Jackie and Campy (19 page)

On the other hand, the writers viewed Robinson as “oversensitive,” “hot-tempered,” and “irrational.”
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With the exception of Roger Kahn of the
Herald Tribune
, who believed that Jackie’s “bellicosity” was a more accurate reflection of “what black attitudes should be,” Robinson had no close friends among the beat writers.
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They could not relate to his constant effort to make baseball a platform for civil rights or his tendency to interpret any difference of opinion as racially charged. In 1952, for example, when Jackie publicly accused the Yankees of racism in their hiring practices because they were the only New York team without a black player, he was excoriated in the national press as a “soap box orator” and a “rabble rouser” who should limit his activities to “ball playing” instead of being a “crusader.”
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Even the black press had difficulty with some of Jackie’s actions. After the 1953 season, while barnstorming in Birmingham, Alabama, against the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues, Robinson, who was managing an integrated team of Major League All-Stars, benched three white players—Gil Hodges, Ralph Branca, and Bobby Young—in compliance with the city’s ordinance against sports competitions between blacks and whites. When he announced his intention to abide by the ordinance, the African American
Birmingham World
criticized him for the decision:

Ignoring the criticism, Robinson went ahead and banned the three white players from the game.
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While he might have had valid reasons for doing so, the contradiction between his decision and the very same principle of integration for which he stood alienated him further from the press.

Dick Young was Robinson’s greatest critic. Once, in an effort to reconcile their differences, the
Daily News
scribe approached him and explained that he only wanted to “discuss baseball,” but “sooner or later we always get around to social issues.”

“If I couldn’t talk about race relations,” Jackie replied, “we’d probably have to stop any serious discussion.” Young bristled at the remark. “Listen,” he continued, “I’m telling you as a friend, that a lot of newspapermen like Campanella because he doesn’t talk about civil rights. But you wear your race on your sleeve and that makes enemies.”

“Dick, we might just as well get this straight,” said Robinson. “I like friends just as much as other people. But if it comes down to a question of respect or friendship, I’ll take their respect. I know a lot of the writers don’t like me because I discuss things that get in the way of their guilt complexes, but I’ll bet you they respect me.”

Realizing that he wasn’t making any headway, Young simply tried to encourage Jackie to be more like Campanella, who was just happy to be playing in the Majors and never spoke out on racial discrimination. “Personally, Jackie, whenever I talk to Campy, I almost never think of him as a Negro,” said Young. “But any time I talk to you, I’m acutely aware of the fact that you’re a Negro.”

Young’s effort to use Campanella as an example backfired. “I want to be thought of as the kind of Negro who’s not going to beg for anything,” snapped Robinson in a veiled reference to his Dodgers teammate. “I want to be the kind of Negro who’ll be reasonable, but is damned well tired of being patient. If that makes me the kind of guy they can’t like, that’s tough.”
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The conversation reflected Robinson’s inability to find a middle ground between his “kind of Negro” and others, like Campanella, who he considered “whining, handkerchief-heads with their hat in their hands expressing eternal gratitude for whatever benefits or rights that the white man gave him.”
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In other words, if you weren’t 100 percent in agreement with Jackie Robinson, you were against him. Young, realizing the futility of his effort, never again bothered to reconcile their differences. And Robinson, to his last days, considered the sportswriter a “racial bigot.”
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Despite their differences on race relations, Robinson and Campanella shared an infamous reputation as bench jockeys and indulged in the practice on a daily basis. Carl Erskine recently described their jockeying as “a form of eloquent professional hatred rolled up into a ball of biting, irreverent humor that would have made anyone laugh at the mere shock of hearing the comments.”
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No opponent was a better target than the New York Giants. Throughout the 1950s the two teams were perennial rivals, competing against each other for the pennant down the stretch. The New York newspapers exploited the rivalry by fueling the emotions of blue-collar fans with controversial quotations from the players and provocative game reports. “There was some real animosity between the players too,” admitted Monte Irvin, who played for the Giants from 1949 to 1955. “We didn’t like them [the Dodgers] off the field and we hated them on the field. The feud between Jackie and [Giants manager] Leo Durocher was especially nasty. Leo used to tell Jackie he was swell-headed, and Jackie would call Leo a ‘traitor’ for leaving the Dodgers. Sometimes it got very personal.”
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One especially vicious exchange occurred when Robinson, playing second base, began needling Durocher about his wife, Lorraine Day, a Hollywood actress. Durocher, who was standing in the third-base coaching box, lost his cool and charged Jackie, screaming a steady stream of racial epithets. Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese stepped between the two men and broke up the argument. When Durocher regained his
composure he saw two of his own black players, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson, standing on second and third base, respectively. Only then did he realize how shamefully he had acted. Hanging his head, “Leo the Lip” walked back to the coaching box, unable to even look at his own players. Realizing the awkwardness of the situation, Irvin, in an effort to help his manager save face, shouted out, “Go get him Skip! He had no right to say that to you. Anything you say goes double for me.”
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The incident underscored just how complicated the issue of loyalty was for the game’s first black players.

