Why I hate Donald Trump
A Father’s Day USFL Story
I am nine years old. The sky is a perfect Colorado blue on a sunny springtime Sunday in 1985. I hold my Dad’s hand tight as he, my brother, and I find our way through the crowds to our seats in the east stands of the old Mile High Stadium. My dad left his basement office and typewriter on a rare Sunday afternoon to take us to watch the new hometown football team, the Denver Gold of the USFL. He had just got me a Denver Gold pennant, cracker jacks or kettle corn, and a program with Vince Evans, lucky #8, the star quarterback on the front.
Vince Evans was a scrappy scrambling quarterback. He ran crazy schoolyard plays like the hook and ladder, the same plays that I dreamed up with my elementary school friends at recess. Vince Evans was my personal home town hero. He was my man of miraculous cunning who would dodge tacklers and lunge into the end zone for game-winning touchdowns as the clock ran out. His pencil mustache matched Lando Calrissian’s from Star Wars, so did his deep milk chocolate skin color.
He was my everything. The Denver Gold won, of course, they won, who knows really, but I was there watching him in the flesh with my dad on a perfect springtime Sunday.
Let me pause for a moment and describe the USFL and why for three brief years in the mid-1980s, the USFL mattered and it mattered to me.
To many, the USFL was just football in the springtime, but to me, it wasn’t just football in the springtime. For a 9-year-old dreamer, the USFL was Spring itself, and it meant the world was fresh and anything was possible.
The USFL welcomed childlike dreamers who planned to create a new world cut from broadcloth. Teams had fanciful invented names and make-believe traditions, the Gamblers, the Blitz, the Invaders, the Bandits, and the Gold. Oh, the Gold.
No weight of history. Just the freedom of imagination and I had a lot of imagination.
The idea of an endzone celebration was revolutionary then. The idea of throwing rather than running on first down was revolutionary then. Formations with more than 2 wide receivers and a quarterback in the “shotgun” position having the ball hucked to him was madness. A quarterback who would run rather than throw was downright blasphemy.
The very idea that a professional black quarterback could be normalized was beyond revolutionary and beyond blasphemy. That upset the natural order of the universe.
In the USFL, there was Vince Evans, a black quarterback, celebrating in the end zone with his third or fourth receiver after a fingertip catch from a deep throw Evans launched on first down after a daredevil scramble when the shotgun position didn’t work.
The USFL had me believing that if you had a dream, any dream, you could bend the world to that dream. The rules are, there are no rules.
Had Colin Kaepernick kneeled for the national anthem 30 years earlier as a member of the San Antonio Gunslingers, I expect the crowd would have kneeled right along with him. Why not? Standing for the anthem wasn’t a thing then. Had a mean lean football playing machine come out as gay and led the Memphis Showboats to victory waving the Rainbow Flag… who knows. The flag had only just been invented back in 1979. Why not embrace that player?
As a child with what I thought was a precision schoolyard arm, I dreamed some days of growing up to be the star quarterback like Vince Evans. Other days, I dreamed my skinny frame would fill in and I’d be a muscular fullback, plowing through the line. And on some rare days, I dreamed that by some magic trick, I might fill in a bit differently, and grow up to be a knock ’em dead beautiful blonde or brunette, and I’d wow the crowd as a Denver Gold Cheerleader in their black and gold leotard and cheer my team to victory.
In what turned out to be my most achievable fantasy, I dreamed of building “Color Hotel,” a chain of fanciful brightly colored buildings with rooftop pools and robots lots of robots. (side note: the robot part has been less achievable, to date.) I imagined I’d grow up to be a rich real estate magnate like Donald Trump and more importantly like my Great Uncle, Uncle Louis, my Dad’s personal hero.
By 1985, Donald Trump had already bought the New Jersey Generals of the USFL. Donald Trump had the money of my boyhood dreams. He had fast cars, luxury jets, probably spy jets in my childhood imagination, and was always in pictures surrounded by beautiful blondes and brunettes.
The NFL had no room for a showboat like Donald Trump. It was a staid league of old-world rules: Mom, Apple Pie, and white Quarterbacks. The NFL didn’t understand then that they actually shared the same rules as Donald Trump. Trump’s grandiosity was just a comically enlarged calcified version of the same, but back then, they didn’t realize that they would eventually land right where Donald Trump already was.
The USFL didn’t understand Trump’s danger either. They welcomed his peculiar brand and his seemingly endless money and ability to garner attention with open arms. The USFL was broke and what are you going to do.
