Cashiering the Commissioner

By Tom Callahan

After 14 years in a box seat, Kuhn is returned to the grandstand

If only Judge Landis or Borne Kuhn were alive. --An old baseball writer's lament

Wherever Bowie Kuhn has his shirts stuffed after next August, when baseball plans to let its tallest and most erect commissioner go, at least he will be able to cheer at the ball yard again, a sore deprivation these past 14 years. "I can't have a favorite team or a rooting interest," he once said with a sigh. "Sad, isn't it?" For Kuhn, it was.

A descendant of Frontiersman Jim Bowie, who struck out swinging at the Alamo, Kuhn is not exactly a buckskin man or most people's idea of a romantic. Standing 6 ft. 5 in., he was never much of an athlete, a "lousy ballplayer" by his own reckoning, better suited for basketball but in love with baseball. As a calm, scholarly child in Washington, B.C., already too stiff to ask the Senators' players for autographs, Kuhn whiled away early 1940s summers manning the scoreboard for a dollar a day, just to have some part in the wondrous events at Griffith Stadium. "That old stadium had magic," he said. "When they tore it down, my world disappeared."

His special heroes were never the biggest stars. Who knows exactly why a boy takes on the care of a certain ballplayer? Kuhn always rooted for Walt Judnich, a large outfielder for the old St. Louis Browns, because Judnich once spoke to him with extraordinary kindness. Looking up the record of Sid Cohen, in Kuhn's memory a Senators pitcher of glorious accomplishment, Kuhn was charmed not long ago to ind that Cohen had pitched a total of three major league seasons and won exactly three games. How much delight baseball brought the commissioner, only he ever knew, since he was no better at showing warmth than at acknowledging cold, trying not to shiver in his blazer in he arctic night air at the 1976 World Series in Cincinnati.

"Good afternoon, everybody," Kuhn opened the post-mortem like a cheery pathologist or a play-by-play announcer. 'Anything you'd like to talk about?"

By the musty rules of baseball, which require the commissioner to be liked by a full three-fourths of the owners in each league, Kuhn's popularity in the National League was deficient (seven for him, five against), and that was that. Although the American League liked him well enough, 11 to 3, his re-election for a third seven-year term was scotched. Said Kuhn: "I think as much as anything else there is some discomfort now with a commissioner who has disciplinary powers over the people who employ him."

The first commissioner, the frowning old Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was sent in from the federal bench to banish the "Black Sox" fixers of 1919 and restore righteousness. His law was arbitrary and final. Kuhn greatly admired Landis. The judge's successor, Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler, was a posturing "ol' podner." The man who followed Chandler, Ford Frick, was a reluctant leader hesitant to decide anything. Next came General William D. Eckert, "the unknown soldier," a strategic and forlorn disaster.

So in 1969, needing a fifth commissioner, the owners turned comfortably to the National League's attorney, Bowie Kent Kuhn, a Princeton man who had earned his pick of law firms some 15 years earlier, and purposely chose one that conducted business with baseball. Kuhn immediately and unflinchingly began handing down opinions as law. "I tried to follow my conscience and act in a moral way," he said, but Judge Landis' day of personal morality and arbitrary justice was past, and the day of arbitrators, agents and Labor Leader Marvin Miller was upon him.

Had Kuhn laughed more, that would have helped. He had to censure, but not so somberly, Detroit Pitcher Denny McLain's bookmaking, comically inept or Montreal Pitcher Bill Lee's enthusiasm for buckwheat cakes sprinkled with marijuana. The commissioner made too much of Willie Mays' going into the casino glad-handing business, as sad a business as that is.

As a personality, the wooden man Red Smith called the "upright scoutmaster," now 56, always suffered by comparison with National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle, whose public relations skills assured an impression of competence and candor. Last week Kuhn allowed himself a smile when, after agreeing that last year's baseball strike had a considerable effect on his fate, he said: "If there is something a commissioner can do to settle a strike, Mr. Rozelle and I haven't been able to figure out what it might be."

All of the no votes against Kuhn contained the whine of grinding axes. One owner (Nelson Doubleday of the New York Mets) wanted a commissioner less committed to team revenue sharing, because he just happens to operate in a big city. Another (Ted Turner of Atlanta) preferred a man versed in television matters, because he just happens to own a network. Asked how much personal enmity was involved, the residue from voided trades, fines and old suspensions, Kuhn said, "I don't know." A lot, he suspected. "Everything has not been a skittle of fish these 14 years, but I think the game has come light-years [fewer than 28 million attendance in 1969, more than 44 million this year]. I'll take some credit," he said.

"I have a long history of feeling I'm something of a servant to the game," Kuhn responded to the mention of a farfetched scenario to save him yet, too preposterous for even this business, "but I'm not sure I'd do it." In an attempt at compromise, the addition of a business officer was considered by the owners but Kuhn was adamant that his essential authority, guarding the integrity of the game, be absolute. "If I had agreed to a dual commissionership to save my job," he said, "the votes for me would have probably all switched. So I don't want to make myself out to be too much of a hero."

Still, the baseball writers, the most proprietary of the beat men, had already gone too far to stop. In the late innings, they had been rushing to his defense. "It's one of the most touching things that has happened to me as commissioner," Kuhn said gently. "Probably, along with Howard Cosell, I've been as much a target for criticism as anyone in sports." He will be missed, if only for that. --By Tom Callahan

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