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Lessons from US baseball for China's troubled football
By Paul Finkelman |
July 24, 2012, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FOR two years there had been rumors that games were fixed. The best team in the sport had been beaten soundly in the championship. Its skilled players suddenly made mistakes, sent the ball in the wrong direction, ran like wounded old men instead of young superstars.
There were rumors of bribery and thrown games. Gamblers in on the fix had made a fortune, betting heavily on the weaker team. When the owners found out, the guilty players were expelled from the game, there were criminal investigations, and trials.
Chinese football in 2012? No. This was American baseball in 1920. The corrupted team was the 1919 Chicago White Sox, known afterwards as the Chicago Black Sox. Members of the team had accepted bribes from gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
It took almost a year for the evidence to become public. At the end of the 1920 season the owner of the White Sox suspended the corrupted players. The corrupted players were arrested but the jury acquitted them because of missing evidence and the fact that most residents of Chicago were sympathetic to the underpaid White Sox players.
Because players could not freely move from team to team, the White Sox players were forced to play for the club owner, Charles Comiskey, who was notorious for underpaying players. The players' revenge was to take bribes and prevent the team from winning the World Series. After they were acquitted, the players hoped to return to baseball. But it would not happen. The team owners - mostly wealthy business men who were used to getting their own way - knew they had to clean up the sport.
They could not do it internally. These powerful "war lords" of the national sport could barely get along with each other and would not accept leadership from one of their own. But they all agreed that professional baseball needed strong and thoroughly honest leadership. The owners did something almost unthinkable: they ceded most of the power to run the game to a newly created Commissioner of Baseball.
To fill this office they looked outside of baseball. They had to find someone who had unimpeachable integrity, a strong sense of right and wrong, and an iron backbone. The commissioner had to know and understand baseball, he could not be a "baseball man." He had to be an outsider. The owners quickly found the right man for the job in the backyard of the Chicago White Sox. In 1921 professional baseball hired the United States District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Born in Ohio, in 1866, Landis was named for the Civil War battle where his father was wounded. As a young man he was a competitive cyclist and played baseball well enough to be offered a professional contract. He rejected this offer: playing baseball was recreation for Landis, he did not want to make it a career. He remained a life-long baseball fan, but turned to law for his profession.
No-nonsense approach
After Landis' short career in politics and corporate law, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the US District Court when he was only 39 years old. Landis was known for his tough, no-nonsense approach to law. He famously forced the oil baron John D. Rockefeller to personally testify in his courtroom in an anti-trust case. While known for sentencing wrongdoers to maximum jail terms, he could also be generous and lenient to those who showed remorse.
Facing the scandal of a corrupted World Series, the owners turned to Landis to clean up the game. Landis quickly ruled that the eight corrupted players would never return to major league baseball.
There would be no lenience here, even though one of the players, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, had been the best player on either team in the World Series, and claimed he was not involved in the corruption. Landis did not believe him. Nor did Landis show any sympathy for another player who had not taken a bribe, but who knew about the plot and did not report him. That made him guilty in Landis' eyes. Although he had often showed mercy to defendants who showed remorse, or were poor, he had no sympathy for those who corrupted a game he loved.
Landis set a new rule for baseball. No one connected with game could ever bet on the game - even on his own team. No baseball people could "associate with known gamblers." There would be zero tolerance. To this day baseball has mostly followed this standard.
Landis ruled baseball with an iron fist. He was called "the czar" of baseball. He stayed too long in the job, remained commissioner until his death in 1944. His unflinching integrity allowed him to clean up the game, forcing players and owners alike to behave themselves.
There is a lesson here for Chinese football. The sport needs to find a commissioner of absolute integrity. The commissioner might be a rigidly honest judge or prosecutor, or perhaps a professor of law or ethics, or even humanities like literature or history.
The new commissioner should love the game - the way Landis loved baseball. In fact the commissioner should love the game enough to be willing to devote years to saving it from its own morass of corruption and dishonesty. The commissioner should have a long term of office - not less than 7 or 8 years and perhaps as much as 10 or 12 years. During that time team owners should be unable to remove the commissioner. And the commissioner should be very well paid.
