Sport: Cashiering the Commissioner

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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