Arizona’s wild USFL ride is chronicled

it was a “bad call.” reporter Tim Tyers had a more colorful description: “the definition of lunacy.”

With the superior Blitz players, many of whom were NFL vets, and coached by the legendary but insufferable George Allen, the Wranglers made the second USFL championship game. Pearlman describes Allen’s New Arizona Wranglers as sort of a cult: “You either believed what the old coach said, or you were gone.”

Amateur hour

To get to the title game, the Wranglers beat Kelly and the Houston Gamblers, then Young and the Los Angeles Express, in a game that was moved to Tempe because the Los Angeles Coliseum was unavailable because of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Two days before the game the original ridiculous kickoff time of 12:30 p.m. was pushed back to 8:30. “Amateur hour had arrived,” Perelman writes. No surprise that it was still hot, and the Wranglers won 35-23.

The championship game was played in Tampa, but three days before the game three Wranglers employees were arrested for taking a limo parked in front of a nightclub for a short joyride. Diethrich insisted the trio be sent back to Arizona immediately, but Allen decided he needed one of the trio, a coach, to stay for the game, so they kept him hidden in a hotel room and told the owner they didn’t know where he was.

Kush the Outlaw

The Wranglers’ success was shortlived, and so were the Wranglers. When the USFL, prodded by Trump, decided to switch to a fall schedule in 1986, it signaled the beginning of the end. The Wranglers’ owner, Diethrich, tired of losing money, surrendered ownership to Oklahoma Outlaws owner Bill Tatham and the franchises merged. “Technically, the Wranglers folded and the Outlaws took their place,” Perleman writes.

Then, the Outlaws brought in Arizona State legend Frank Kush as head coach. Kush, known for his toughness, does not come off well in the book. His pro career, which began when he was fired at ASU for punching a player, was mostly a train wreck. One ex-Colts player is quoted as saying Kush “seemed to take joy in ruining people.”

The Outlaws braced for the worst. But instead of a tyrannical dictator, Kush was, in Pearlman’s words, a “plush throw toy.” Assistant John Teerlinck, who would go on to coach for three Super Bowl winners, called him “the biggest disappointment in my life … He was a complete sellout. All he cared about was getting paid. I never worked for a worse coach than Frank Kush, because he didn’t care about any of it.”

Kush’s Outlaws were a mess. Attendance, never great anyway, dropped significantly in ‘85, key players were lost in trades, releases or quit on their own. Kush took joy, Perelman writes, in ridiculing players during film sessions, but he wasn’t the only one acting out. Perelman relates the time Teerlinck got into a drunken brawl on a commercial flight with one of the players – and was of course fired the next day.

Even with Doug Williams at quarterback -- he’d lead Washington to a Super Bowl title two years later -- the team finished 8-10, and like the rest of the USFL ceased to exist once the league “won” it’s antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1986 but only received $1 in damages (trebled to $3 under antitrust law). The book doesn’t mention this, but the Outlaws made a last-ditch effort to woo entry into the Canadian Football League, but that ended up going nowhere.