Paul Finkelman is the President McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School. He recently gave lectures in China on sports and law, among other topics, at the Chinese University of Politics and Law, Peking University, and on behalf of the US Embassy in Beijing and the US Consulate in Shanghai.
There were rumors of bribery and thrown games. Gamblers in on the fix had made a fortune, betting heavily on the weaker team. When the owners found out, the guilty players were expelled from the game, there were criminal investigations, and trials.
Chinese football in 2012? No. This was American baseball in 1920. The corrupted team was the 1919 Chicago White Sox, known afterwards as the Chicago Black Sox. Members of the team had accepted bribes from gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series.
It took almost a year for the evidence to become public. At the end of the 1920 season the owner of the White Sox suspended the corrupted players. The corrupted players were arrested but the jury acquitted them because of missing evidence and the fact that most residents of Chicago were sympathetic to the underpaid White Sox players.
Because players could not freely move from team to team, the White Sox players were forced to play for the club owner, Charles Comiskey, who was notorious for underpaying players. The players' revenge was to take bribes and prevent the team from winning the World Series. After they were acquitted, the players hoped to return to baseball. But it would not happen. The team owners - mostly wealthy business men who were used to getting their own way - knew they had to clean up the sport.
They could not do it internally. These powerful "war lords" of the national sport could barely get along with each other and would not accept leadership from one of their own. But they all agreed that professional baseball needed strong and thoroughly honest leadership. The owners did something almost unthinkable: they ceded most of the power to run the game to a newly created Commissioner of Baseball.
To fill this office they looked outside of baseball. They had to find someone who had unimpeachable integrity, a strong sense of right and wrong, and an iron backbone. The commissioner had to know and understand baseball, he could not be a "baseball man." He had to be an outsider. The owners quickly found the right man for the job in the backyard of the Chicago White Sox. In 1921 professional baseball hired the United States District Judge for the Northern District of Ohio, Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Born in Ohio, in 1866, Landis was named for the Civil War battle where his father was wounded. As a young man he was a competitive cyclist and played baseball well enough to be offered a professional contract. He rejected this offer: playing baseball was recreation for Landis, he did not want to make it a career. He remained a life-long baseball fan, but turned to law for his profession.
No-nonsense approach
After Landis' short career in politics and corporate law, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the US District Court when he was only 39 years old. Landis was known for his tough, no-nonsense approach to law. He famously forced the oil baron John D. Rockefeller to personally testify in his courtroom in an anti-trust case. While known for sentencing wrongdoers to maximum jail terms, he could also be generous and lenient to those who showed remorse.
Facing the scandal of a corrupted World Series, the owners turned to Landis to clean up the game. Landis quickly ruled that the eight corrupted players would never return to major league baseball.
There would be no lenience here, even though one of the players, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, had been the best player on either team in the World Series, and claimed he was not involved in the corruption. Landis did not believe him. Nor did Landis show any sympathy for another player who had not taken a bribe, but who knew about the plot and did not report him. That made him guilty in Landis' eyes. Although he had often showed mercy to defendants who showed remorse, or were poor, he had no sympathy for those who corrupted a game he loved.
Landis set a new rule for baseball. No one connected with game could ever bet on the game - even on his own team. No baseball people could "associate with known gamblers." There would be zero tolerance. To this day baseball has mostly followed this standard.
Landis ruled baseball with an iron fist. He was called "the czar" of baseball. He stayed too long in the job, remained commissioner until his death in 1944. His unflinching integrity allowed him to clean up the game, forcing players and owners alike to behave themselves.
There is a lesson here for Chinese football. The sport needs to find a commissioner of absolute integrity. The commissioner might be a rigidly honest judge or prosecutor, or perhaps a professor of law or ethics, or even humanities like literature or history.
The new commissioner should love the game - the way Landis loved baseball. In fact the commissioner should love the game enough to be willing to devote years to saving it from its own morass of corruption and dishonesty. The commissioner should have a long term of office - not less than 7 or 8 years and perhaps as much as 10 or 12 years. During that time team owners should be unable to remove the commissioner. And the commissioner should be very well paid.
Paul Finkelman is the President McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law at Albany Law School. He recently gave lectures in China on sports and law, among other topics, at the Chinese University of Politics and Law, Peking University, and on behalf of the US Embassy in Beijing and the US Consulate in Shanghai.
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