This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 16, 2011 - In late spring 17 years ago, the emperor and empress of Japan made a journey to the United States and while here paid a call on St. Louis.
I was assigned to cover their visit, and the assignment, which would have been pretty good in any event, given the credentials of the man and woman involved, developed into one of the most memorable ever.
The emperor and empress, whose demeanors were entirely pleasant but inexorably neutral, descended through shimmering heat by helicopter to the base of the Arch. For the next two days, maintaining absolute serenity and dignity, they followed a rather punishing schedule in the heat, until the last day when a visit to the Missouri Botanical Garden was blessed by layers of clouds and a cooling mist.
Japan, as most of us know, has a penchant for baseball comparable to ours, so it seemed a good idea to the tour organizers to take the couple to a baseball game. (The Cardinals, playing the Pittsburgh Pirates, lost that night, 7 to 4.)
The imperial party, the press and other attendants trooped over to old Busch Stadium and if anything more interesting, more off-script, more fun or more memorable happened during the visit of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, I would like to know what it might be.
The reason I'm writing about this now, to be perfectly honest, is because it is my only chance to write about Stan Musial and thus to prevent my being left out of the real and virtual ink-spilling festival conducted in the press on the occasion of Musial's being in Washington on Tuesday (Feb. 15, 2011) and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Because I'm rather oblivious to sports, friends, relatives and especially my colleagues are going to laugh at me for stepping up to the plate to swing at anything even distantly related to games, even something related to Stan Musial, whose athletic abilities, while celebrated, must be considered as part of a larger character ensemble. That package includes a standard of personal rectitude, along with warmth and good will, guaranteed to elevate the man who owns them to an exalted position of legend.
And so it was on the Friday night leg of the imperial progress that the empress and emperor of Japan made their way to the old Busch Stadium and up into an Anheuser-Busch corporate suite. It was VIP-ville, starting with the Empress Michiko and Emperor Akihito and going on from there to August Busch III, U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt, politico Joyce Aboussie and other worthies, chief among them Musial.
The scene was pretty stiff. The Americans were all on their good behavior until everyone not a member of the royal retinue began following the O.J. Simpson-White Bronco saga. The press box was adjacent to the Busch box, and since there seemed to be precious little chance of any news popping up there, where politeness was more or less enforced, we Americans began skulking back and forth to witness this particularly bizarre moment in the annals of celebrity misbehavior.
But Musial wasn't in the pack. No chance he was going to let this particular three- or four-inning visit by the emperor and empress to his ballpark to watch his game rained out by a police chase.
He also wanted, it seemed to me, to have some fun, so it came to pass that while one celebrity athlete was driving up and down the 405 at 35 miles an hour, another one rose from his seat and approached the emperor.
Want to see how I hit 'em? Musial said, or something to that effect.
The emperor's usually unreadable face betrayed bewilderment.
Then, in a language anyone, baseball fan or not, would understood instantly, Musial picked up an air bat, and displayed his trademark corkscrew stance, moving as was once described as if he were "a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming," and swung.
The retinue was stunned. The American hosts, realizing that this demonstration was probably out of bounds, froze. What passed for silence in an open-to-the field ballpark box prevailed. In the press box, the Simpson saga continued. But after a moment in which jitters were palpable, the current monarch of the Chrysanthemum Throne looked into the eyes of the great American hero, and smiled.
It was a quiet and transcendent minute, a meeting of cultures, an encounter of two formidable characters, a moment soon to be forgotten by the men and women in attendance, a flicker of grace to pass almost unnoticed, sponged as it was into the fractious history of 20th-century international relations and professional sports.
Nevertheless, if for that reason alone, for gripping that stiff and starchy moment like an Adirondack bat and slamming an imagined baseball into History, we better appreciate and comprehend the wonder that is Stan Musial; and, baseball fan or not, we know why, if anyone deserves his country's most distinguished civilian honor, that person is indeed the Man.