Leadership Lessons

It only takes one. One person's leadership can make a difference.

This commentary appeared in the Sunday BCCT and brought back a lot of memories about those days in June when we started to ask the question, "Which Kennedy assassination?" and stood at the side of the train tracks to say goodbye to another political leader taken too soon.

The issue here is not if you agree or disagree with playing baseball on the Sunday following RFK's assassination, but the instructive example of one man who had a vision. The vision became a collaboration and then a reality.

You can protest all you want. "I'm just a...", and fill in the blank with ditch digger, french-fry cook, office worker, refuse-collection artist, or stay at home parent. That doesn't change the fact that you can exert leadership in your own little corner of the world in your own way. Position alone does not define leadership. Leadership is the measure of the person in the position.

You just need to be ready to step up to the challenge.

During tragedy, playing games took precedence
Jerry Jonas’ column appears in the Life Section every Sunday.

It’s often been said that games like baseball and football are basically children’s games played by grown men. Sometimes these grown men take their games far too seriously. A classic example of this occurred 40 years ago this weekend following the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy.

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, after celebrating his victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy was shot by a 24-year-old gunman. He succumbed to his wounds early the next morning.

Saturday morning, Betty and I and our then-young children, watched the live telecast of Kennedy’s Funeral Mass from New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At its conclusion, we headed to the Levittown railroad station to stand alongside the tracks with hundreds of others and watch the senator’s funeral train pass on its sad journey from New York to Washington, D.C.

That afternoon, after listening to President Lyndon Johnson declare that the next day, Sunday, June 9, would be a national day of mourning, it suddenly occurred to me that the Phillies were in Los Angeles, the city where RFK had been killed, and, despite the president’s request, they would be playing a ballgame with the Dodgers.

Two months earlier, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, all Major League Baseball clubs had been asked to postpone their games on the day of his funeral. At that time the Phillies were in Los Angeles to play the Dodgers — the only major league team unwilling to postpone their game. To their credit, and despite facing a fine and forfeiture, the Phillies refused to play.

Following King’s death, there had been rioting, looting, even killing in many major league cities, and there was good reason to fear what might happen had the games been played.

By contrast, at the time of RFK’s death, there was no fear of violence, and with the exception of two postponed games on Saturday in New York and Washington (where the funeral Mass and burial took place) all the games were ordered played. In opposition, the Major League Players Association urged the leagues to declare a day of mourning either Saturday or Sunday, but neither baseball’s commissioner William Eckert, nor the leagues’ presidents Joe Cronin (AL) and Warren Giles (NL) would do so.

Eckert released a condescending statement saying that baseball was paying tribute to Sen. Kennedy with no Saturday games to begin before the completion of the funeral, and that appropriate tribute be would be paid by all clubs at the Sunday games.

Not unexpectedly, many players were outraged and a few rebelled. Despite warnings from management, on Saturday all 25 Houston Astros players voted not to take the field against Pittsburgh, and the New York Mets, backed by their board chairman, refused to play the Giants in San Francisco. Since the Giants had sold 40,000 seats in advance, their owner said that he wanted indemnification from the Mets and insisted that they forfeit the game.

In Los Angeles, the Dodgers once again insisted on playing. This time the Phillies did not protest, and both teams announced that they would wear black armbands in respect for the late senator.

At the time, I was regional advertising and promotions manager for Ballantine Beer, then a major TV and radio sponsor for the Phillies. The thoughts of a ball game being played and telecast on a day of mourning depressed me. The thought of our happy-go-lucky beer commercials being broadcast that day disgusted me.

While I couldn’t stop the game, I could do something about the commercials. I would simply cancel them. I informed the TV and radio stations that we were removing our spots from the game and that one of the announcers should read the following statement: “Out of respect for the memory of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, and in keeping with the president’s request that today be a national day of mourning, Ballantine will not be televising any of its commercial messages during the game.” It was a subtle protest of baseball’s decision to play the game.

The station executives were now in a quandary. At first they insisted that it was too late to cancel the spots. Their argument was that there were two others sponsors, and that if we pulled our spots and they didn’t pull theirs, it would make them look bad. And since it was already Saturday afternoon, they weren’t sure that they could reach them. The station personnel also insisted that the three Phillies announcers would have difficulty filling-in the extra time.

A phone call to the announcers Byrum Saam, Bill Campbell, and Rich Ashburn (who ironically were staying at the Ambassador Hotel where Kennedy had been gunned down) assured me that they would manage to ad lib during the extra minutes.

Re-contacting the stations, I insisted that the advertising be canceled. Within 30 minutes another major sponsor agreed to follow our lead and cancel their commercials. Now it was up to the third major sponsor. Although they took some time to reach a decision, faced with being the only major sponsor to run their spots, they also agreed to cancel.

The next day the game went on complete with black arm bands. Our original message became a joint message from the three sponsors informing TV viewers and radio listeners that there would be no commercial advertising during the broadcast.

Although it didn’t completely make up for the lack of respect shown by Major League Baseball that weekend, the protests of many individual players and the cancellation of our commercials did add a small measure of dignity to an otherwise tasteless episode.