Game time is almost two hours away in cozy Arlington Stadium as the Texas Rangers take batting practice. Along the baseline, hefting a bat like a mace of office, George Walker Bush ambles through his own pregame drill. He chats up players and reporters and makes small talk with fans, using a down-home twang and slang that belie ten years of New England schooling. They seek his autograph as eagerly as they do the players'. Bush scribbles on a baseball, a hat, a scrap of paper. On this warm summer evening, not one sportswriter or spectator asks about his relative with the extra middle name, George Herbert Walker Bush. In Arlington the White House feels about as far away as Tiananmen Square, both in distance and in culture.
During the 18 months that he labored in his father's campaign headquarters, acting as the family enforcer among the hired handlers, Bush was often a bristly presence. "Junior," as Washington insiders called him, was out of his element back East, uncomfortable in his father's shadow once again. Of the five Bush children, George, the eldest, had always been the most drawn to Dad's patterns of endeavor. What rebellion he waged was stylistic. He became the real Texan in the family -- chewing tobacco, using barnyard humor, settling in the state's western corner -- the one harboring what his aunt Nancy Ellis calls a "slightly outrageous streak."
When he returned to the state last December, he chose a new venue, Dallas, and a new career. With an alchemy of serendipity, energy and a famous family name, he fused two groups of investors into a combine that bought the American League's Texas Rangers this spring. Says his youngest brother Marvin: "This is a real opportunity for him to be George W. Bush and not George Bush Jr."
Bush's role as a managing partner includes being the visible front man. Sitting through nine sweaty innings is part of his strategy to improve the image of a club whose fortunes had been waning. No air-conditioned sky box for this owner. "I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in," he says, "eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal." So he is quite happy when fans chirp to him about the team's improved won-lost record. He saves his broadest, Hollywood-handsome grin for the occasional urging that he run for Governor in 1990.
That possibility was on his mind for months, well before the Rangers deal came down at him with the speed of a Nolan Ryan fastball. And why not? The Republican incumbent is retiring, and George W. has inherited his father's genes for ambition and seizing opportunities. He stumped Texas extensively for his father last year, delivering standard conservative scripts with energy if not eloquence. His name would make fund raising easy. No single rival for the G.O.P. nomination dominates the field.