Mike Celizic

Everybody makes mistakes, but not everybody admits them. And, when you get high enough up in a hierarchy, getting someone both to admit to a mistake and then correct it can be like spending your days down at the docks waiting for the Titanic to come in.

That’s why it was so refreshing to hear NBA commissioner David Stern not only admit that his beloved high-tech synthetic basketball was a bigger mistake than New Coke but also order the microfiber ball banished at the turn of the new year and replaced with the familiar cowhide sphere the players know and love. It might be cruel to cows in the mind of PETA, but the misconceived new ball was cruel to humans and had to go.

For Stern, it was a do-over. And seeing it happen had to make a lot of people wish there were more mulligans in sports, because the landscape of the games we pay to see other people play is littered with the kind of mistakes that cry out for correction.

The first thing I thought of that could and should have been corrected in the first two months after it was introduced was the designated hitter. The American League came up with that abomination in 1973, and it should never had made it to 1974.

That’s just my opinion, and I recognize that many baseball fans whose powers of reason are otherwise in tip-top order believe the DH is the greatest thing to happen to baseball since beer vendors. So it’s not going to be reversed.

But there are a lot of other situations that everyone would agree would have benefited greatly if teams and individuals could do it all over again. Don’t you think that just a few months ago, for example, Phil Mickelson would have taken a mulligan on the 72^nd hole of the U.S. Open at Winged Foot and maybe hit a three-wood off the tee instead of that driver he deposited in the hospitality village?

As long as we’re talking golf, I’m pretty sure the day will come when Michelle Wie will wish she’d have put off turning pro until a couple of years after her Sweet 16 party and concentrated on winning in the women’s game before taking on the men.

If Brett Favre could do it all over again, he might want to revoke his decision to play one more year with the Packers instead of either retiring or asking for a trade to a team that could actually play football.

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If we could only hit control-Z for life’s well-intentioned blunders, how much easier would it be? Alex Rodriguez could have reversed his trade to the Yankees and found a home in a city with more adoring media and fans. And the Houston Texans could have decided a month into the season that they were going to take either Vince Young or Reggie Bush after all and let somebody else have Mario Williams.

If Bud Selig could go back and change things, he’d be in the early 1990s deciding to reign in his game’s early steroid problems instead of choosing to ignore all the juiced-up players until things got to such a point they spilled an indelible stain on his game.

Mark McGwire could go back in front of a congressional subcommittee and get it right. Pete Rose could go back to when he agreed to a life-time ban and started confessing his sins right then and there. Muhammad Ali could decide not to fight those last few bouts that helped leave him in the sad shape he’s in today.