The Benefits Not in a Contract

By Tom Callahan

There were better weeks than last for canceling a sport. Couldn't strikes be timed to follow a good drug bust, or any of the disgraces that once were rare intrusions in the sports pages but now are staples? Russell Baker has noticed that sportswriters hardly ever gush anymore, but the problem has to do with all the grim details in the piece. The cranky voices of lawyers and agents are growing as familiar as Vin Scully's. They argue over dreary words. This time arbitration, last time compensation. When do they get to calcification?

But the too frequent mood of misery was absent last week, and so it may not be a complete coincidence that baseball's strike was short-lived. Over an amazing prestrike weekend, baseball's Rod Carew, Tom Seaver and Dwight Gooden, football's Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson and Roger Staubach, a runner named Steve Cram, a tennis player named Boris Becker and an amateur golfer named Scott Verplank had got in the first word, not for the players or the owners but for the games: excellence. On dark occasions in sports, the President and both houses of Congress can vouch for this inessential industry as an essential reverie, and still the public may have a little difficulty recalling what's so lyrical about sweating. This time the memories were fresh and bright.

Imagine two young men debuting in the same baseball season, winning the Rookie of the Year awards for the American and National Leagues, toiling 19 summers in and out of the sun, and arriving at the definitive milestone of their positions on the same afternoon. For a pitcher, that means 300 victories, in the 116-year history of baseball the province of just 17 men, now including Seaver, 40. Leading up to the moment, he acted cool and professional. Only afterward would he admit, "It was like I was pitching my first major league game." The morning before, he was sitting beside his father Charles in the Chicago White Sox dugout at Yankee Stadium, just as so many years earlier, like so many sons and fathers, they must have sat together in ball parks. Reversing and updating the dialogue, Seaver said, "Look over at the batting cage, dad. There's Yogi Berra's son."

Once Charles Seaver was an amateur golfer of Walker Cup class renowned for his serenity under fire. His boy is quick to correct anyone who says he played golf the way Tom pitches: "I pitch the way he played golf." Finding himself in New York now was another incredibility to Seaver. "Tom is really still a Met," Mets First Baseman Keith Hernandez insisted the next day as Seaver's former New York teammates bellied around a television set (equitably enough, in Chicago). Baseball's particular prodigy, Pitcher Dwight Gooden, 20, had just won his eleventh consecutive game to break a club record that Seaver fashioned 16 years ago. "It's especially great coming today," said Gooden. "This is something I'll always remember." Seaver was about through beating the Yankees, 4-1, when returning to the dugout after the eighth inning, he brushed by the family field box to reassure Daughter Annie, 9. "Only three more outs to go," he murmured. "Good," she said happily, "then we can go home and go swimming." He finished the game filled with delight.

The batters' equivalent of 300 victories is 3,000 hits, Carew's entry that same afternoon making a total of 16 names on this roster of saints. Since Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates died in a plane crash almost 13 years ago at 38, the approximate measure of a great hitter has become precise. Clemente had 3,000 hits exactly. That Carew, 39, would get the single for California against his old team, the Minnesota Twins, was another wonder of happenstance. But his shorter ration of the day's glory was predictable. When Carew said, "I'm just very glad it's over," the sigh recalled Henry Aaron's relief in 1974 after hitting the 715th home run that bettered Babe Ruth. "Aaron was as good as Willie Mays," Pete Rose thinks, "just not as famous." In the year of Rose's assault on Ty Cobb, Carew took his usual place in the off-light with a practiced grace.

Styles and settings barely begin the contrasts between Roger Staubach and Joe Namath, new Hall of Fame quarterbacks from the Naval Academy and Alabama, Dallas and New York City. During the late '60s and early '70s, they were on the opposite ends of every spectrum. In a Fu Manchu mustache, Namath played Elvis Presley to Staubach's Pat Boone. But they came to be stuffed and mounted together and cried along with Simpson during the inductions at Canton, Ohio. As Namath searched the sky for a hangdog man in a houndstooth hat, the late Alabama coach Bear Bryant, he also shared the honors with Pete Rozelle, a football commissioner who once insisted Joe quit the saloon business. For some such mischief never revealed, Bryant kicked Namath off Alabama's team for the last game of the 1963 season and the Sugar Bowl. "Coach Bryant," Namath said, and his voice cracked like crystal.

A fair-haired Englishman, Steve Cram, 24, was running the world off its feet with three world records in 20 days. That orange dervish Boris Becker, 17, confirmed his Wimbledon tennis championship in West Germany's first Davis Cup victory over the U.S. (the best American, John McEnroe, avoided Hamburg). But of all the sunny events piled up against the bleakness of arbitration clauses and pension proposals, the singular one was actually contested in a rainstorm at the Butler National Golf Club near Chicago, ultimately for no money at all. Scott Verplank, 21, a student at Oklahoma State, became the first amateur in 31 years, since Gene Littler, to win a P.G.A. Tour event.

Jim Thorpe, a touring pro since 1975 who had never won but had finished second three times, was assured the $90,000 first prize even before he made a putt to force a playoff with Verplank. The kid was only eligible to play for a trophy. In a grill at Boston's Logan Airport, where a television set was tuned to the Western Open, senior golfers who had been completing their own competition in nearby Concord trickled in from the final round. One greeted the other who hailed the next. "Come look at this, the kid's got a chance." The room thickened with old golfers. Billy Casper ambled by. "Billy, Billy, the kid's going to win it." When he did, they shouted for joy, stood there plainly moved for a moment. All of these are only games, but on the bottom line, money is not what moves us. --By Tom Callahan