Greatest Happening Since Babe

It’s probably too early for it, but I have a candidate for Sports Illustrated’s sportsman of the year.

Michael Jordan.

Oh, I know he hasn’t dunked a basketball in earnest in almost a couple of years. I know that Dream Team II didn’t include him. He’s probably had a dip in shoe sales and soft-drink peddling. But let me tell you what he did do.

He gave the game of baseball a shot in the arm. Oh, I don’t care that he batted . 203 or whatever it was. For a minor league team, at that.

But consider what this man did for the grand old game: Amid a storm of derision, hooting, catcalls and assorted expressions of scorn, he left a sport at which he was not only dominant but all-time.

And what did he leave it for? A villa in the south of France? A yacht trip to the Bahamas. A life of ease on the golf course?

Nah! He left it to try out for the Chicago White Sox but cheerfully accepted assignment with the Birmingham Barons. A double-A baseball team. A farm club.

He did it, he said, because he loved baseball. He was fulfilling a dream.

Think about that for a minute. A guy who was the greatest basketball player ever to play the game chucks it all to go try to hit the curveball. He went from a ball 30 inches in circumference to one 9 inches. He went from prime time to blackout.

You remember how they used to say a certain player--Willie Mays comes to mind--would play the game for nothing? Well, Michael Jordan damn near did.

He went from a sport of the 21st Century to one of the 19th. They said baseball was too old, too slow, too quaint. But here was this legendary sportsman ready to suit up with the no-illusion veterans, the starry-eyed kids, to make the long bus trips to metropolises like Greenville, Knoxville, Huntsville, Chattanooga and Memphis and do it joyously.

He opted for the indigenous American sport when he was the toast of six continents in a sport recognized everywhere, even in places where they don’t know who Mickey Mantle is.

I have never wanted anyone to succeed more than I did Michael Jordan. He did more for the esteem of baseball than anyone since Babe Ruth saved it from the Black Sox.

Then, there are the other candidates. Choose one: Bud Selig, Richard Ravitch, Donald Fehr.

It’s hard to figure who’s done less for baseball under the guise of helping it, indeed, saving it.

How do these guys qualify for sportsman of the year? Well, bear in mind the contributions don’t always have to be positive. Hitler and Stalin made Time magazine’s man of the year, if memory serves. Your impact on history can be apocalyptic.

So, these guys eminently qualify. Serial killers occupy a better place in the minds of sports fans than a guy who kills baseball.

No World Series? No pennants? What’s next? No Indy 500? No Kentucky Derby? The Super Bowl is too new to qualify. After all, the next one will be Super Bowl XXIX. The next World Series would have been World Series XCI.

Who honors baseball? Michael Jordan tossing aside the adulation of the multitudes to risk humiliation, failure? Or the cleanup hitters of the counting house, the MVPs of bookkeeping who padlocked an American institution after they let their labor loot it.

Who says baseball is their private toy anyway? A yacht berthed at St. Tropez, a Bugatti in the garage, a stamp collection?

The minute these guys sewed a community’s label on the front of their team’s uniforms--and there’s no evidence they ever asked the community’s permission--they entered into an implied contract with that community.

This was not like owning a Mom & Pop store on Firestone Boulevard. You owned a municipal project, a public trust. These guys draw support, sustenance from that community identification, indeed their very existence depends on it. If you don’t think so, just go down to an anonymous sandlot game where the principals play in a blank uniform for the fun of it and count the crowd and look for the television cameras. It won’t take long.

The men who run baseball have run it over a cliff. These Solomons have really cut the baby in half. These guys for whom the communities not only lent their name and their loyalties but also built them magnificent edifices to showcase their product, have broken faith with those communities, with the people who made them, nurtured them, made them a part of the municipal family, so to speak.

The communities should now entertain bids from other entrepreneurs who will not only pay for the privilege of representing the communities but guarantee they will perform, not forfeit a season. If you hire a blimp or a skywriter or even a balloon to advertise and promote your city, it has to fly.

A team has a higher obligation to the community it purports to represent than to fold its tent in a union squabble. Otherwise, what you have is the Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars. Or the House of David. Are they the Milwaukee Brewers? Or the Bud Selig & Co. Brewers?

It’s not an ordinary business. Otherwise, wouldn’t the so-called imperiled “small-market” teams simply move into the big markets? Go where the money is? Didn’t Macy’s move across the street, so to speak, from Gimbel’s? The May Company from the Broadway? Pittsburgh’s losing money? OK, move to New York where there’s lots more.

Of course, they can’t. New York won’t stop them. “Baseball” will. Standard Oil can open a gas station where it wishes. Baseball can’t.

So, a community that could look forward to revenue from a playoff or World Series crowd is dark. The game is dark. The outlook is dark.

The Dark Sox. Tell me, who has hurt the game of baseball worse--the 1919 Chicago Black Sox? Or the 1994 lineup of Selig, Ravitch and Fehr? The commissioner--Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis--brought us out of that 1919 shame. The commissioner now is part of the problem.

So, let’s hear it for Michael Jordan. The only guy in it who showed he really loved the game for itself.