“The Donald,” as he was known then, could buy any player he wanted for his football team, and he did. He bought Doug Flutie, a tiny little movie star looking white QB with a mop of thick dark hair who played a lot like Vince Evans. For some reason, they always called Doug Flutie, a Boston College man, the school where he won a Heisman Trophy. No one ever mentioned that Vince Evans was a USC man, go figure.
Donald Trump bought Herschel Walker too. Herschel Walker was a true superhuman running back. Just ask the programmers who released the Tecmo Bowl Nintendo arcade game two years later. If you chose to be Walker in the game you literally could not be tackled. Walker had the same mustache and skin color that Lando Calrissian and Vince Evans did, so he too must be a hero, and he was.
The Donald’s actual “Dream team” wasn’t enough for him. The Donald said football should be played in the fall, apparently, that’s how God created it and the world has firm rules about things like that.
I was just a kid, but I already knew the USFL was the dream. The Donald said it was the wrong dream. The Donald said there was even such a thing as wrong dreams.
The Donald led the USFL into a completely foolish lawsuit with the NFL that crashed and burned the league. As a voracious reader and the son of a lawyer, and a future lawyer too, I devoured every detail of the suit. Technically, the Donald didn’t actually lose, instead, he was entirely humiliated with a victory that was a complete strategic defeat. He won just $3.00 for the league and it was split evenly among the teams. The USFL went bankrupt losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Donald was still rich, but I was entirely over him. The Donald didn’t kill just a league. He killed the promise of a fresh better and renewed world and from then on he committed and recommitted himself to killing that promise again and again and defending his rigid pathetically narrow nostalgic fool’s paradise. Years later, my dad joined his side as a rank and file legionnaire.
Vince Evans went on to play for the Los Angeles Raiders of the NFL, my hometown team’s sworn enemy, and my new favorite team in the wake of the death of the Denver Gold.
I am almost forty years old. It’s a Sunday afternoon. I don’t remember the weather outside. I was dropping my kids off to play with their grandparents. I descend the steps of my parent’s home to my Dad’s basement office where he still types away on his typewriter.
I am a lawyer now, but I don’t practice, instead, I build a version of the Color Hotels of my childhood dreams. I renovate old abandoned schools and warehouses into fanciful renewed active buildings. My biggest project to date, a renovation of the former Wonder Bread building in Kansas City on Troost Avenue, the town’s former race dividing line, takes up most of my time.
By now, Donald Trump has already descended the escalator of the Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President. My Dad had Fox News on as he generally did. In a shrill voice, I hear him shout “N….” just before I enter his office. He sees me and looks sheepish. Hillary Clinton was on the screen.
My Dad’s racism wasn’t new. His use of the N-word wasn’t new either. Something was though. Did Trump’s descent to presidential candidacy ennoble him to shout it louder? Did Trump’s descent to the presidential candidacy remind me of my need to shout my father down louder?
That moment marked the beginning of the end of our relationship. He had been asking to come to Kansas City and see my work there. I was my Uncle Louis reincarnate in his eyes, but I wasn’t Uncle Louis, I was a very unique me, myself and I and I didn’t want him there, in Kansas City.
I was toeing into presenting as a maturing version of the beautiful cheerleader of my childhood dreams on frequent work trips there and didn’t want to make room for the judgment I’m sure he would cast my way for my feminine expression.
He would track my success throughout my life, framing articles of my various accomplishments. I sent him an article about my work on Troost. The article told the story of how I was restoring a former Wonder bread building from its history as a woefully inefficient bread baking facility to a new life as a mixed-use building with 80 plus apartments, medical and professional office space and retail space fit for the coming century against the backdrop of racial inequity.
He responded with a supportive but bizarre and racist retort that praised me as a modern-day British Imperialist taming and improving a backwater slum in India in some Rudyand Kipling “white man’s burden” hero fantasy. He twisted my actual work to his narrative, to Trump’s narrative. Football is in the fall. White men tame the natives with real estate prowess and extract wealth and power. A baritone voice bellows “the march of progress.” I am disgusted.
That’s not it at all.
He is, even today, such a smart and such a wrong-headed man.
Throughout adulthood, he would regularly call me on Friday to check in and offer a weekly parental blessing. This was his personal take on a tradition my mother’s grandfather had begun. He started it when I went to college. As the 2016 campaign wore on those calls started turning to politics and when they did, he’d quickly hang up. Before long, those calls ceased.
