We even have a guest lined up as author and New York Times writer Jeff Perlman,who is currently in the early stage of finally writing the badly needed history of the league has even agreed to do the show!
If anyone out there has questions for Jeff, I'll be happy to see if we can get them answered when he does the show.
I am very excited about doing the USFL show to talk about the league that meant the most to me of all the renegade leagues that challenged the established leagues.
I loved the ABA,but they didn't have national television and they merged with the NBA just before I turned eight,but the USFL? Now,I was there for the beginning and the ending of that!
I have lots of USFL stories of my brother and I watching games,buying merchandise in an area that generally ignored the league and other stories that will wait for another day or the podcast even.
This blog is even more personal to me.
Jeff Pearlman posted a youtube tonight of him and his nine (I think Jeff said he was nine) year old son Emmett as they searched their area for former Jacksonville Bulls quarterback Ed Luther.
Now,what this brought to mind was all the hours that I spent with Ryan watching USFL tapes with Ryan being roughly the same age as Emmett.
I still tape games of my teams,but I'm not as fanatical about it,but for years my main hobby was trading tapes of older and newer games that I couldn't get in my area.
USFL games were often swapped and the quality was pretty painful in hindsight in many cases as they were multiple generations old.
When you copy a DVD,the copy is exactly the same as the original.
VHS degraded in quality with each pass down the line,so many of those games weren't anywhere near broadcast quality.
I just remember so many times sitting on the battered couch with the latest game to arrive on the TV and watching the various teams and teaching Ryan,the Memphis Showboats with Walter Lewis,the Pittsburgh Maulers with Glenn Carano,the New Jersey Generals with an aging Brian Sipe to name just a few.
Sure,it was a lot of time spent on an dead football league,but the time spent with Ryan was just as important and watching Jeff with his son Emmett brought those times back to mind.
I miss those days-sharing something I loved with someone I loved.
I'm not sure how much Ryan really remembers of those time and the league or him dancing around in a hallway "playing" a football game with a small rubber football hollering the name of Gary Anderson as the Tampa Bay Bandits played over the tile.
But I sure do and watching the Pearlman's hunt for Ed Luther made this person look back in time for even a few minutes and smile...
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