Football for a Buck by Jeff Pearlman

Author:Jeff Pearlman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

If Bassett required a game to back up his point, all he needed to do was focus on a Week 17 matchup between the Birmingham Stallions and Memphis Showboats at the Liberty Bowl. In a metropolis that craved professional football, inside a stadium that was crumbling and antiquated, a sellout crowd of 50,079 witnessed a clash that featured everything the USFL tried to offer its fans. First, Cliff Stoudt, the Stallions quarterback, hit on 13 of 19 throws for 282 yards, including a thrilling 44-yard pass-lateral-run to Joe Cribbs, the team’s splendid halfback. Second, the Showboats’ Derrick Crawford, a 5-foot-10, 185-pound speedster from nearby Memphis State, made a series of electrifying, how-did-he-do-that catches, resulting in six grabs for 52 yards and two touchdowns. Third, in a play that was later watched and rewound and watched and rewound in both teams’ facilities, Reggie White, Memphis’s 6-foot-5, 290-pound defensive end, chased Cribbs down the sideline and captured him after a 50-yard pursuit. Fourth, while the home team wound up losing 35–20, the city’s denizens were in love. The Showboats were not particularly good (they would finish 7-11 in their debut season), but the franchise was going about the process wisely. It spent big money on two regional college stars, White from Tennessee and quarterback Walter Lewis of Alabama, and forked over $440,000 over two years for linebacker Mike Whittington, the onetime New York Giants starter. As its coach, Memphis hired Pepper Rodgers, the former UCLA and Georgia Tech head man and a walking, talking PR machine. Though far from football’s most adroit Xs and Os practitioner, Rodgers devoted himself to pimping the league and the team. No event was too dull, no audience too small. “He always knew where the camera was,” said Art Kuehn, Memphis’s center and a former Seattle Seahawk. “For a new team, that was an important skill.”

Rodgers had a line for every occasion, a chuckle for every minute, a sales pitch for every potential customer. Asked how he wooed a player to Memphis over the NFL, Rodgers said, “I take him out for a big spare ribs dinner, show him Memphis and take him to my big ol’ house overlooking the beautiful Mississippi. Then I ask him, ‘Boy, do you really want to play in Buffalo?’” Rodgers’s assistant coaches were required to schedule time for naps. He never wore socks. He devised oddball offensive alignments off the top of his head and demanded the team give them a try. “He’d split the offensive line in half—three guys on one side of the field, two on the other,” said Billy White, a halfback. “I thought it was the craziest thing ever.” Rodgers was weirdly lovable. Once, on a team flight to New York, he wore an Air Force bomber jacket and stood at attention the entire trip. “I remember he came to practice in a tuxedo and football shoes,” said Jairo Penaranda, a Memphis running back. “And he took every rep that entire week as the scout quarterback in the tux and cleats.

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