Million-Dollar Question: Canseco’s Matrimonial State

Your faithful correspondent on affairs of the heart, we note that an actress long friendly with Joe Theismann is suing him for $4.5 million.

Her charge: promising to provide for her, he has taken off.

She wants $4.5 million from one who no longer is even playing. What would a woman ask from, say, Roger Clemens, now earning $5 million a year?

In baseball, this tops the $4.7 million bagged a while back by Jose Canseco, recently detached from his wife, Esther, who has introduced an interesting dimension to matrimonial warfare.

Suing Jose for divorce, Esther is pointing out they have homes in Florida and California, but that their official residence is California, where he is employed in the winsome city of Oakland.

Your thinking woman’s combatant, Esther explains that California numbers among those states in the union in which the wife is entitled to half.

Florida isn’t that generous.

Since, during their marriage, Jose signed a five-year contract with the Athletics worth $23.5 million and has earned other money, including one World Series winning share and two losing, Esther understandably is partial to the Golden State.

It can’t be charged that Esther didn’t back her husband in time of crisis. Inadvertently short of hits in the last World Series, Jose was benched in the fourth game by his manager, Tony La Russa.

Jose accepted the decision quietly. But Esther called La Russa a “punk.”

La Russa is a lawyer, one of only five managers in baseball history to have passed the bar. It would be ironic if Jose enlisted the punk to defend him in the upcoming skirmish with Esther.

But the case has broader impact on sports in general. At the rate at which salaries are escalating, athletes who get married will have to protect themselves against states such as California.

One will suggest to a new bride: “Dear, maybe it would be nice if we settled down in Arkansas. Good bass fishing around there.”

Married three times, Joe Montana was uncoupled from the first two before he ascended to high finances. With the third wife, he is a resident of California, meaning one raises his glass and recites for Joe the Irish toast:

“May your roof never fall in,

“And may those beneath it never fall out.”

Canseco’s teammate, Mark McGwire, recently underwent a California divorce. It didn’t discourage Rickey Henderson from settling down with his wife in the same state.

Nor is it known whether it inspired Dave Stewart to stay single after coming into $3.5 million.

The course pursued by Canseco over the years has been one of the more intriguing in baseball.

Named Oakland’s model citizen in 1988, he got arrested on more than one occasion for dangerous driving, then pinched again for illegally possessing a gun.

He embarks on prodigious hitting streaks, then falls into slumps equally dramatic.

In the World Series of ‘88, he was made to look like a schoolboy at bat, going 1 for 19.

He improves in the ’89 World Series to 5-for-14, after which he comes to the most recent All-Star Game with the fattest contract in baseball history.

The American League has a runner on second, two outs. Wade Boggs is at bat. The National League manager orders Boggs walked in favor of Canseco. It is contempt beyond comprehension for Jose’s skills. He rolls out weakly.

And, as pointed out above, he goes so sour in the last World Series that the king of salary is set down in the fourth game. Asked to pinch-hit in the ninth, he grounds out.

It has been a mad whirl for Jose, leading now to a war with Esther in which a judge must tell the two where they live.