Salon.com > Marvin Miller

LeBron James might improve your pension

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

John Montgomery Ward was a pioneering baseball star: In 1880, he became the second pitcher ever to hurl a perfect game. Ward was also a lawyer who was the first to recognize that the reserve clause embedded within each contract bound players to the teams that signed them -- and that gave team owners an enormous, inherent advantage over players that lasted for decades.

"In the enactment of the reserve-rule the clubs were probably influenced by three considerations," wrote Ward in a seminal essay titled "Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?" in 1887. "They wished to make the business of base-ball more permanent, they meant to reduce salaries, and they sought to secure a monopoly of the game."

"Chattel" was entirely appropriate because, for much of the 20th century, baseball players and other professional athletes were among the most exploited labor forces in the United States. Team owners dictated artificially low salaries; benefits (pension, medical care and the like) were inadequate. Athletes did not employ agents nor have an organized, certified union to represent their rights, on and off the field.

When Jews ruled basketball

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:58:00 +0000

BACK WHEN TRACK AND FIELD was a popular spectator sport, my dad used to take me to Madison Square Garden to watch the Millrose Games in the dead of winter. Invariably, he would nudge me and point to an elderly gentleman in black tie standing in the infield.

“There's Abel Kiviat!” he'd exclaim. “Your grandfather knows him. He was the best.”

Kiviat was then in his 80s, a shrunken gnome with bowed legs. In his prime, just before World War I, he was a top-rated distance runner. He held the 1,500-meter world record and took the silver medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

Family lore has it that Kiviat and my grandfather worked as counselors at the same summer camp. Later, as cogs in the judicial system, they would stop and chat in the marbled hallways of the state and federal courthouses.

The connection transcended the personal: Abel Kiviat was a Jew. This was of supreme importance to our family because so few Jewish athletes succeeded at the elite level. Those who did — the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax being the prime example — acquired a distinctive aura. Kiviat and Koufax were the real Chosen Ones, SuperJews, able to whip the Goyim on their AstroTurf.

R.I.P., Marvin Miller, baseball’s FDR

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:26:00 +0000

In 1990, I got phone call that changed my life. The man calling was Marvin Miller, whom I knew of as the labor leader who had transformed the Major League Baseball Players Association from a company union to the most successful labor organization in America. He had seen a few things I had written in the Village Voice and asked me if I’d like to work with him on his autobiography, which he later decided to call "A Whole Different Ball Game," published in 1991.

I thought I knew baseball and business. Working with Marvin quickly disavowed me of this notion. But within a year and a half, I got an education. Meeting with him every other day for almost 18 months, Marvin and his wife, Terry – “the dynamic Terry Miller,” as sportswriter Bud Collins called her – proved to be a revelation.

To be honest, I really didn’t know how important Marvin Miller was to baseball and all of professional sports. I didn’t find out until I began interviewing his contemporaries. There’s a quote you’ve probably been reading or hearing in the blizzard of praise since Marvin’s death was announced yesterday, the great old-time Brooklyn Dodgers and later New York Yankees announcer Red Barber saying, “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the three most important men in baseball history.”