The Donald was Trump now and sometime after he assumed the presidency, I stopped all communication with my Dad.
There was one moment sometime after the passage of the tax bill when my dad hid in a bathroom rather than discuss how the new code had gutted my business.
There was another when I dropped the kids to play after the anti-immigration El Paso shooting. I looked at my very olive-skinned son innocently goofing off in his favorite and very dirty team Mexico soccer jersey. I talked gun control with my Mom and Dad. He hopped on his bike (a very uncharacteristic and rare occurrence) and rode away to avoid conversation.
We never discussed Trump's petulant fit when Colin Kaepernick dared to kneel during the national anthem at an NFL game. Of course, that kneel sent Trump sideways. He had cratered my USFL dream over his narrow world view of the time of year football should be played, how could he sit by as a black quarterback dared to change a single custom of how a player on the sidelines might observe the singing of the national anthem? The world had firm rules about things like that.
I am well into my forties now. My children are now almost ten and almost eight. Two sons and a daughter (twins). We are in the basement of our home. It’s early winter and dreary, clouded over and cold out. I take advantage of a slow Sunday afternoon to pull out my childhood football cards and page through them. They are organized neatly by team in three-ring binders as only the kid I was then might organize.
“There’s a Doug Flutie Card.” I show my kids. He’s older than his USFL days and he’s the quarterback for the New England Patriots in this card. His mop of hair is intact. He’s still got that pretty boy glimmer in his eyes. “He was never much of a player. He bounced from team to team. He was creative though and worked hard to keep playing. Good guy not the stuff of legend though.”
“There’s Herschel Walker. Now, he’s the stuff of legend. He was an amazing running back. I bet this card is even worth money.” That got my older son’s attention. This was Walker’s NFL rookie card on the Dallas Cowboys, his first-team he played on after Trump killed the USFL. He looks tough, ready for action, and man was he ready for action. “He could run through ten men. No one could bring him down when he had a full head of steam.” I confused Tecmo Bowl Nintendo with reality, but I wasn’t that far off.
I page through and there is Vince Evans. It’s his 1987 card. His first year on the Los Angeles Raiders. His helmet is off, his arms look relaxed like he just tossed the ball to his mate. He’s smiling with his hero’s mustache. That day at Mile High with my dad comes flooding back and with it, seething anger and a hollow hole. My daughter says I cry in my brain, not my eyes, she’s right. She seems to notice as I pause over this page.
“Was he a running back, too?” the interested son asks innocently.
“No,” I cringe a bit, there is much work to do. “He was a quarterback and a really really good one. He used to play for a team in Denver. The Denver Gold and they were amazing. Your grandpa took me to a game once. It was a dream. ” My brain sheds a few more tears.
“They played football in the spring, Dad?” the other son asks.
“They did. They did til Donald Trump came along.” I still seethe. I still couldn’t let it go. I still can’t. “You know, you can do just about anything you can dream up. The sky is the limit. No fear.”
They know it to be true. They’ve seen their dad walk the walk.
That fall, I had taken two of my kids to Troostapalooza. The Wonder Bread building on Troost was the completed “Wonder” by then. I had built my Color Hotel in all its imaginative glory and running the “Wonder” into the endzone was beyond any of my wildest imagination. Together with friends I made in the surrounding neighborhood, we threw the Troostapalooza festival that embraced the possibilities of this once vibrant place and faced head-on the ugliness its racist history. Make Troost Great Again, I smirked. Absolutely not, my friends and I are working together and making Troost greater than anything Trump or my Dad or anyone from any time past could have imagined it to be.
This was Troostapalooza’s second year. The kids look forward to a return of the Marching Cobras, a historically Black marching band who owned the street the year before. That moment was absolute magic. A Vince Evan’s touchdown ten thousand times over.
This year, torrential rains drive people of all colors off the street from the dozens of craft vendors, from the rocking music stage, from the packed pickleball and basketball courts to the Wonder buildings indoor arcade. I’ve got on a killer pink skirt and I’m rocking the festival shirt. The rain doesn’t wash away my on-point makeup. One son rests his head on my chest as we watch aerialists perform indoors to end another magical day. The other son leans in, enthralled with the show. My daughter stayed home, crowds aren’t her thing.
Dreams of the springtime day in Mile High Stadium 1985 dance through my head.
I wish my dad could see me now. We don’t speak anymore though. And that’s why I hate Donald Trump.