But back in the 1950s, when the issue of race was involved, black ballplayers’ loyalties were sometimes divided. There were so few blacks in the Majors that if one of them was ostracized, the others felt a moral obligation to come to his defense, whether or not they played on the same team. On the other hand, the etiquette of the game demanded loyalty to one’s team, first and foremost, especially when the verbal barbs were unacceptable even by baseball’s lax ethical standards. Thus Irvin’s defense of his manager was justified because Robinson had violated those standards when he attacked Durocher’s wife. There were other occasions when the Dodgers-Giants rivalry pitted the black players on the two teams against each other. Campanella, for example, was especially hard on Giant outfielder Willie Mays. During Mays’s rookie year, 1951, Campy made it a point to agitate him by asking questions whenever he came up to bat. “What do you say, pup?” “Are you getting [laid] much?” “When you getting married?” The banter was meant to break the young ballplayer’s concentration so he wouldn’t get a hit. But it was also extremely personal and it unnerved Mays. Newcombe could be just as bad. Once, after learning of Mays’s comment that he “wouldn’t have trouble hitting against him,” Newcombe threw at the Giants’ outfielder, knocking him down each time he came to bat. After the third knockdown pitch, Irvin came to his teammate’s defense: “If you want to pick on somebody, Don, why don’t you pick on a veteran like me? Somebody who can defend himself for Christ’s sake!”
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Although Robinson spoke highly of Mays as a ballplayer, he didn’t have much respect for him personally. Jackie viewed the young Giants’ center fielder much like Campanella: as a docile, uneducated black who shirked his responsibility to advance the cause of civil rights because he didn’t want to jeopardize his career. Mays later claimed that while Robinson
mentored young black players from other teams, he never had a meaningful conversation or significant encounter with him.
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Irvin admitted that the bitterness of the Dodgers-Giants rivalry affected his relationships with the black Dodgers. “We weren’t too friendly with each other,” he recalled. “Jackie and I were never close, on or off the field, though I admired the fact that he’d taken so much abuse without cracking the first couple of years in the Major Leagues. Newcombe and I mostly stayed away from each other. But Campy was my friend all the way back to our days in the Negro Leagues. I knew he was the kind of guy who wanted to beat your brains out on the field, but after the game was over we’d forget about it. The bottom line was that on the field, I was loyal to the Giants. If I hadn’t been, then there would have been a double standard, and that would have damaged the cause [of integration].”
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However, the rivalry didn’t prevent Irvin or the other black Giants from barnstorming with Robinson and Campanella after the season ended. Between 1950 and 1954 Jackie or Roy organized and led a group of Major League All-Stars that toured the South each October and early November, playing games against local semiprofessional teams and Negro Leaguers. Among the regulars on those barnstorming trips were Irvin, Mays, Thompson, Newcombe, and Doby.
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The additional income those trips afforded each player was undoubtedly incentive enough to join the tour, but the fact that black Major Leaguers from other clubs were routinely invited indicates that Robinson and Campanella were looking out for them and their financial interests.

