No Small Achievement Affable but forceful commissioner David Baker has thrown his weight around and put the Arena Football League on the sports map

There were menacing glares and vulgar words, the threat of violence cutting through the climate-controlled air. Anyone who questioned the intensity within the Arena Football League would have been swayed by the scene that took place on a November 1995 afternoon in St. Louis, as fierce competitors waged a bitter battle that would help propel their struggling sport to a new level of legitimacy. ¬∂ Alas, the action took place not on a 50-yard indoor field but in a hotel conference room, where contentious team owners berated one another over various issues, including whether to retain commissioner Jim Drucker. It was anunsettling introduction for DavidBaker, the rookie owner ofthe Anaheim Piranhas, whose first thought was, What have Igotten myself into? "It was total chaos," Baker recalls. "Guyswere yelling, screaming, storming out of the room andthreatening to sue each other." After a similarly mean-spiritedmeeting the previous year in Orlando, Joe O'Hara, then theowner of the Mass Mauraders, had floored Drucker with a punchto the face in a hotel lounge in the Disney World compound."Not our finest hour," remembers Arizona Rattlers vice presidentGene Nudo, who witnessed the blow. "To have a guy flattened inthe place where every kid goes to have a good time wasembarrassing."

Fourteen months later in St. Louis, with Drucker's head figuratively on the chopping block this time, it was Baker, a former politician, who found himself holding the swing vote. He