Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
April 16, 2009

It was March 1984. Jim Blanchard was heading into his second spring as governor of Michigan. These were tough times for the young governor.

Only a few months earlier, I had joined Blanchard as press secretary. It’s hard for anyone who wasn’t there to understand the degree of animosity Blanchard faced, or the toll it was taking on him. He had raised the state income tax rate to clean up someone else’s mess. Through a series of gimmicks — my favorite one involved changing the dates of the fiscal year so the state could get 15 months’ revenue over a 12-month period — the Milliken Administration had left Blanchard in a nearly $2-billion hole. Blanchard’s unpopularity swelled as Macomb and Oakland County voters dumped two state senators in well-orchestrated recall elections that shifted the leadership of the Michigan Senate.

Blanchard was next on the hit list. But I don’t think that bothered him as much as something he told me over a scotch one evening.

Now, I might have the sequence of events a bit distorted here, but the details are close enough for government work. Jim’s son, Jay, was in the third or fourth grade when Blanchard became governor. He was a wonderful kid, and a good baseball player. During that first summer in town, Jay had done what millions of kids had done before. He joined a Little League team.

Jay was different than most kids, and as the season progressed, everyone could see it. He was one heck of a ball player.

It was sometime over that winter, my first few months on the job with Jim Blanchard, that he shook his head sadly and told me how Jay had refused to play in the Lansing Little League All-Star game the previous summer. He was plenty good enough, all right. He earned the spot. The kid could hit. But he refused to play. “Why?” I asked Jim.

“He didn’t want to hear people booing any more when they announced his name over the PA system.”

Bill Liebold, the governor’s long-time aide, among his closest, must have been the one to break the news to me. Jim Blanchard, with his approval rating still hovering (if you can use that phrase to describe this) around 30 percent, would be throwing out the first ball at the Tigers’ home opener.

Now, I don’t honestly know which one of us thought of the answer first, let alone who first realized the problem. For sure, it didn’t take very long for either of us to imagine the sounds of the boos and the hoots that would resound from every sight-obstructed section of old Tiger Stadium as the Blanchard name was announced on that PA system.

That’s when it came to one of us — it really doesn’t matter who. What matters is that one of us said: “Let’s go get The Bird!”

If we could get a small speaking tour set up for the retired Mark Fidrych in early April, we would have a legitimate reason to bring him to the ballpark so he could walk out with Blanchard.

Only a few years earlier, this goofy-looking kid who talked to the ball like it had ears took America’s pastime by storm.

Our plan was to convince The Bird to use some of his unspent popularity convincing high school kids to keep away from dope. In those days, governments funded efforts to eliminate drug abuse. We knew where the money was. We could pay The Bird a thousand or two for a few school appearances. He’d be doing well and doing some good at the same time. While he was at it, he could join Governor Jim at opening day.

Everything went according to plan. Blanchard walked out on the field with The Bird in tow. The crowd went wild. No one even thought about the tax increase. All they could see was the smiling governor and the curly-headed kid who only a few years earlier had taken an otherwise lackluster team all the way to fifth place with a 19 and 9 rookie record.

I believe it was the next day when I got a call from Liebold. He’d taken on the job of managing The Bird’s post-opening-day high school anti-drug-abuse lecture tour.

“Rick” I heard Bill say. “We have a bit of a problem here.”

It seems The Bird had told a group of high school kids at an assembly in Sterling Heights that they should stay off the killer weed. He did that part right.

But he also said he could not understand why if a six-pack of beer on a Friday night was good enough for him, it wasn’t good enough for them, too.

That was Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. How can we not miss him?

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.