COMMENTARY : History Should Be Kinder to Campanis

Al Campanis is 78 years old now and eight years removed from the time when his words came out ignorant and wrong. He was on “Nightline” and told Ted Koppel that blacks lack the “necessities” to be managers in big league baseball. Before 48 hours had elapsed, a distinguished baseball life, spent with baseball players of all colors and background, had been ruined. We looked at a single statement from that life and threw away the rest of it.

So did Peter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner. He asked for Campanis’ resignation as general manager and got it. Campanis had been with the Dodgers since he played a handful of games in 1943. But a baseball friendship with Jackie Robinson, begun in the minor leagues in 1946, is really the way he always has marked the beginning of his Dodger career. Now he had been fired, thrown to the mob, as if that would solve all problems of race in America.

Now Campanis is back in baseball with what is a wonderful job for him, vice president and director of baseball operations for the Palm Springs Suns, a Double-A team in the Western Baseball League. Campanis is back doing what he always has done best, evaluating young talent. He did that for Branch Rickey in 1946, when Rickey sent him to Montreal to help Robinson learn to play second base.

It is the way Campanis should go out. When he retires from baseball this time, it will be by choice. He is one of the great baseball men, a man who had a bad day once and sounded like a bigot even though the actions of his life said he was not. By the time a lot of us wised up and figured that out, it was too late to do Campanis any good. He was gone. The best of Campanis is that he never got as angry as everybody got at him.

“I needed a couple more words that night on television,” Campanis said Friday (February 10) from his office in Palm Springs. “It’s so long ago that nobody cares anymore, but all I was talking about was the necessary experience.”

There was a pause and Campanis said, “Sometimes you don’t say what you mean.”

The president of Rutgers University, Francis Lawrence, was in the same kind of trouble last week. Lawrence was quoted as saying that African-Americans lack the “genetic hereditary” background to do well on some of the standardized tests used by college admissions people. Lawrence, who has had the kind of long, honorable career as an academic that Campanis had as a baseball man, apologized. He says he misspoke. His record says he has spent his career fighting for the same minority students who now want him fired.

It now appears Lawrence will stay on at Rutgers. It never should have been an issue, no matter how many students scream for Lawrence’s head. If the school had caved in to the screamers and demonstrators, no matter how noble and righteous they feel, it would have been a disgrace.

On Friday, I asked Al Campanis if he knew about Francis Lawrence’s problems, everything that has happened there. The other night, some demonstrators even stopped the Rutgers-UMass game by sitting in on the court and refusing to leave. It made the national news. Campanis said he missed it all.

But right away he wanted to know something.

“Is he going to lose his job over this?” Campanis said.

I told him I didn’t think that would happen, even though the governing board at Rutgers was meeting then to discuss Lawrence’s future.

The difference at Rutgers, at least for now, is that the people who run that school have more nerve than O’Malley showed in 1987. They looked at more than a few ignorant words.

“I’m sure (Lawrence’s) words just came out wrong,” Campanis said. “That happens, you know.”

The students don’t care at Rutgers. They don’t want to hear about anything that happened before they got to college, which is apparently when all meaningful school history began. I saw one of the leaders of the protest movement, a young man named Ivan Rolley, on television the other morning, and he did not even want to discuss Lawrence’s apology, or his fine record on minority recruitment at Rutgers. Rolley, who is about 20, didn’t need to know anything about Lawrence because he already knows everything.

“That’s always the worst part,” Campanis said. “People judge your whole life on a handful of words. Then your good name is gone.”

I have gotten to know Campanis since 1987. He never has sounded mean about anything that happened to him. He called a couple of weeks ago when he was in New York for the baseball writers dinner. He sat with Spike Lee that night. Lee is planning a film about Jackie Robinson’s life, and Campanis can talk forever about Robinson, all the way back to when he showed him a better way to shift his weight when pivoting on the double play.

On Friday, Campanis told about a dinner in Palm Springs the other night. A lot of old Dodgers, almost 20 of them, showed up because they never forgot Campanis even when baseball did. Tom Lasorda gave a speech and said, “I don’t care what anybody says, Al Campanis has never had a prejudiced bone in his body.” These days there is even some talk about naming the Suns’ ballpark after Campanis.

It will never change what happened. What Campanis said to Koppel was offensive. What Francis Lawrence said was offensive, whatever he meant. It should not cancel out everything else Lawrence has done. But that is the way it happened with Campanis. We all felt full of virtue afterward.

Last Sunday there was a column on the op-ed page of The New York Times, saying Francis Lawrence should be fired, using what the Dodgers did to Al Campanis as a precedent. It is the same as telling Judge Lance Ito to use precedents set down by a hanging judge like Roy Bean. Enough time has passed that what happened to Campanis is no longer considered wrong.

Rutgers’ governors stood their ground. They gave their president the backing and the compassion that Campanis did not get from the Dodgers. Maybe in the years since “Nightline” the world has learned something. Maybe the Rutgers students could try to do the same.

“People only heard that one thing from me,” Al Campanis said Friday. “Then they never wanted to listen to me again.