Donald Trump owned Trump Tower, Trump Castle, Trump Shuttle and Tour de Trump and was preparing to add another enterprise to his portfolio. He was going to own one team, if not two teams, in a proposed new baseball venture called The Baseball League.
“I have agreed to become a part of it, to work with them and make this league a great success,” Trump told me in a 1989 telephone interview. “I see it as a very viable league. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it. We’ll have a long-term contract with a major television network or a number of major networks, including cable.”
Speaking nearly 30 years ago, the then 43-year-old real estate entrepreneur sounded much as he does today when he talks about making America great again. He – and the entire country – can only hope that his current endeavor turns out to be more successful than the baseball venture.
Trump will be inaugurated Friday (Jan. 20) as the 45th President of the United States. Unlike George Bush, the 43rd president, who was managing partner of the Texas Rangers, Trump never became owner of a baseball team, because the league never made it.
Trump might have had something to do with its failure in 1989, though there are conflicting accounts of what happened at a critical meeting. In the different accounts, though, Trump came across as the problem.
In a contemporaneous account I reported in The New York Times, I wrote based on what I was told by a person close to the founders:
“Meshulam Riklis, a friend of Trump and husband of Pia Zadora, was also set to own a team. But when the owners met in New York to plan the announcement of the creation of the league, Trump and Riklis did not show up. Shortly after the meeting began, their aides arrived and announced to the other owners and the founders that Trump and Riklis didn’t think the league was ready to proceed to the next step.”
That development, I added, undermined the momentum the league’s organizers had generated. “Their vacillation,” I added, “turned a stick of dynamite into a water-soaked firecracker. The league lost its momentum and never recovered.”
A person familiar with the prospective league’s plans backed up that characterization of Trump’s failure to put up money when the league organizers’ schedule called for it.
“They had six very substantial guys to have franchises,” he said. “As they progressed, at certain times they each would put up $1 million. The time came, and five put up $1 million. Trump didn’t.”
On the other hand, David Lefevre, one of the founders of The Baseball League, said – 27 years later – he didn’t recall it that way.
“There was a final meeting and Trump was there,” the New York lawyer said in a recent telephone interview. “We had the money. We were ready to go. The last formal meeting was at our place. Everybody flew in.”
The holdup, Lefevre said, was Trump’s desire to have two teams in the league, one in New York, one in New Jersey.
“The two-team thing created a lot of complaints for people,” Lefevre said. “Having two teams was disturbing to some guys. As the league started to grow that would be a problem. They wanted time to think about it. Trump’s position was he wanted two teams. He said ‘I think I can help the league. I can help with the media.’”
Trump, Lefevre said, was confident he could make it work, quoting him as saying, “This is what I do. Don’t worry about me.”
Trump wasn’t even supposed to be part of the league. “He pushed his way in,” said the person familiar with the league’s plans. “No one invited him. David Lefevre had known him for some time.”
Invitee or party crasher, Trump added instant credibility to a project whose organizers had maintained a low profile.”
Discussing Trump’s involvement, a source close to the league’s organizers said they recognized that Trump has traditionally been a leader rather than a partner but that they were convinced he would be a good team player.
“They welcome his participation as the owner of a New York-area franchise and feel his talents and intensity will be an enormous asset to the league,” the source said.
Besides Lefevre, who had been a minority partner in the Houston Astros’ ownership, the league’s other primary founder was Richard Moss, the noted baseball union lawyer, who won the Catfish Hunter and Messersmith-McNally (free agency) grievances, and later was a highly successful agent. Moss declined to talk about Trump.
In my 1989 interview, Trump said ”I see it as a very viable league. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. We’ll have a long-term contract with a major television network or a number of major networks, including cable.”
Trump even said he had plans made. He said his team would initially play in a temporary 35,000-seat stadium, then in a permanent stadium that would be built while the team played in the temporary stadium.
“We have four different communities that want us very much, and we’ll make a decision over a short period of time,” Trump said.
Asked if a stadium could be built in time for the opening of a season next April (1990), Trump said: “Building is my business. When we do a fight in Atlantic City, we set 22,000 seats over a three-day period. So for me to do a baseball stadium of a nice proportion would not take long. Obviously the major stadium, which would be built later, would take much longer.”
Trump has been occasionally mentioned as a prospective buyer of an existing major league baseball team, but whatever plans he might have had never materialized.
However, Trump’s name in connection with the proposed league stirred some skepticism. Only a few years earlier, Trump owned a team, the New Jersey Generals, in the United States Football League, and his goal was to parlay it into a merger of a few of the league’s teams, including the Generals, of course, with the National Football League.
The merger never happened, the U.S.F.L. folded in 1985 and Trump’s team never made it to the N.F.L.
The skeptics suspected that Trump had a similar but more successful plan in mind for his baseball team or teams with Major League Baseball. Trump denied it, but in this instance he didn’t get a chance to prove it one way or the other because the league never took flight.
The closest Trump got to Major League Baseball – and this is a stretch – was when he led the U.S.F.L. owners in an antitrust lawsuit against the N.F.L. They hired Harvey Myerson, Trump’s lawyer, as their lawyer even though he wasn’t an antitrust lawyer.
The name of Myerson’s firm was Myerson and Kuhn. Kuhn was Bowie Kuhn, the former M.L.B. commissioner. Trump’s league won the suit and was awarded $1, which under antitrust law was tripled. The firm soon broke up, Myerson died and Kuhn fled to Florida, where the firm’s creditors could not collect $3 million in debt from him.
Trump went on to be elected president.