A MAN WORTH REMEMBERING

There are Tragedies and tragedies and if the actions that led to a man’s rise also produce his downfall, who can complain? Justice has been served, and poetry.

Then there is the case of Al Campanis, who had reached the age of 70 years 5 months 4 days last Monday without ever having done anything to qualify as a racist before going on a late-night TV show.

What happened after that may not have been Tragedy but it wasn’t pretty, either. A career that was near its end was stamped with something ugly and terminated abruptly.

Nothing that follows should be construed as a defense of racism, subtle, de facto or otherwise. Nor is the point of this that if he was a good guy, people ought to forgive him more readily. Like, what’s a little prejudice between friends?

But conceding everything, including the fact that he said some things that at some level he must have meant, committing career suicide in the process, to me he is unconvincing as a racist. He is too warm a man, anything but mean-spirited, and I never heard a word or a suggestion like that come out of his mouth.

I was around him a fair amount in the three seasons I covered his team and we had our battles. Once I called his age and competence into question in the paper. He stayed mad as long as he could, which was about the duration of one telephone conversation. I’m not a person who thinks of the people he covers as friends; it’s a professional relationship, after all. But there are people I’ve covered toward whom I feel friendly, and chief among them on the Dodgers was Campanis.

There are others who feel as I do, including George Vecsey, the New York Times columnist who wrote Loretta Lynn’s book, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and Bob Welch’s “Five O’Clock Comes Early.”

Vecsey thought about doing a book on Campanis’ 91-year-old mother, Tulla, who now lives in Buena Park and still insists on cooking her son breakfast when he comes over.

Born on the Greek island of Kos, she had an affair with an Italian soldier, whose child she bore. She was ostracized by her family and her people and abandoned by her lover. When the soldier, whose name was Campani, was called home, she followed him to Piraeus and to Italy, where she became a popular figure while bringing the suit that won her son the right to his father’s name.

She and her son came to America in 1922 and at Ellis Island, the name became Campanis. She raised him strictly, in the continental manner, demanding that he be faithful in his studies. He has a degree in education from NYU, where he also enjoyed courses in physiology.

His discourse in physiology Monday night, of course, got him in a world of trouble. It should be noted, however, that he looks at everyone, not just blacks, as if they were race horses.

Once when a writer went over to his office in Vero Beach, wearing shorts, Campanis eyed the man’s legs.

“Good wheels,” he said.

“ Chief! “ said his secretary, Marge Wade, rolling her eyes.

Chief was Campanis’ nickname among the Dodgers. It may have been given sardonically, although if it was, he didn’t seem to know it. He loved it.

Ultimately, Vecsey decided not to do the book on Campanis’ mother, but not before he’d gotten to know Campanis. When Campanis became famous late Monday night, one of those who hurt for him was Vecsey.

“I’m stunned,” said Vecsey from New York. “That seemed so uncharacteristic of Al. I have never seen a sign of it. I’ve been to his home and I’ve been to his mother’s home. I’ve been out with him socially.

“In another context, in another conversation, I could see him saying just the opposite. He always took pride in the fact that they were the team of Jackie Robinson, or Junior Gilliam. Everything I ever saw in him suggested that he was nothing but a true disciple of (Branch) Rickey.

“He spoke several languages, he was aware of the differences between people. He was very popular with the people from the Dominican Republic. (After acquiring Pedro Guerrero from the Cleveland organization and becoming aware of the island’s potential, Campanis had one of his scouts, Ralph Avila, set up baseball’s first developmental program there.) Whenever he was in New York, I’d see him in a restaurant, sitting next to these brown-skinned people from the Dominican. I never heard him say anything like ‘I’ve got to do this.’ They were his amigos .”

How could this have happened?

Unless those gods that the Greeks know so well really have it in for someone, a man’s fall must flow from the events of his life, all right. If I find it hard to see Campanis as a racist, it is not hard to see him as burdened with some stereotypical racial baggage.

He was raised in an ethnic neighborhood in New York where such characterizations would have been common enough. There has been talk about his “old-fashioned attitudes,” but even in these enlightened times, when the poor seem to have faded from consciousness and civil rights from the top of our national agenda, there are too many people who could find some old-fashioned stereotypes within themselves, were they to look hard enough.

If Campanis had a tragic flaw, it was not that he was a closet racist and one sad night that racism popped out. In fact, he was part of, and comfortable with, the most progressive program in baseball management, however inadequate it may be. Campanis’ flaw was loving his job too much and staying too long.

