Fay Vincent: Goodell's in the fight of his life

In the dead of a spring night in 1991, Lenny Dykstra left a bachelor party, slipped behind the wheel of a luscious-lips-red Mercedes-Benz, and - with Darren Daulton sitting next to him, with Dykstra's blood-alcohol level already having left Pennsylvania's legal standard for drunkenness in the dust - crashed the car into a pair of trees.

Teammates on the Phillies at the time, Dykstra and Daulton were lucky to have walked away from the accident, let alone to play baseball again, and the incident created a dilemma for the man charged with determining Dykstra's fate in the sport. Dykstra had committed a crime outside of Major League Baseball's purview, but people kept asking Fay Vincent the obvious question: What are you going to do about this?

Twenty-three years later, with Roger Goodell's handling of the Ray Rice scandal threatening his future as the NFL's commissioner, Vincent answered the phone Thursday in his New Canaan, Conn., home and didn't wait long to bring up the decision he faced with Dykstra.

"Everyone told me I should punish him," Vincent said. When a player, a coach, an executive, or an owner commits some kind of malfeasance, there's always pressure for punitive action outside the criminal-justice process, Vincent said. But not since Major League Baseball's owners voted Vincent out in 1992 has a commissioner's place atop his sport been in as much peril as Goodell's.

"He's in the fight of his life," Vincent said.

From his feeble two-game suspension of Rice to that elevator-security video showing Rice knocking Janay Palmer-Rice unconscious, from the Associated Press report that a law enforcement official sent the NFL a copy of the video in April to the announcement that former FBI director Robert Mueller will investigate the league's handling of the situation, Goodell has gone from a chest-puffing disciplinarian to a bumbling dictator distanced from reality.

He's made the NFL's 32 owners enough money - a reported $6 billion in revenue last year alone - that they'll wait to see if he can ride out this wave of outrage before they consider removing him. But there's such a groundswell of anger and indignation over the NFL's response to this incident of spousal abuse that its sponsors and fans could soon be having second thoughts about their ties to and affection for a league that appears without principled leadership.

"The politician acting on principle still has to sell his case," Vincent said. "For the next month or so, Goodell has got to be out in the public, making his argument, articulating his principles. If he made a mistake, he has to explain why, what he learned. . . .

"If he wins the fans, he wins the game. And if he loses the fans, he loses the game."

There's one big difference, though, between the chaos around Goodell and the choices and circumstances that led to Vincent's ouster. If anything, baseball's owners turned against Vincent because he was too honest, too critical of their desire in the early 1990s to confront the players' union over the sport's escalating salaries.

"They wanted Armageddon," Vincent said. "They wanted to break the union, and they didn't think I was as committed as Bud Selig would have been - and they were probably right."

So they voted him out, but none of them, or anyone else, could argue that Vincent hadn't been open and forthcoming. And when the 1994-95 strike wiped out the World Series and chunks of two regular seasons, the damage to baseball's popularity and goodwill validated Vincent's integrity and foresight.

Goodell has the opposite problem. Whatever support he might enjoy among the NFL's owners now, the public doesn't share it. No one believes him. No one trusts him. So far, he and the league have come off as evasive and incompetent at best and duplicitous at worst, and when it comes to facing the music, Goodell has heard only the faint sounds of a few notes.

He slinked to the comfort of CBS, one of the NFL's television partners, for one unsatisfying interview in which he claimed that he didn't see the elevator video until Monday, that even though TMZ could obtain a copy of the video, the most popular, profitable, and powerful sports organization in the country could not.

A reasonable person watches that video of Rice and the woman who would become his wife - watches him drop her to the floor with that single, brutal punch - and hears that the league had access to it, and a reasonable person says to himself or herself, What has Roger Goodell been doing?

"That's a very great challenge for him," Vincent said. "He's got to change that perception, and facts are relevant. It's like Nixon and the 'Checkers' speech. There are things that are very important for him to explain, and he's got to explain them."

No one ever had to make that demand of Vincent. Here was a commissioner who understood that he had to apply a coherent moral code on a case-by-case basis, who dared to cross the owners he worked for because he recognized his stand represented the best interest of his sport, who had enough character that he could choose not to discipline a player and still retain his credibility.

That's why, when it came to Lenny Dykstra's driving drunk and damn near killing himself and Darren Daulton, Fay Vincent could do the one thing Roger Goodell can't now and never could: absolutely nothing.