiver. “We had to change the word because he just couldn’t say it.”
“I was from Georgia, so that made me the closest guy, geographically, when it came to understanding Bobby,” said Matt Braswell, the center. “He wasn’t Cajun, he was straight coon-ass. If the game was getting closer, he’d get more excited. And if he got more excited he became harder and harder to understand. We’d be in the huddle, Bobby would kneel down and say what he had to say. Nine guys would look at him and as soon as he was done talking they’d turn to me to translate.”
Before long Hebert was the USFL’s best quarterback. He ranked first in touchdown passes (27), third in passing yardage (3,568), and third in completion percentage (57 percent). Even if reporters only grasped every third word, he still made for top-shelf copy. His outfit at press conferences always included a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. He told teammates that, in his neck of the woods, shrimp boots were called Cajun Reeboks. “He was the friendliest guy around,” said Paul Keels, the Panthers’ play-by-play announcer. “If you didn’t like Bobby Hebert, you didn’t like people.”
On tape, Stars coach Jim Mora didn’t like Hebert. Or his fleet wide receivers, Holloway and Anthony Carter. Or halfback Ken Lacy, who ran for 1,180 yards and six touchdowns. Michigan was loaded, and Curt Sylvester, who covered the Lions and Panthers for the Detroit Free Press, was convinced the city’s USFL team would trounce the NFL team. That’s why Mora was terrified. That’s also why, in the days approaching kickoff, he worked his team excessively hard. It was Young Coach in a Panic 101, and the small handful of the Stars who had once played for the Philadelphia Eagles recognized the look. Two years earlier, in the lead-up to Super Bowl XV in New Orleans, Eagles coach Dick Vermeil put his men through, in the words of Philadelphia Daily News columnist Ray Didinger, “long meetings, longer practices and an unrelenting passion that le his players numb.” By the time kickoff arrived, the Eagles were mentally and physically drained. They lost to the inferior Oakland Raiders, 27–10. “I did the same thing,” Mora said years later. “I worked us too hard. I wanted to establish a mindset of toughness, of keeping what we had going. Instead, I tired them out. That’s on me.”
To the NFL’s surprise, 59,906 fans entered Mile High Stadium on a perfectly mild and gorgeous Sunday evening. The USFL championship game was, at long last, a thing, and even though it wasn’t a sellout (“The first Super Bowl didn’t sell out, either,” a league official told members of the press), and even though the local fire marshal rejected Simmons’s request for fireworks, the feeling was . . . “big and important,” said Fusina. “It felt like we were there for a special moment in time.”
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After a handful of skydivers landed in the middle of the stadium and cheerleaders from the Gold, Panthers, and Stars performed a choreographed routine and trumpeter Al Hirt played the national anthem, the captains met at mid-field for the toss of (inexplicably) a coin from the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Bill Parkinson, the referee, flipped the money into the air and the Stars, in red jerseys, chose to receive the kickoff. As Novo Bojovic placed the football on a red tee and stepped back, the attendees let loose with a thunderous sound. “The stands were made of wood,” said Ray Bentley. “And the fans were stamping hard on that. It got really loud.” Fusina was right — this did feel big and important, surely not altogether unlike the first-ever Super Bowl 16 years earlier.
The greatest fear among Simmons and his loyalists was a subpar game. The USFL would find a way to explain disappointing ratings or underwhelming attendance. But an up-and-down season could not wrap with a 43–7 yawn fest. It just couldn’t. “The league wanted a show,” said Hebert. “That was clear.”
It took a while. The Panthers jumped out to a seemingly insurmountable 17–3 third-quarter lead on the strength of Hebert’s two scoring passes to Holloway. Unbeknownst to the media, during the week Hebert had received a telephone call at the hotel from a man who said, come Sunday, the quarterback would “die by high-powered rifle.” The Panthers were concerned, but Hebert was not. “There was nothing I could do about it,” he said. “I wasn’t gonna play in a bullet-proof vest.”
Then, something snapped. The Stars drove down the field midway through the third period, endured a missed 34-yard field goal from David Trout, but moments later had another drive, capped by a successful 28-yard boot. It was the first sign of positivity for Philadelphia, and the momentum continued when, 8:49 into the fourth quarter, Willie Collier, a wide receiver out of Pittsburgh, soared through the air to snag a 21-yard touchdown throw from Fusina. With the successful two-point conversion, the score was 17–14 and the feel of the game shifted. The sun had set. The lights were bright. The stadium grew louder. People had waited for the Stars to play like champions, and finally they were. In the ABC booth, Keith Jackson and Lynn Swann shifted in tone and approach. A blowout was no longer a blowout. Philadelphia had arrived, and they were about to take over.
