The League Commissioner Quotes

As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (“Bud”) Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A’s success “an aberration,” but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how’d they do it? What was their secret?

... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.

In a phrase widely attributed to some early Zionists, and before them Christian Restorationists, Palestine was “for a people without a land, a land without people.” Herbert Samuel, a British Jewish liberal who served as the first high commissioner of the Mandatory government in Palestine, presented an interim report to the League of Nations in the summer of 1921, a year after his arrival, in which he described a country “exhausted by war” that was “under-developed and under-populated.” Though he may not have been entirely impartial, he depicted Palestine as a kind of wasteland where the townspeople were “in severe distress,” cultivated land was left untilled, woodlands had almost disappeared, and orange groves were parched and in ruins.

The NFL was terrified of gambling because it would be devastating if fans came to believe that the outcome of that one-yard run was fixed, scripted, rigged. Notwithstanding the popularity of professional wrestling—which actually is scripted—a sports league cannot attract viewers if people believe the outcome to be in any way predetermined. The league’s concern with integrity, then, was as much about ensuring the fairness of its games as ensuring the perception of fairness. “The most precious possessions that we as a football league have are our reputations for integrity and the integrity of our games,” Commissioner Paul Tagliabue told Congress during hearings over PASPA. The league went to extremes to preserve that reputation and distance itself from all things gambling.

while back, I was at an incredibly high profile event. This room was filled with the heaviest of heavy hitters in the sports world, including most of the team owners along with the commissioners of the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, WNBA, the World Surf League, the IOC, etc. Rarely do you get the chance to be in a room with this many powerful people at the same time. There was an über-successful attendee named Michael. One of my major objectives was to impress and win him over because he throws arguably the most exclusive party in the country each summer.