Lessons from US baseball for China's troubled football
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 24, 2012
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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