In the ‘70s, he was as buttoned-up as the Sphinx but in recent years, he seemed looser-tongued. Occasionally he seemed confused about details. At the 1985 winter meetings, he got up at a press conference to announce the Steve Yeager-to-Seattle deal and started talking about the Candy Maldonado deal. No one had known about the Maldonado deal.

What Campanis was, however imperfectly, was a Dodger. He idolized Rickey and lived by Walter O’Malley’s advice on signing players--”Spend it like it’s yours.”

If the O’Malleys needed a terrier to sit at the side of their vault, they had their man. If Campanis was nice personally, he never batted an eye when it came to dispatching anyone in the interest of the greater good. He loved The Dodgers a lot more than he loved any Dodger.

Of course, he was also notorious for re-acquiring his former players--Bobby Castillo, Joe Beckwith, Joe Ferguson. Was that kindness or his ever-keen desire to be proven right? Both, perhaps.

He was the scout who found Sandy Koufax, as a first baseman at Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. He said that when he saw Koufax throw, the hair stood up on the back of his forearm, for one of two times in his life, he said. The other was the first time he and his wife saw the Pieta in the Vatican.

He signed a second Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente, suffered when Clemente was allowed to go to the Pirates, and pined thereafter for a successor. He had high hopes for Maldonado, which were shared by no other Dodger official.

“First of 3,000,” said Campanis, watching Maldonado get his first big league hit.

Four years later, Maldonado was sent off to the Giants, having discovered that the first 1,000 are the hardest.

Campanis protected his prerogatives to the point of comedy. When his customary chair was taken at dinner one night in Vero Beach, he was so unhappy someone had “The Chief” painted on the back of it so no one would ever make that mistake again.

It was barely noticed but his position had become almost ceremonial. The key decisions have been handed up to Peter O’Malley throughout the ‘80s. Fred Claire, who formally took over Campanis’ job Thursday, has actually been the No. 2 man in the organization for five years. Contracts have been given to Bob Walker, the Dodger staff counsel, since the salaries got over $500,000.

But Campanis still absorbed the shots as if he had called them, and without a word in his own defense. When Tommy John was allowed to leave in 1979, setting up the team’s tumble after its ‘77-’78 pennants, Campanis was pilloried. Later, Dodger officials said privately that the decision had been O’Malley’s.

Campanis wasn’t immune to the corruptions of power. He wasn’t bad at setting someone else up to take a fall, himself. After the ’82 campaign ended a game short of the division title, after Fernando Valenzuela was taken out of that tie game on what became Joe Morgan Day in San Francisco, Campanis decided that the problem was . . . the age of the . . . coaching staff?

Danny Ozark, a longtime retainer who had rendered the kind of service that was supposed to be remembered forever in the Dodger organization, was unceremoniously dumped. It was suspected that if the news hadn’t leaked clumsily, Campanis might have cashiered Monty Basgall, too.

It’s easy to fault the Dodgers for not having taken Campanis down years ago but, in their defense, it wasn’t going to be easy. If he was going, it might not have been kicking and screaming, but it wouldn’t have been voluntarily, either.

The consensus had him leaving after the ’88 season, when Tom Lasorda’s contract would be up, allowing him to go upstairs, but Campanis wasn’t embracing the idea.

“My mother is a healthy 91 and they say it’s in the genes,” he told The Times’ Ross Newhan.

Then came last Monday night. Maybe he was just doing what he’d always done, sticking up for the home team, trying to demonstrate that it was being unfairly accused.

Tuesday, O’Malley declared that Campanis’ job was “absolutely not” in jeopardy but, on Wednesday, O’Malley asked for his resignation.

There has been speculation that there was another hand in this, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s. It was Ueberroth’s initiative to use this season as a memorial to Jackie Robinson. Ueberroth is not one who allows himself to be crossed lightly. After the resignation, Ueberroth applauded the Dodgers’ quick action.

And that’s how Al Campanis single-handedly revitalized the civil rights movement among baseball front offices, where it had been languishing. It’s good to see actually. I just wish it wasn’t being done in the name of repudiating a man who, I believe, wishes the movement the best of luck.

When I was a month away from leaving the Dodger beat, I wrote a feature on R.J. Reynolds, a young Dodger who had just laid down a squeeze bunt to win a key game with the Braves. To my surprise, I got a letter from Campanis.

It said:

“Dear Mark: (Poison Pen)

“You see, you can write a very good article by being nice!

“Just thought I would let you know that the Chief thinks you are a good writer and perhaps I will miss you come spring. . . .

“Your friend, regardless of what you write, (signed) Al.”

Below his signature, his secretary had typed, “The Chief.”

It’s the way I’m always going to remember him, no perhaps about it.