URL:http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2007/04/06/a-man-of-substance-serving-baseball-in-style/
A Man of Substance, Serving Baseball In Style
By Curt Smith (bio)
In several books, I have addressed America’s great divide: not right v. left, rap v. bluegrass, or Bud Light v. Tangueray. Instead, at some point, each of us becomes a person of substance, or style.
Style is outer-directed, feeling ethics situational. Substance turns inward, eying right v. wrong. People of style love trend. People of substance deem beauty skin-deep, and decency deep-down. Recently, a man of substance died.
Baseball has had nine Commissioners since the post’s 1920 birth. Bowie Kuhn was the fifth (1969-84) and, in many ways, best. We judge a leader how he finds, and leaves, his job. Kuhn found baseball on a respirator. He left the summer game in bloom.
Dead at 80, Kuhn grew in up in Washington, his Senators the Atlantis of the American League. “I never had to tell who was winning. People knew,” said announcer Bob Wolff. “I only had to give the score.” Adversity strengthened Kuhn, priming him to swim upstream.
In a 1964 Harris Poll, 48 percent of America named baseball their favorite sport. Half that did when Kuhn became Commissioner. Forbes mourned “our beat-up national sport,” too bland, it seemed, for a hip and inchoate age. Aping a 1971 film, baseball resembled sport’s Last Picture Show. Kuhn vowed that the last would be first.
He opposed free agency, fearing a caste system: teams with the gold rule. Baseball brooked five work stoppages, but expanded from 20 to 26 teams. Attendance doubled. Postseason swelled: the League Championship Series. Kuhn OKd the designated hitter, tired of a pitcher trying to hit: dull as seeing paint dry, hearing W. speak, or reevaluating Al Gore.
Kuhn fined Ted Turner, for player tampering, and George Steinbrenner, for illegal campaign funding. Above all, he understood the TV age. In 1969, baseball bad one network series: NBC’s Game of the Week. Worse, pro football blanketed syndication. Kuhn craved a weekly half-hour show of highlight, lowlight, feature, and other fare.
First, he sired a ABC/NBC arrangement. Joe Garagiola replaced dull as dishwater Gowdy. Kuhn tried to bounce Howard Cosell, touted Al Michaels and Vin Scully, and sired This Week In Baseball: syndicated sports highest-rated serial. Ultimately, no baseball series so bespoke one man: host Mel Allen. Allen was hired by Bowie Kuhn.
Kuhn moved to night the World Series weekday schedule (“Working men can’t see day games”) but kept weekend’s in the afternoon (“for kids”). The balance thrived till his successor made the Series all-nocturnal: also, killing Game and OKing salary collusion. Peter Ueberroth was shallow, glib, and a debacle: a stylist, to the core.
Under Kuhn, baseball regained parity with the NFL. His reward was an ‘80s firing. “What’s dumber than football’s dumbest owner?” said Orioles don Edward Bennett Williams. “Baseball’s smartest owner.” Some writers seemed as dumb. Kuhn was formal: how old-timey. A devout Catholic: how bourgeois. A model family man: how square. His foil was Marvin Miller, firebrand players union leader. The New York Times, among others, never forgave Bowie, then or now. Forgetting nothing, it learned nothing, too.
Recently sports economist Andrew Zimbalist bayed that Kuhn “never did anything enlightening.” He must have lived on another 1969-84 planet. Having little substance, critics couldn’t recognize it in Kuhn. Emerson wrote of Napoleon, “He was no saint, to use his word, no capuchin, and he is no hero in the high sense.” Neither saint nor hero, Kuhn was a good man who each day went out and did his job.
One day Kuhn will be elected to the Hall of Fame: honoring, among other things, his fine private sense of humor. The last laugh will be on those who could, or would, not grasp his substance: still blind as a bat, deaf as a doorknob, and dim as a burned-out bulb.
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