Bowie Kent Kuhn

REV. GEORGE RUTLER

As baseball fans religiously record statistics, Bowie Kent Kuhn (1926–2007) was, at 42, the youngest commissioner of baseball ever; the tallest, at six-foot-five; and the heaviest, at 250 pounds, though his height made him seem slim.

Bowie Kent Kuhn
As I measured up to none of that, I was not an impressive guide when I led him and his wife, Luisa, through the woods of Colorado while on retreat. As snow began to fall, I imagined our becoming a sequel to the Donner party. Bowie appeared in many outdoor situations, including pro-life marches, but most famously was he in the bleachers adjudicating some of the rifest controversies in baseball history, overseeing the renaissance of the national pastime through the use of television for night games, and the expansion of the major leagues to 26 teams.

I do not think he ever wavered from an uncomplicated faith, and often he would ask me to hear his confession with the stolid practicality of a player donning his uniform for a double-header. In our various trips with Legatus, the organization of Catholic business leaders, he scheduled the sacraments and prayer times as though he were making calls from the dugout. Baseball was like an organic appendage, and he chose his first law firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher because it represented the National League. Some thought him morally arch, as when he panned Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four as detrimental to baseball. In 1985 Peter Ueberroth reinstated Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle to play after Bowie had banned them for promoting gambling casinos. At dinner in the far reaches of Long Island on August 14, 1995, the day after Mantle died, Bowie listed for me the reasons he could not in conscience attend the funeral. I thought it a fine parade of righteous indignation in contradistinction to the self-righteousness above which he stood aloof as philosophically as physically. “My Church taught me the importance of right and wrong. . . . The Church is my bulwark.”

Bowie listed for me the reasons he could not in conscience attend the funeral. I thought it a fine parade of righteous indignation in contradistinction to the self-righteousness above which he stood aloof as philosophically as physically. “My Church taught me the importance of right and wrong. . . . The Church is my bulwark.”

When Billy Martin, who accused Bowie of violating “basic rights” of players, was given a gargantuan funeral after a car crash in bibulous circumstances, and eulogized from the pulpit as sliding into the heavenly home plate safe, Bowie had no comment, but wrote in his memoir, Hardball, that Martin had “a wryness that one would find in an abused animal” that “precluded trust or affection.” Suspending George Steinbrenner for making illegal campaign contributions, and the same for Tigers pitcher Denny McLain for illegal bookmaking, were other testaments of Bowie’s discomfort with moral ambiguity. The man who had been elected commissioner unanimously in 1969 on the first ballot was eased out not all that easily by a coalition of managers after the 1984 season.

Skills with which he promoted groups like the Catholic Values Investment Trust and a committee to defend the representation of the Holy See at the United Nations failed to rescue an ill-advised law partnership. It was another instance of his incongruity with others who preferred the shallows to the higher ground of ethics, and because of bankruptcy laws he moved from New Jersey to Florida, where an offended dignity continued to nurse AIDS patients and pursue philanthropy undeterred.

In Texas he told a convention how I had coded a combination lock in my rectory to match the date of the death of Pope St. Symmachus. For some reason he found my mnemonic device amusing, as did some 600 cowboys who, from that moment, were theoretically able to break into my dining room. A few days before his death, preparing for elective coronary surgery, he indicated to me on the telephone that Extreme Unction is a better strategy than stealing home.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Rev. George W. Rutler. "Bowie Kent Kuhn." Crisis (July/August 2007).

Fr. Rutler writes a Cloud of Witnesses column for Crisis magazine.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Morley Institute a non-profit education organization. To subscribe to Crisis magazine call 1-800-852-9962.

THE AUTHOR

Rev. George W. Rutler is pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition in New Jersey and New York, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Thomas More College awarded him an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters, and in 1996 Governor George W. Bush made him an Honorary Texan.

Father Rutler contributes to numerous scholarly and popular journals and has published 14 books on theology, history, cultural issues, and the lives of the saints, and also one book on sports, as a member of the U.S. Squash Racquets Association. Among his books are: A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins,

Copyright © 2007 Crisis

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