The Baseball Commissioner Who Made Bush President →
I, myself, am often reminded of life's little ironies.
The story begins in the early 1990s, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush—the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner—to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.
Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of "no confidence" in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig "would support his dream to become baseball's next Commissioner." It didn't work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush's dream job. He would preside over a players' strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history—something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn't accomplish—but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly '60s and '70s mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late '90s and early '00s. Selig was the proud steward of baseball's rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.
The commissioner's old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.
You'll remember that President Bush's Cabinet included Condoleeza Rice, who wants to be the NFL's commissioner. It'd be an interesting turn of events if those two ever end up in their true dream jobs.