Congratulations to Tony La Russa, Esq. on his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame

Phil Zukowsky and I were the editors of the Loyola Law School newspaper, Blackacre, in 1979-80. We knew that the then-White Sox manager had taken the Florida Bar Exam, and we'd heard that the results were in, and we were putting the current edition of paper together. Somehow -- and I can't remember how -- we managed to get a call into the Florida Board of Bar Examiners. In those long-ago days that involved getting a long distance line from the Loyola operator and there may have been some begging involved.

However we got the call made, when we got through we found out that, indeed, Mr. La Russa had passed the bar. Passing the bar was very much on our minds in those days. We presumably ran a small item.

Hey, you have to grab onto greatness when you can.

Little did we know then -- little could we know -- how great La Russa would turn out to be. Tito Landrum wasn't yet a phrase that could make strong men (well, strong men who were also White Sox fans) weep. Mr. La Russa's three world titles could not have been imagined then either. Nor could we have imagined his enshrinement in Cooperstown.

A number of commissioners were lawyers -- Fay Vincent, Bowie Kuhn, Happy Chandler -- Kenesaw Mountain Landis was a federal judge in Chicago when he became the first Commissioner of Major League Baseball. All except Vincent are in the Hall of Fame. But, surely, La Russa is the first lawyer-manager to enter Baseball's Valhalla.

Hey, you have to grab onto greatness when you can. Especially when you can make a blog post out of it.