Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday night, October 2, 2018. Posted Wednesday night, October 3.
His sliminess was as much a calling card as his savvy: Clinton Manges, owner of the United State Football Leauge’s San Antonio Gunslingers during the USFL’s brief existence in the 1980s. Donald Trump owned the New Jersey Generals at the same time, and in some ways Manges was a worse person than Trump, and even he isn’t the worst person in the book! Photo courtesy of the San Antonio News-Examiner.
Watching baseball. Reading football. Cubs and Rockies in the NL Wildcard game. “Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL” by Jeff Pearlman.
In the mid-1980s, the upstart USFL---United States Football League---struggled to provide a spring fix for football addicts suffering from withdrawal after the Super Bowl. According to Pearlman, the level of play was professional. Not up to NFL standards but worth the price of admission. The league did make a go of it for a while and might have lasted if not for a number of adverse factors including the stupidity, cupidity, arrogance, greed, and deluded thinking of some of the team owners, one of whom was Donald Trump.
Trump owned the New Jersey Generals and he figures bigly in the book, doing what Donald Trump does best---destroying things. In this case, he’s seen helping to destroy the USFL which he only joined as a means to finagling for himself ownership of an NFL team which he covets because it’ll make him more money and gain him more respect and celebrity. Self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement being the twin pole stars of his moneygrubbing, attention-whoring life.
Surprisingly, he’s not the worst person in the book.
He’s one of the worst.
He’s as miserable a specimen of human being as we know him to be. In 1983, he wasn’t yet forty, but even then he was up to no good. He’s always been a nogoodnik. It’s just that the story Pearlman’s telling is populated with nogoodniks, other liars and cheats, con artists and frauds, and out and out crooks of Trump’s ilk if not his fame. Take Clinton Manges, the owner of the San Antonio Gunslingers…
In the late 1940s, [Manges] managed a service station in Port Aransas, Texas. It was there, while pumping gas and checking beneath the the hoods of automobiles, that Manges caught his break. Or to be more accurate, created his break. One day he found himself working on the car of Lloyd Bentsen, the investor who amassed a fortune worth $100 million in real estate, oil, and cattle. As he fixed up the vehicle, Manges inquired as to where Bentsen was heading. “Farmer Jones up the road as some land for sale,” [Bentsen] said.
“Hmm,” said Manges. “That’s interesting.” He excused himself, rushed inside the service station office, and placed a call to Farmer Jones, a man he knew well. He returned moments later with a smile pasted to his face. “Mr. Bensten, you can deal with me directly,” he said. “I just bought the land.”
Bentsen could have been furious. Instead, he was dazzled. From that day forward, he took Manges beneath his wing, involving him in land deals and teaching him the tricks of the game...Within a half decade, Manges was known as one of [Texas’] elite property traders. “He had no peer when it came to understanding the intricacies of deals,” [Paul Burka wrote in Texas Monthly]. “He knew to read people; he could be charming and expansive and incredibly persuasive, or he could be belligerent and ruthless.”
As the years passed, Manges’s sliminess was as much a calling card as his savvy. He was regularly sued for unpaid bills and skipped taxes. He wrote fake checks and was content bribing any available on-the-take public official. In 1963 Manges was indicted for making false statements on a loan application to the state of Texas…
Manges had money. It just seems that it came and went, and when it came in he was reluctant to let it go back out again and did what he thought he had to and was entitled to stop it on its way out the door. He avoided paying creditors when he could and didn’t pay his players as a matter of course. Once when the Gunslingers were flying home from an away game, he left them stranded on an airport runway when their plane stopped to refuel, having neglected to allocate money for the fuel bill.
But even he isn’t the worst person in the book.
One of the other owners is an outright fraud with no money of his own who uses his team as a piggy bank. The head coach of the Arizona Outlaws is a sadistic alcoholic. Many of the players are violent and vicious drug addicts and drunks. There are plenty of decent and well-meaning people, executives, coaches, players, and others, with real talent, intelligence, and ethical standards throughout, but they’re surrounded by sharpers, schnorrers, schnooks, self-dealing strivers, hangers-on, wannabes, and sellouts, ethical trimmers, moral dunces, and vainglorious dopes on the make. And in this thieves carnival and parade of fools, Trump fits right in.
I’ve said it before, one of the reasons political media didn’t cover Trump as what he was during the presidential campaign was they didn’t believe he could be what he was. Nobody like that could possibly be a serious contender for President of the United States, let alone get himself elected, therefore Trump couldn’t possibly be like that. This circular thinking persisted well into his first year in office and still crops up now and then as credulous journalists and pundits look hopefully for signs he’s turned into somebody else, somebody worthy of holding the job George Washington held.
But as “Football for a Buck” makes clear, Trump is nothing original or new. He’s a type, firmly in the American grain. Given how many characters there are like him and how many there have always been, the wonder isn’t how did one of them become President. The wonder is it didn’t happen sooner.
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“Football for a Buck” by Jeff Pearlman is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
~ H.S. Thompson
Posted by: FDChief | Thursday, October 04, 2018 at 09:24 PM
And I should add that what was immensely frustrating was trying to clue what seemed like 80% of the U.S. public about Donnie's well-known-in-the-NY/NJ-area grifting past. That's who and what he WAS; the short-fingered vulgarian who cheated people and profited off sending his "businesses" into bankruptcy. Everybody in the metro area knew how bone-stupid he'd been with the USFL, and how he'd been the major player in driving the league into the ground and strolling away with a pocketful of cash.
And every time I'd start ringing the firebell about him I'd get these bemused looks; "But...he's a BUSINESSman..!" "He's rich, you don't get rich from being stupid and short-sighted!" and I'd hammer on how you can if you're a good conman and you can trick people into being more stupid and short-sighted than you are.
And, obviously, it didn't make enough of a difference to spare us the rule of this idiot and his pack of thieves...
Posted by: FDChief | Friday, October 05, 2018 at 02:12 PM
I dunno. Your descriptions don't actually make it sound as it any of these characters are actually *worse* than Trump. Or is it just your contention that they're all equally bad?
Posted by: Geox | Friday, October 05, 2018 at 08:31 PM
Geox, I might have been a bit hyperbolic there. But there are some pretty bad actors in the book, Manges being one of them---there's more about him than I got into here. But the Donald Trump who appears in the book is 1980s Donald Trump when he was just another up and coming Reagan era greedhead. You can see the qualities that would make him the monster he is today (and several people around him did see him growing worse) but in the context of the time, he wasn't the worst crooked wheeler dealer wheeling and dealing. It's just hard to see him in the context of those times now. The idea he might be president was in no one's head but his own and he was still keeping it to himself. But at the time he there was nothing special about him. There still isn't really. He's a type. The thing that sets him apart from other types like him is that he's in the White House and they're still operating their cons, doing their bullying, and using their wealth and influence to make life miserable for people in Wichita and Ashtabula.
Chief, the morning before you posted the quote from Thompson my son was quoting him to me making a similar point. GMTA.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Monday, October 15, 2018 at 06:09 AM