Screen capture/NFL Films Doug Flutie, in the final year of a career that saw him play with eight teams in three professional football leagues over 21 seasons, joined Tom Brady in the New England Patriots quarterbacking corps in 2005. ‘I always say Doug Flutie was the Mexico wall before the Mexico wall.’ Jeff Pearlman
That’s the author of the newly released “Football for a Buck,” Jeff Pearlman, sharing on Tuesday what he allowed was a well-worn quip with NBC’s Willie Geist.
He added: “But he actually was.”
So how is it that the diminutive journeyman quarterback shares any noteworthy trait with a proposed wall dividing the United States from its southern neighbor along most or all of the countries’ nearly 2,000-mile shared border. It may come as a minor surprise that the connective tissue is Donald Trump.
Trump, whose most notable connections to professional football in recent years have been a long-running complaint about players sitting or kneeling, or remaining in the locker room, during the pregame playing of the national anthem and occasional criticisms of the NFL’s rule makers for seeking to reduce gratuitous violence in order to minimize life-altering injuries, was once more intimately involved. He owned the New Jersey Generals in the long-since-defunct United States Football League for two seasons in the mid-1980s.
It was during that brief tenure, aiming to garner publicity for a team that he is believed to have overpaid significantly for and a league facing long odds of long-term success, he signed Flutie out of Boston College, where the 5-foot-10 quarterback had won the Heisman Trophy. As he negotiated with Flutie — settling on a six-year, $8.3 million contract (per Pearlman, the richest contract in all of professional football at the time) — he told his fellow USFL owners that they would all be on the hook along with him for Flutie’s salary.
Shades, in Pearlman’s view, of that big, beautiful border wall that Mexico didn’t want but would be required to pay for.
Trump mounted a more recent effort to purchase an NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, and, in fact, has been quoted as saying that if that bid had succeeded he’s unlikely to have declared a presidential candidacy.
