Sacked!

In a more innocent age, perhaps, sports in the U.S. were played for the sheer thrill of winning. But today, in an era when stadium grass is plastic and the players are depreciable assets, big-time sports are played for money, and lots of it.

Thus the "moral victory" claimed last week by the United States Football League in its much publicized antitrust suit against the National Football League left the supposed victors feeling lower than the SAT scores of their top draft picks. The upstart league did win in a narrow sense: a federal jury found that the old and established N.F.L. was guilty of monopolizing professional football. But the U.S.F.L. lost its $1.7 billion suit where it counts, at the bottom line. After five days of tortured debate, the five- woman, one-man jury awarded the new league $1 in damages. Even tripled, as antitrust damages are by law, the award would not buy the winners a new chin strap.

For the U.S.F.L., which needed to win megabucks just to stay in business, the verdict may spell doom. The outcome was the sudden-death climax of a game that had more fumbles than the sorriest preseason scrimmage. The U.S.F.L.'s suit was watched with immense curiosity by millions of fans who recognize that pro sports are as much about greed as glory and cheered on by local boosters who feel that no city can call itself big league without a pro-football team. More than mere football, the struggle was redolent of the battles among 19th century steel and rail barons, who paid lip service to the virtues of free markets and then fought like mad to corner them.

Owning a pro-football franchise is a dream that seems to possess every high- rolling American businessman who ever scored a touchdown in high school or wishes he had. The rewards are not limited to locker-room privileges and the honor of being addressed as "Mr." by an All-Pro tackle. Most N.F.L. stadiums are filled at kickoff time, and last year the owners of the 28 franchises divvied up some $1.2 billion in TV contracts. Understandably, the N.F.L. barons have been loath to share the spoils. More teams mean smaller slices of the TV pie. Businessmen who want to start a new pro team are left with only one option: to form their own league.

In 1982 a small group of well-heeled football fanatics, most of them real estate moguls, took the gamble and created the U.S.F.L. The twelve-team league opened in 1983 with a new twist: it played not in the fall but in the spring and summer, thereby testing aficionados' appetite for year-round football. Over the next two years, other fat-cat fans, including New York City's Donald Trump, bought in to swell the league to 18 franchises.

For a while, the new league looked like a fair bet. Franchises were a bargain: $2 million to $5 million a city, vs. $70 million in the N.F.L. True, blue-chip players did not come cheap. Trump, the owner of the New Jersey Generals, paid $5 million for Georgia Running Back Herschel Walker and $8 million for Boston College Quarterback Doug Flutie. Still, much of the money could be written off against profits from the owner's other investments. Besides, a bidding war served to run up the other league's costs while siphoning off talent.