Sport: Cashiering the Commissioner

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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.