How Donald Trump ruined Burt Reynolds' football career: "I begged him not to do it"

Burt Reynolds and Donald Trump became friends in the 1980s, but that relationship turned out to do more harm than good.

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(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)

Film » Cutting Room Floor

Sat 17 May 2025 15:15, UK

Like most members of the Earth’s population, Burt Reynolds had his hopes and dreams crushed by Donald Trump. In his case, though, it was personal and he could afford it. The actor was a top Hollywood star for decades following a string of hits in the 1970s and ‘80s like Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Cannonball Run. Later, he enjoyed renewed success with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, a film he later denounced. 

Throughout his career, Reynolds exuded the type of performative masculinity that Trump is drawn toward like a flea to blood. They became fast friends in the ‘80s, just as the actor was beginning his reign at the box office and the future reality TV star was just coming into his own as New York’s pre-eminent villain (a high bar). They worked on opposite sides of the country, but they saw eye-to-eye on many things, so their friendship endured the distance.

Although he became famous for his acting, Reynolds was, first and foremost, an avid fan of American football. He played it in college and even remarked once that he would rather play in the NFL than win an Oscar (he did neither). In the 1980s, he decided to live out his dream in one way or another by taking an ownership stake in the Tampa Bay Bandits, a team that played in the USFL, a fledgling football league. It was messy from the start.

The team’s founder was a Canadian businessman named John F Bassett, who was embroiled in a lawsuit with the NFL over his previous league, the WFL. Thanks in part to Reynolds’s enthusiastic involvement in marketing, however, the Bandits were highly successful for several years, and even became more popular than the local NFL team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 

Things started to go south when Donald Trump, who was the majority owner of the league, tried to force a merger with the NFL. He attempted to do this, in part, by bringing an ill-conceived lawsuit against the much more successful league. Like many of Trump’s business decisions, it was ruinous, and the USFL folded shortly thereafter. With no league to play in and with a pending lawsuit from one of its former players, the Bandits, too, were kaput.

When asked about the debacle in a 2018 interview with A24, Reynolds said, “What took us down was Trump because he tried to take us up against the NFL, and that is the toughest group of people to go up against anywhere. I begged him not to do it, but he’s a rather stubborn man, and it was the finish of our group.” Of all the adjectives one could use to describe Trump, ‘stubborn’ is probably the most flattering, but to have one of your buddies blame you for the demise of an entire sports league isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, either.

Still, Reynolds did not harbour ill will toward his old crony. In fact, when Trump swapped his illegal business dealings for the presidency, he invited Reynolds to visit him in his ‘little round room’ (also known as the Oval Office). In yet another accidentally revealing indictment of his friend’s character, Reynolds revealed that, having met with no fewer than four US presidents, Jimmy Carter was his favourite. “He had such humanity and he was such a sweet man,” he explained.

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