Washington Post Doug Allen Interview Will Hobson: I don’t want to waste your time. I’ve just been springing phone calls across the country. I’ve got few people say like in the first five minutes, actually I wasn’t really involved here. But you were with the USFL or the NFLPA? Doug Allen: I was with both. The NFLPA organized the USFLPA because there were a number of ex-NFL players in the league and they were very upset about the way they were being treated compared to the way they were being treated in the NFL. For example, if you got hurt, you got sent home without medical care and your contract was cancelled. You didn’t get paid for the rest of the season the way they did in the NFL. They got $5 a day in training camp. While the pay wasn’t that, it averaged between $30,000 and $50,000 a player, there were no benefits and that kind of a treatment. So they asked us to organize a union, and we did. We negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that changed some of those basic problems. And during that process of representing the players, Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals and started investing money on the league. Will Hobson: And before I forget, do you mind if I record this conversation for note-taking purposes? Doug Allen: No, not at all. 1 Will Hobson: Thinking back in the time, do you have any just general memories of Trump? Any anecdotes or any stories -- Doug Allen: He’s exactly the same today, just he was thinner in those days. Otherwise, he was just as much an asshole then as he is now. My best example of that was –- I have a couple of them. He was not on the bargaining team for the league, but he insisted after he started putting money into the league that he be involved in bargaining. And so he demanded a bargaining session take place at Trump Tower. The general counsel of the USFLPA was also the general counsel of the NFLPA. Richard Burleson and I and a player I much -- I can’t remember which one, went to that bargaining session. They were league executives, not the commissioner but league executives on the other side of the table. Many are from the NFL and went back to the NFL after the league folded, and I had known them for years. One of them was Vince Lombardi’s son. I don’t remember whether he personally was at that meeting. Anyway, he kept us waiting. We’re in the conference room at the top or at the upper part of Trump Tower and we’ve been sitting there for 45 minutes waiting for him. He walked in and sat down at the head of the table between us rather than on the league’s side. He took one look at Richard Burleson and said, “I know you, I know you. You work for Cecil Upshaw.” He meant Gene Upshaw. Cecil Upshaw was a baseball player who was 2 distantly related to Gene. And Richard laughed out loud because it’s kind of a funny way to start the dinner Dutch. And I had met Donald before, but Richard hadn’t. Richard said, no, I say I don’t work for Cecil Upshaw. And the other side laughed when he said that. Donald Trump said “No, no, no, you work for Cecil Upshaw. I’m not having anything to do with this as long as somebody who’s a spy for the NFL is in this room.” He gets up and walks out, and again his side laughed. They were very happy he left and we had a pretty productive hour or so meeting that didn’t include him. And then the commissioner and the guy who was second in command of the staff in the league called me up later on and thanked me for resisting the entreaties of Trump to negotiate directly with me. They didn’t want him to have anything to do with us. But he was a bull in a china shop, just like he is now, and pissed everybody off. I could live with it. I didn’t work for him and I got to say no. One time his office called me up and they didn’t identify themselves. This woman said this is Donald Trump’s office calling, not this is Jean [phonetic] from Donald Trump’s office. Just this is Donald Trump’s office calling. Mr. Trump would like you -- I’m in Washington. D.C. and she said, “Mr. Trump would like you to meet him tomorrow morning at 8:30 in Trump Tower.” I said, well, I can’t do that, but I’m going to be in New York tomorrow and I’d be happy to 3 meet him late afternoon at the Hyatt in Grand Central which he owned at the time. She put me on hold and it was so long I forgot that I was on hold. I was on a speaker phone. Finally she came back on and scared the crap out of me and said, well, “This is Donald Trump’s office again.” And I said, yes. She still hadn’t given me her name. She said, “I’m afraid if you can’t meet with Mr. Trump tomorrow morning at 8:30, he won’t be able to meet with you.” And I said, lady, you called me, I didn’t call you. That’s fine with me. After that little exchange, I got a call from the league that thanked me for not falling under to Trump because they didn’t want him to have anything to do with those negotiations. Will Hobson: So these were negotiations between the, I guess, nascent USFL Player Association and the USFL? Doug Allen: Yes. But these were negotiations that tried to -– we negotiated that agreement three different times based on the condition and the circumstances of the league and trying to do everything we could to keep it going because it was a great opportunity for players, and coaches, and team executives that weren’t working on the NFL at the time. I mean, if you look at all the players that came by the USFL, and not just players but coaches and general managers that were on the USFL, it was like a division of the NFL in terms of the personnel. 4 Will Hobson: What was Richard Burleson’s -- what did he do and what is his title? Doug Allen: He was the general counsel of the NFL Players Inc. The USFLPA had three full-time staff people meet, an assistant director, and a secretary. Some of the staff of the NFLPA were loaned to us. We paid the NFLPA for their time. So I paid the general counsel and the legal staff with the NFLPA whenever they got involved in negotiations or arbitrations involving USFL players with the knowledge of the NFL players and the USFL players that we were doing it that way. It was cost- effective to do it. So our offices were right in the NFLPA. I kept doing things for the NFLPA. I was a spokesman for us and for the NFLPA. I kept doing some of that for Gene because he asked me to even though I was paid entirely by the USFL players for the three years I was the executive director. Will Hobson: Do you have any sense of how the direction of the line of communication was with folks in the NFL? I’m curious how folks like in the NFL league office and owners, how they were reacting as Donald Trump comes onboard, buys the USFL team of New York/New Jersey, and then immediately starts rating rosters and throwing money at Don Shula and Lawrence Taylor. Doug Allen: He wasn’t alone in doing that, and I don’t think that’s so much what upsets them about him personally. It was this idea that he was going to take the USFL through the 5 fall and directly compete with the NFL and use that as a way to leverage his team into the NFL. That was his strategy. That was just pretty naked and obvious. That’s what pissed them off, not so much the fact that he was competing for players because lots of people were doing that and other teams had signed high draft picks and star players. He stockpiled his team and had a great team that probably –- I mean I think the top third of the USFL could have competed in the NFL, and the best team in the USFL would have been a good team in the NFL. So the quality of the play was pretty damn good by the end of the league’s existence. I think they were concerned about the competition, but that wasn’t what upset them about Donald Trump. It was this notion that he was going to demand and get by leverage a team in the NFL, which is all he cared about. He didn’t care about the USFL. He had absolutely no interest in that league continuing its existence. He only was using it as a weapon to try to get an NFL franchise, which he was never going to get otherwise. I mean they hated him. Will Hobson: That kind of begs a question on why didn’t he try to buy –- if his interest was purely on an NFL team, why didn’t he try to buy an NFL team before -- ? 6 Doug Allen: Because the ownership transfer has to be approved by the league, and he wouldn’t have gotten that approval.