With 3:11 remaining in the game, the Panthers found themselves with the ball at the Stars’ 48-yard line. It was second down and 10, and one play earlier Lacy had taken a handoff from Hebert, only to be slammed to the ground by Mike Lush, Philadelphia’s bone-shaking safety. Lacy spent the next few minutes writhing on the turf in pain. On the Stars’ sideline, Fitzkee told ABC’s Tim Brandt that his team was about to win. “We have the confidence,” he said. “If our defense gets the ball, I think we’ll go down the field and score.”
Now, after the injury delay and a Stars’ timeout, Hebert stepped to the line. Holloway, quick and undersized, stood wide left. Carter, speedy and lean, went far right. Halfback John Williams and fullback Jim Hargrove positioned themselves behind the quarterback. The play call was split right A44 pass corner 2—a quick sideline throw to Carter. With the snap, Lush came charging across the line as Hebert looped to his right, cocked back his arm, and, after taking two quick stop steps, red a laser to Carter 30 yards away. The fleet wide receiver, weighing but 168 pounds and wearing uniform No. 1, caught the ball, spun inside, stutter-stepped, and burst past strong safety Scott Woerner and cornerback Antonio Gibson, both of whom tumbled to the ground. Carter dashed down the field and, as he crossed into the end zone, raised the pigskin in his right hand atop his helmet and into the darkness. “Nobody could catch him,” said Eatman. “He was lightning.”
Carter leaped into the arms of center Wayne Radloff and tossed the ball into the stands. (“You know, I think I should have kept that,” Carter later lamented.) The rest of Michigan’s offensive players joined the party, with Bojovic, all 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds of him, clinging to the back of a lineman like a koala to a tree. Jackson’s call — “Hebert gets it away . . . Carter’s there . . . first down… he’s loose… he’s got some help… he’s going for the corner… touchdown! Whoa!”—was perfect in its simplicity, and in the blink of an eye the oft-maligned USFL had its signature moment. Hebert would win the game’s MVP award, but Carter (9 catches, 179 yards) was the hero. “I am No. 1 and the team is No. 1,” Carter said afterward. “There is nothing better than that.” A late Stars’ touchdown mattered not, and Michigan, with a 24–22 triumph, was the USFL’s first champion. After his team stormed into the locker room, Stanley received a congratulatory call from President Ronald Reagan aboard Air Force One. Magic Johnson, the Michigan native, entered to supply hugs and high fives. There was champagne aplenty.
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“My grandma bought 27 tickets to the game, so I had everyone there,” said Hebert. “She’d never even been on a plane before, and now she’s watching me win a championship. The win, the ring, the togetherness — it was all that a guy could imagine.”
For Hebert, the Panthers, and the young league, the night could not have gone better.
But . . . wait.
With the USFL, something generally had to go wrong. It was all but required by law. So, yes, the game drew a solid 10.1 rating. And attendees were entertained. But in the seconds before the final gun sounded, some 1,500– 2,000 people charged onto the field and attacked the goalposts. Denver’s police force, out en masse, was under strict orders from the city that no damage could be done to the field.
Hence, officers maced the fans.
There were snarling police dogs and bloody heads and chants of “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” Large objects were thrown onto the feld—“a big ol’ ice chest landed right next to me,” said Jim Van Somersen, the Gold’s public relations director. “There was a man in jeans but no shirt, who got in a cop’s face, and the cop let his dog go and the dog went after the guy.” One fan was removed on a stretcher. Four were cuffed. “If it had been my decision, I would have let them have the goalposts,” said Jerry Kennedy, a police captain. “My officers were attacked and forced to use mace to quell the disturbance. In my 20 years at Mile High Stadium, I’ve never seen fans act like that.”
Some of the blame was assigned to idiot rioters, 12 of whom were arrested (“There were a load of drunk people,” recalled Gregory Clow, the league’s art director, who stood along the sideline). But a great deal was directed toward the league, which hosted a Miller-sponsored free-beer handout in the parking lot 90 minutes before kickoff. “The response to that giveaway was enormous,” William N. Wallace wrote in the New York Times. It hardly helped that alcohol concessions stretched through the fourth quarter.
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In the press box far above the turf, members of the media and league officials watched the free-for-all in horror. Reporters came back from the field with their eyes burning from the spray. Doug Kelly, trying to navigate through the scrum, was pushed down and had his eyeglasses shattered. Simmons wanted to hide. “It was the USFL’s worst nightmare,” said Araton, the Daily News reporter. “It went from being this great championship game to a riot.”
Like many papers across the nation, the following day’s New York Post chronicled little of the game, and much of the melee. Beneath the headline ROCKY HORROR SHOW was the subhead COPS, WILD FANS IN UGLY CLASH AFTER PANTHERS COP USFL TITLE. Steve Serby, the Post writer, referred to it as “a bloody 20-minute war.”
“Talk about a momentum crusher,” said Kevin Noonan, who covered the Stars for the Wilmington News Journal. “Amazing game, amazing capper to the season, and the final image is cops teargassing fans.
“The NFL must have been laughing its ass off.”
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