COMMENTARY : Decade of the ‘80s Brought Out Worst and Best in Sports

Greed, greatness and Gretzky. A miracle on ice and Magic on court. A Rose scorned, a sprinter expelled, an athlete dying young.

The 1980s brought out the worst and best of sports. Playing fair was replaced by playing rough. Money mattered. Television ratings overshadowed the final score. Innocence was out. Arrogance was in.

Baseball and football players staged strikes. Umpires, too.

Boycott became an Olympic event, played by the United States in 1980 and the Soviet Union in 1984. The world’s fastest human in 1988, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, was a cheater who took steroids.

Death stalked the games. Maryland basketball star Len Bias overdosed on cocaine two days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics in spring, 1986. Former California Angels pitcher Donnie Moore, tormented by a crumbling career and a rocky marriage and haunted by a pitch that cost his team a spot in the 1986 World Series, shot his wife three times and committed suicide in 1989. Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti’s heart stopped in summer 1989. Thirty-nine people perished in a soccer riot in Brussels, Belgium, in 1985.

The whole world was watching.

Sports owners spun a wheel of fortune, applying the ethics of the board room to the playing field. The Raiders traded Oakland for Los Angeles in 1982 and then beat the National Football League in court. The Colts fled Baltimore for Indianapolis under cover of darkness in 1984. The football Cardinals flew the coop from St. Louis to Phoenix, Ariz. The basketball Kings headed from Kansas City, Mo., to Sacramento. The Clippers sailed up the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles in 1984.

Athletes charged kids for autographs.

Money flowed. Kirby Puckett became baseball’s first $3-million-a-year player. He was followed by Rickey Henderson, Mark Langston and Mark Davis. Of course, television picked up the tab. CBS anted up $1.1 billion for baseball rights and another $1 billion to lock up the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. men’s basketball tournament.

The America’s Cup business boomed after America’s 132-year winning streak was ended by Australia in 1983. Dennis Conner and the United States won the cup back in Fremantle, Australia, in 1987, then were forced by the courts to defend a wildcat challenge from New Zealand. Conner’s catamaran won the competition, but the New York state courts will have the ultimate decision.

Money corrupted. Pete Rose, the greatest singles hitter in baseball history, gambled on sports and was banished for life from the game he loved. Paying players earned Southern Methodist University’s football program a two-year “death penalty” from the NCAA.

Twenty major league baseball players testified before a grand jury in Pittsburgh about the use of drugs in the clubhouse.

Clearly, sports ceased to become an escape from reality. But the decade also contained beauty and drama, the stuff that moves millions to cheer with passion.

The great ones were Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana and Magic Johnson. Gretzky smashed hockey barriers, led the Edmonton Oilers to four Stanley cups, and then went south to Los Angeles. He even took a wife.

Montana’s precision elevated the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl titles in the ‘80s.

Magic merely turned a triple double into a calling card, guided the Lakers to five titles and helped transform a once-struggling National Basketball Assn. into a global force.

Some things changed. Muhammad Ali retired, Bear Bryant died, Tom Landry was fired. Mike Tyson leveled all comers in boxing’s heavyweight division, and any coach whose team won a Super Bowl instantly was proclaimed a genius, even Bill Parcells.

Sugar Ray Leonard wouldn’t go away.

The torch of tennis greatness was passed from Bjorn Borg to John McEnroe to Ivan Lendl to Mats Wilander to Boris Becker.

Jack Nicklaus won his sixth Masters; his son carried his clubs.

Bo Jackson played baseball. And football.

Pete Rozelle quit.

Carl Lewis matched Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Kirk Gibson limped to home plate and hit the home run of the decade, if not the century.

Women continued to stride toward equality in pay and performance. Martina Navratilova was the first to turn a tennis season into $1 million. Steffi Graf won the Grand Slam. Chris Evert completed a storied career with a wave and a smile.

Remember Mary Lou Retton?

Joan Benoit earned a gold medal and a place in history by winning the first Olympic women’s marathon in 1984. The 1988 Summer Olympics belonged to sisters-in-law Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

But the decade’s greatest moment came two months into 1980, when a bunch of American college kids took on the Soviets in a hockey game at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. Amateurs against socialist pros. Us vs. them.

The game wasn’t even televised live, but the memory lives. Mike Eruzione’s goal. Jim Craig wrapped in an American flag. And Herb Brooks, all business, surveying the scene of gloves and sticks and bodies like a guy who just had wandered onto the scene of a traffic accident.

Yeah, that was purity: U.S.A. 4, U.S.S.R. 3.

Nothing else came close.