There is hope for baseball. There is hope that come next spring we may once again watch real major leaguers, not the scab variety being threatened by John Harrington and other owners with no pride.
The reason for hope is that the owners and players are at least listening to W. J. Usery Jr., master mediator. On Wednesday, the owners postponed their plan to impose a salary cap on the players, which had been scheduled for next Monday. Why did they back off? Partly because Bill Usery persuaded them.
When I heard W. J. Usery Jr. was entering the baseball strike in mid-October, I heard the trumpets and the charge of the cavalry. I've heard that sound before. For the past 22 years, I have given W. J. Usery Jr. credit for saving my life in an indirect, bureaucratic sort of way.
We met only once, at a news conference or somewhere, and I remembered him as tall and rangy, like the grim, mustached lawman who dogged Bonnie and Clyde all over the Southwest. The current pictures show him as a rumpled 71-year-old bloke, but W. J. Usery Jr. is a giant in my memory. He's dealt with more dangerous blokes than egomaniac baseball owners and players. He's dealt with murderers.
This was back when I was a news reporter in Appalachia, covering the United Mine Workers. On New Year's Eve in 1969, the insurgent who had lost the election for president, Jock Yablonski, had been murdered in his home in Clarksville, Pa., along with his wife and daughter. Just driving past the Yablonski house gave me the creeps.
In 1972, the insurgents were challenging the union again. The president of the union was a seedy little guy named W. A. (Tony) Boyle. A lot of people were saying Tony Boyle had ordered Yablonski killed. Boyle invited me to lunch one day while he was passing through Louisville. During the meal, one of Boyle's assistants said, "So, you live out on the East End, huh?" I had never mentioned where exactly I lived in Louisville. I thought of the Yablonski house and I got the chill all over again. These guys were gorillas.
President Nixon appointed W. J. Usery Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Labor-Management Relations, to supervise the mine election. In 1969, Usery had been criticized for not stepping into the violence and intimidation of the Boyle-Yablonski campaign. Since the Nixon Administration was generally dismantling anti-poverty and mine safety and ecology programs in Appalachia, you had no idea what to expect from W. J. Usery Jr.
That summer, I started traveling around with Arnold Ray Miller, the new insurgent candidate. We'd travel in private cars from one district to another, always giving false names at motels. Miller told me that one night in Whitesburg, Ky., a couple of men from Harlan County asked the hotel clerk where Arnold Miller was. The clerk had said there was nobody registered by that name.
In that tense fall of 1972, under the stewardship of W. J. Usery, there were troopers and sheriffs and maybe Federal marshals wherever Boyle and Miller went. Nobody ever blew out the tires of Arnold Miller's car. Nobody started serious trouble at a Tony Boyle rally.
"Usery played a positive role," said J. Davitt McAteer, now the Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety and Health Administration in the Department of Labor. Back in 1972, McAteer had been monitoring the election for a nonpartisan group.
"I think you have to say the element of violence was diminished partially because of the horrendous response to the murders," McAteer said yesterday. "But there was also a participation by government. Once the government gets rolling, it gets rolling."
"I remember meetings where Usery would say, 'Don't bull me, this is the way it's going to be,' " McAteer added. "One of his favorite sayings was, 'Let's put the mud in their pocket for a while.' I still use that one."
The miners voted in early December. Arnold Miller won. Later Tony Boyle went to jail for planning the Yablonski murders. The murderers confessed. They were, however, not the gorillas I had lunch with.
Now a private labor-relations consultant, Usery will be paid jointly by the players and the owners. He has not submitted his first bill. Yesterday his office said he was en route to Illinois for a different labor negotiation. He'll get back to the owners and the players soon. He's the best chance baseball has.
