1984 Olympics After Los Angeles was awarded the
1984 Summer Olympics in 1978, management consulting firm
Korn Ferry was tasked with finding a president for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. Ueberroth was one of over 200 people approached for the role; other prominent candidates included
Curt Gowdy,
Alexander Haig,
Lee Iacocca, and
Pete Rozelle. Ueberroth later wrote that he was initially reluctant to apply for the job, but eventually agreed to meet with LAOOC board members one-on-one. In the first of these meetings, he wrote,
Justin Dart declared that he did not want to meet any other candidates. Ueberroth's primary competitor for the position was Edwin Steidle, the chairman of
May Company California. When the LAOOC board put the matter to a final vote on March 26, 1979, a two-week delay was requested to allow Steidle to negotiate the terms of his exit from May. With 17 of the 22 members present, the board voted 9–8 to deny the request, effectively making Ueberroth the only candidate.
Rafer Johnson, who later lit the cauldron at the opening ceremony, was reportedly the deciding vote. Ueberroth was then chosen unanimously. Ueberroth remained in the role for the next five years, serving until after the Olympics were over. This resulted in a surplus of nearly $250 million, which was subsequently used to support youth and sports activities throughout the United States. The privately run Olympics became the model for future Games, and Ueberroth's aggressive recruiting of sponsors for the 1984 Olympics is credited as the genesis for the current Olympic sponsorship program. Due to recruiting competitors between the Los Angeles Olympic Committee and the
United States Olympic Committee (USOC), after 1984 all Olympics in the US had their local organizing committees enter into recruitment agreements with the USOC to jointly recruit sponsors and share revenue. Coincidentally, he was born on the day on which the founder of the modern
Olympic Games, Baron
Pierre de Coubertin, died.
Baseball commissioner Ueberroth was elected to succeed
Bowie Kuhn on March 3, 1984, and took office on October 1 of that year. As a condition of his hiring, Ueberroth increased the commissioner's fining ability from US$5,000 to $250,000. His salary was raised to a reported $450,000, nearly twice what Kuhn was paid. Just as Ueberroth was taking office, the Major League Umpires Union was threatening to
strike the postseason. Ueberroth managed to arbitrate the disagreement and had the umpires back to work before the
League Championship Series were over. The next summer, Ueberroth worked behind the scenes to limit a players' strike to one day before a new labor agreement was worked out with the
Players Association. During the course of his stint as commissioner, Ueberroth reinstated two
Hall of Famers,
Willie Mays and
Mickey Mantle, who had been banned from working for Major League Baseball by Kuhn because of their associations with gambling casinos. Also, Ueberroth
suspended numerous players because of
cocaine use, negotiated a $1.8 billion
television contract with
CBS, and initiated the investigation against
Pete Rose's
betting habits. In 1985, Ueberroth's first full year in office, the
League Championship Series expanded from a best-of-five series to a best-of-seven series. At his urging, the
Chicago Cubs chose to install lights at
Wrigley Field rather than reimburse the leagues for lost night-game revenue. Ueberroth then found a new source of income in the form of persuading large corporations to pay for the privilege of having their products endorsed by MLB. However, Ueberroth, with the assistance of the owners, also facilitated
collusion between the owners in violation of the league's collective bargaining agreement with the players. Players entering free agency in the 1985, 1986 and 1987 offseasons were, with few exceptions, prevented from both signing equitable contracts and joining the teams of their choice during this period. The roots of the collusion lay in Ueberroth's first owners' meeting as commissioner, when he called the owners "damned dumb" for being willing to lose money in order to win a World Series. Later, he told the general managers that it was "not smart" to sign long-term contracts. Former
Major League Baseball Players Association president
Marvin Miller later described this as "tantamount to fixing, not just games, but entire pennant races, including all post-season series." The MLBPA, under Miller's successor,
Donald Fehr, filed
collusion charges and won each case, resulting in "second look" free agents, and over $280 million in fines.
Fay Vincent, who followed A. Bartlett Giamatti as the 8th commissioner, laid the crippling labor problems of the early 1990s (including the
1994–95 strike) directly at the feet of Ueberroth and the owners' collusion, holding that the collusion years constituted theft from the players. Under Ueberroth, Major League Baseball enjoyed "increased attendance (record attendance four straight seasons), greater awareness of crowd control and alcohol management within ballparks, a successful and vigilant anti-drug campaign, significant industry-wide improvement in the area of fair employment, and a significantly improved financial picture for the industry. When Ueberroth took office, 21 of the 26 clubs were losing money; in Ueberroth's last full season –
1988 – all clubs either broke even or finished in the black. In
1987, for example, baseball as an industry showed a net profit of $21.3 million, its first profitable year since
1973." Nonetheless, following the announcement of the first of three large awards to the players following the collusion findings, Ueberroth stepped down as commissioner before the start of the
1989 regular season; his contract was to have run through the end of the season. He was succeeded by
National League president
Bart Giamatti. ==Post-baseball activities==