Only seven months after a World Series triumph that sealed his place among the greats, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is calling on all his smarts to cope with crises on and off the field

	In what could be his final season, the 62-year-old La Russa has been hard-pressed to find the right moves to lift his slumping and injury-riddled club. John Biever/SI

By S.L. Price

He was the boy wonder once, and if Tony La Russa hated that perception, hated how his youth and a Florida State law degree put a big target on his back for the old-time baseball men, it didn't erase the truth of the matter. He was a wonder all right, a 38-year-old Chicago White Sox manager with Prince Valiant hair and aviator shades, the very picture of cerebral cool. Who, after that 99-win season in 1983, didn't know it? When the White Sox fired La Russa after a poor start in '86, he still landed a job with the Oakland A's in just 13 days; within two years he was ringmaster for the most glamorous team -- Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dennis Eckersley -- in the game. Vegetarian, animal-rescue activist, bilingual high priest of the hyperspecialized bullpen, early La Russa crackled with grim intensity and a counterculture vibe.

But that was long ago. Yes, last off-season La Russa got himself an elaborate tattoo, his first, inked along his right shoulder, a tribal design his wife had spied on the arm of one of her favorite drummers. Yes, at 62 he's still flat-bellied, and yes, he still has most of that hair, now slightly gray (or more than slightly if he's been hitting the dye bottle). But the tattoo, he insists, was the result of keeping a long-standing promise to his two youngest daughters, a celebration of his unlikely 2006 World Series title with the St. Louis Cardinals. Considering that originally he had vowed to get an earring if he won another Series, he'll take it. "There's a look of coolness there if I walk around without my shirt, but if you look at me up close and personal?" La Russa says. "Not cool."

Not cool -- that could apply in many ways to La Russa these days. From the red-faced shame of his drunken-driving arrest in March to the hot seat he occupies as his bewildered team digs out from its worst start in 17 years to his threat to "start swinging this fungo" bat at any reporters showing "insincerity" in covering the April 29 drunken-driving death of St. Louis reliever Josh Hancock, La Russa has been a study in human pyrotechnics. He has seen the shattering of his enlightened image -- already cracked by a 2005 admission that he had suspected Canseco was using steroids with the A's -- and heard his leadership doubted. Just months removed from reveling in the Cardinals' 10th championship, won on the field of their new, $365 million ballpark, La Russa has found himself the public focus of what team president Mark Lamping calls "the most embarrassing period" of their 12 years together in St. Louis.

No one could take so bruising a fall without howling, and indeed, La Russa's response ranges from bitterness to regret to rage to resignation -- occasionally all at once. But he won't say what seems obvious: Sometimes life comes at you like a landslide, and you dodge one boulder only to get leveled by another. "I've now read this word three or four times, and it's a perception that some people have that I don't feel at all: embattled," he says, before a May 9 home stand finale against the Colorado Rockies. "I don't feel embattled. As long as this doesn't sound disrespectful, this is so routine for what a manager goes through during a season. Now ... you don't have guys die. But the adversity? The ups and downs? You're always trying to keep your wagons going -- or you're circling them trying to stay alive."