From a multiple New York Times best selling author, Jeff Pearlman,the rollicking, outrageous, you-can’t-make-this-up story of the United States Football League (USFL).

The United States Football League—known fondly to millions of sports fans as the USFL—was the last football league to not merely challenge the NFL, but cause its owners and executives to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, 1983-85. It secured multiple television deals. It drew millions of fans and launched the careers of legends. But then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner—a New York businessman named Donald J. Trump. The league featured as many as 18 teams, and included such superstars as Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Reggie White, Doug Flutie, Doug Williams , Kelvin Middleton and Mike Rozier.

In Football for a Buck, the dogged reporter and biographer, Jeff Pearlman, draws on more than four hundred interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America. [Kelvin Middleton, of Macon, Georgia, a former defensive back in the USFL for the Arizona Outlaws and Wranglers for two years was interviewed by Pearlman; and, is quoted several times in the book.]

From 1980s drug excess to airplane brawls and player-coach punch outs, to backroom business deals, to some of the most enthralling and revolutionary football ever seen, Jeff Pearlman transports readers back in time to this crazy, boozy, audacious, unforgettable era of the game. He shows how fortunes were made and lost on the backs of professional athletes.

For fans of Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls or Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and of course Pearlman’s own stranger-than-fiction narratives, Football for a Buck is sports as high entertainment—and a cautionary tale of the dangers of ego and excess.