Director Mike Tollin Responds to Donald Trump’s USFL Documentary Anger

↵↵This year is ESPN’s 30th birthday. You may have seen something about that in the last few weeks. As part of the celebration, ESPN commissioned a series of films to be created, calling it 30 For 30. One of those films, Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?, has raised the ire of real estate mogul and professional celebrity Donald Trump. Per The New York Post Page Six:↵

↵↵⇥“The documentary is third-rate, as was spring football,” Trump told the paper. “Football was meant to be played in the fall and I realized that early on. [Mike] Tollin is a sad guy who is living in the past. He ought to get on with his life.”↵↵↵For those who don’t know the back story between Trump and the USFL, let’s quickly explain. Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals in 1984, the year after the league was created, because he saw the USFL as a true competitor to the NFL. That said, Trump thought the only way to really compete with the NFL was to play games in the fall and not the spring. After three seasons of spring football, the USFL attempted to move their 1986 schedule to the fall, in direct competition with the NFL, filing antitrust lawsuits against the NFL in the process. As Tollin’s film explains, the push to directly challenge the NFL – spearheaded by Trump in what many saw as a veiled attempt to have the NFL buy out the league in a merger – led to the demise of the USFL.↵

↵↵And as we know, Donald Trump doesn’t like to fail. But fail he has, famously including the bankruptcy of his casino enterprise in the 1990s. You don’t write a book called The Art of the Comeback if you haven’t had some failures from which to come back. So why does this USFL movie stir up Trump’s rancor? And why is Trump calling Small Potatoes “third-rate” and Tollin a “sad guy who is living in the past?” We asked Tollin his thoughts. ↵

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↵↵⇥“The film is a celebration of a league that was much beloved. We did 30+ interviews and everyone had fond memories of the USFL, except for Donald. Why is that? Because he never wanted to be there to begin with, because in his eyes it was ‘small potatoes.’ ↵⇥↵⇥“As he admitted to me, he wanted to buy an NFL team, but they didn’t want him in their league. So he brought his personal agenda to the USFL, which was to try to force a merger with the NFL after only three years. This strategy led directly to the demise of the USFL, as two dozen people such as Burt Reynolds, Steve Young, Doug Flutie, Jim Kelly, and Keith Jackson happily attest.”↵⇥

↵↵↵Maybe Trump can buy the UFL. After all, that fledgling league is already playing games in the fall. Of note, when clicking on the video links for the film on ESPN’s dedicated site, the excerpt that features Trump titled “Who Killed the USFL?” is no longer available. For more on Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? look for Chris Littmann’s review of the film in the near future on First Cuts.↵

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