Robinson and Campanella also went out of their way to mentor young black players from other rival teams. Both Dodgers made a conscious effort to befriend Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs, before he reached the Majors. In 1950 Robinson invited Banks, then a shortstop with the Kansas City Monarchs, to join his All-Star team on a barnstorming trip through the South. Banks, who idolized Jackie, jumped at the opportunity to serve as his double-play partner. Before a game in Meridian, Mississippi, Robinson approached Banks to compliment him. “Young man,” said Jackie, “I’ve been watching you and you really can pull that inside pitch. You hit very well.” Afterward Jackie worked with Banks to help him get rid of the ball more quickly on double plays.
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Campanella, also on the tour, was noticeably impressed with Banks as well and, along with Robinson, pro
moted the youngster with Brooklyn’s front office. “‘Ernie,’ they said to me, ‘you can play in the major leagues, and we’re going to recommend you,’” recalled Banks years later. “I thought they were kidding, but they did recommend me to the Dodgers. They were friendly. They wanted to see me and other young black players make it to the majors.”
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The encouragement continued after Banks cracked the big leagues. In 1953, when Banks was a rookie with Chicago, Campanella went out of his way to drive him from Ebbets Field to his Manhattan hotel after a day game. During the ride Campy emphasized the responsibility that young black players had to do their best when they made the Majors to pave the way for other prospective Negro Leaguers. Complimenting Banks on his playing ability, he cautioned, “Just remember this, and at your age it’s easy to forget. The higher you climb in baseball, the greater your responsibility will be all up and down the line, both on and off the field.”
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Robinson and Campanella also mentored Hank Aaron when he was promoted to the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. After spring training that year, the Dodgers and Braves barnstormed together on the way north, stopping off to play games at Mobile, New Orleans, Birmingham, Memphis, Louisville, and Indianapolis. “The black players stayed at the same hotels during that trip,” recalled Aaron in a recent interview.

For Aaron, who idolized Jackie Robinson as a youngster, the attention was overwhelming. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, he dreamed of be
coming a Major League baseball player. But his father discouraged the dream, reminding him that there were no “colored ballplayers” in the Majors. All that changed in 1947, though. And the following year, when Robinson visited Mobile, fourteen-year-old Aaron skipped school to hear his hero speak. “Truthfully, I went to hear his baseball stories,” he admitted. “Jackie encouraged us to stay in school, get a good education, and make sports a second choice. But I came away determined more than ever to be in the big leagues before he retired. Jackie had that kind of effect on all of us. He gave us our dreams. He breathed baseball into the black community, kids and grown-ups alike.”
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While Robinson’s relationship with Banks and Aaron was supportive, his effort to mentor younger black teammates could be problematic, especially when Campanella was trying to do the same thing. Both Jackie and Campy actively sought to be acknowledged by teammates as the leader of the Dodgers. One of the ways they did this was to cultivate younger black teammates. It was a responsibility both men accepted as African American veterans, and they embraced it because of the broader influence they could exercise on the team itself. Joe Black, a twenty-year-old pitcher, roomed with Robinson when he was promoted to the Dodgers in 1952. “There were days on the road when I was too tired to do anything but play baseball,” recalled Black in a 1997 interview. “But Jackie wouldn’t let me. He’d get me out of bed early in the morning so I would go with him to a school to talk to the kids there. Usually, the school would schedule an assembly for one or two hours. Jackie would talk about the importance of education and tell them that they had to be ready when the opportunity for a good job came their way. At the time, I didn’t realize how much those visits meant to the kids, or how he was teaching me to be a role model.”
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