Ueberroth’s National Passion : In War on Drugs, Commissioner Moves Beyond Baseball

Peter V. Ueberroth is commissioner of major league baseball, a position of great challenge. But Ueberroth, unlike most mortals in his position, seems to be looking beyond the bats and balls these days.

This tendency is in his history. While others measure horizons by eyesight, Ueberroth uses a telescope.

Ueberroth’s current passion is the battle against drugs. Cocaine and marijuana, to be specific. And his passion--”call it an anger, a deep, burning anger and you’ll be closest to my true feelings,” he said--is not focused on drugs in baseball in this country. It is focused on drugs in this country.

Just say that he is mad as hell and he is not going to let his country take it anymore.

“I didn’t want to know about these things, I didn’t want to care,” he said. “But I can’t help it. The feeling is there. I’m committed. I know too much.”

Ueberroth’s overall hard-line stance against drug use isn’t new. When he took over as baseball commissioner in the fall of 1984, he said he would tackle the drug problem as his sport’s enemy No. 1. And, on Feb. 28, he conditionally suspended 11 players for their alleged use of illegal drugs, an action that got him mostly positive reviews--and much attention.

Just Wednesday, he testified in Washington before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, and his testimony, in essence, asked government officials to declare war on those “bringing the poisons into our country.”

But what did take better focus during a lengthy interview Thursday with The Times was that Ueberroth’s tough talking on this topic has little to do with him as baseball commissioner and everything to do with him as Peter Ueberroth, self-imposed visionary, a three-piece-suit rebel with a cause.

“I’m kind of waiting for somebody to tell me I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “A few people in baseball have said that it is kind of inappropriate, that my position doesn’t really dictate that I do this. And I guess I’d have a hard time arguing with that.”

It also seems that he will have a hard time backing down from his self-appointed rounds. The near evangelistic zeal currently burns too hot.

“If there were such a thing in the government as a czar of drug fighting in this country, and somebody asked me to do that, I’d be hard-pressed to say no,” he said.

“I’m really a terrible public speaker, unless I care. And I’d like to hear a tape of the thing in Washington.”

The implication was that, in his testimony before the House committee, he cared enough to send the Congressmen his very best message.

Because he cares so much about this drug issue, and because he is seen only as a baseball commissioner and a sports figure looking out for only the best interests of his sport, his stance on the current status of his game is widely misunderstood, he said.

“The problem is, you can’t put what I said in headlines,” Ueberroth said. “It isn’t that simple. It isn’t short, crisp. But when I say that baseball is done with drugs, that’s what gets the headlines, and it reads differently that way.

“Yes, I’m saying that the battle against drugs in baseball is over. I’m saying that we have addressed it, that we have a stranglehold on it. That we expect there will be a few skirmishes, but that we, in baseball, as an institution, have stood up to drugs and won.

“But what I’m also saying is that there is more to do. That there needs to be a continual vigil. And that others need to not lose heart, to go forward against it.”

Ueberroth’s interpretation of his--and baseball’s--victory over drugs is in taking action against it, in meeting the enemy face to face. To his way of thinking, he came, he saw and he conquered.

To those who find the logic of the conquest lacking a few visible prisoners in shackles, Ueberroth answered: “You have to just let the program (fines, baseball drug testing) work. It has been put in place, now it must be left alone to run its course. At the end of the season, we’ll revisit this.”

Ueberroth said baseball’s plan will work because everyone in baseball wants it to--players, managers, front-office personnel, umpires.

Ueberroth is a man who, among other things, moves on well. He moved from the comfort of a lucrative travel agency to the huge challenge of the 1984 Olympics. And he quickly moved from that $225-million success story to the baseball commissioner’s office, where he has already tackled a strike and a drug problem.

What he seems to be doing now is moving on again. He remains commissioner of baseball in name, in fact and in the dispatching of many daily duties. But in spirit, and in his spare time, he has literally ascended the pulpit to carry on his public war against drugs.

“I’ve got six commencement speeches to make in the next month or so, and every chance I get, I see people of influence, or people who can tell me more about what they know is going on,” he said.

He will speak May 19 at a San Diego symposium that was set up to better inform sportswriters of the drug problems they are now forced to write more and more about.

“If I can get away, I’ll go early and listen to the other speakers,” Ueberroth said. “I want to know as much as I can.”

Cynics, of course, listen to all this and ask the question that Ueberroth is asked most and likes least: Does he also want to run this anti-drug zeal into an increased public awareness of Peter Ueberroth as a political candidate?

“If I were running for public office, it would be pretty foolish for me to stick to just one issue,” he said. “That’s a pretty narrow platform.”

And so, whether you like it or not, whether you buy his motives, whether you think the commissioner of baseball ought to be committing such a large part of his energy to something that in its scope has little to do with baseball, Ueberroth presses on.

He talks with passion about the New York school system currently having only a 1960 film available to inform its children about the dangers of drugs.

He talks with passion about parents who will turn out by the thousands to make sure a youngster infected with AIDS by the slip of a hospital needle won’t be allowed to sit near their son or daughter but who will not even be mildly interested in knowing about or attending sessions on the drug-infested atmosphere their child inhabits.

He talks with passion about drugs called black tar and crack, drugs that he said have impact--and much quicker addiction time--well beyond the better-known drugs of the day such as cocaine.

He talks with passion about the seriousness of our border-control problems, and about the advisability of taking economic sanctions against the countries that “manufacture and send this poison to our children.”

And he talks about personally lobbying major corporations for commitments of 20% of their advertising funds for paid, professionally done and commercially timed anti-drug advertising.

The question came up about the length of his term as baseball commissioner. Ueberroth paused for a moment, looked to an aide and said, “I’m not sure.”

He was told that his term ran until after the 1989 season.

It didn’t seem to matter. He had other things on his mind. And in the tradition of somebody who does it so well, Peter Ueberroth is moving on to them.