Jackie Robinson (38 page)

Jack continued, even with his growing fame in the aggressive world of male professional sports, to exert tight self-discipline about alcohol, tobacco, and sex. On the subject of affairs outside marriage he was rigid, as when he chastised a young admirer from Akron, Ohio, who propositioned him in a letter. “
I want you to love me just once,” she had pleaded. “Just once and then I might be satisfied. I know that you’re [a] married man and that you have a son but you don’t have to be an angel.… Your wife would never know about it.” To which Robinson replied sternly: “
When I married Mrs. Robinson, I exchanged vows to love, honor and cherish her for the rest of my life.”

Although sex was a strong force in Jack, his principles and inhibitions probably prevented him from ever being completely comfortable coping with its demands. On the road, he burned with such longing for Rachel that he sometimes apologized for the steaminess of some of his letters—“
but they are meant only for you to read and were written to let you know that regardless of how long I am away no one else can ever be seen.” If sex was a strong drive, love and companionship were at least as important, and he was ready to say so. A roommate would remember with a sense of wonder the intensity of Robinson’s frequent telephone calls home. “
When he’d be on that phone talking to Rachel,” Joe Black said, “I mean, you could feel the excitement exuding through his body. You could feel the love going from
his voice to [her], flowing to her. I mean, he was trying to caress her with his voice.” The weeks of separation, Jack wrote to Rachel from the Caribbean, had only “
increased my love for you more than one could anticipate. I never dreamed I loved you so very much. I knew my love was very strong but until now I did not realize that I love you so very much that it hurts terribly to be away from you.” Jack shared with Rachel his fear that they were too much the Puritans with one another. “We have not loved each other the way we are capable of loving or better than that we have not expressed our love as it should be. Both of us seem to wait for the other and as a result we are not able to get the most out of our love. Loving you Darling,” he wrote, alluding specifically to his brother Mack and his wife, “makes me realize how awful it must be for two people to be married and not really be in love.”

At times, Jack seemed to be on the verge of suggesting that Rachel was not as spontaneous as he wanted her to be; but finally he put it differently. “Darling,” he wrote her, “
if only you loved me as I love you then I would really be happy. I am satisfied with you loving me as you do now, however, because it would be impossible for two to be in love as much as I am with you. I wish there were ways I could prove it to you.” For all these fine words, he was also well aware that he was not as mature and unselfish as he expected Rachel, as his wife, to be; he was a man, and in many things he did what he wanted and left her to clean up. What set him apart from many other men was his willingness, at least from time to time, to admit his failings and beg her to see that he truly loved her: “It seems my habits make you sometimes doubt me but there is no question in my mind that my marriage is the greatest thing that could have happened to me. All the other honors are really secondary and Darling someday I’ll prove it. I hope it will be soon. I will do everything to prove it.”

W
HEN THE 1948
D
ODGER SEASON
opened at the Polo Grounds, against the Giants, Jack was the picture of confidence. “
We think we have a better club now than we had this time last season,” he proclaimed. But the Dodgers, including Jack, tripped coming out of the gate. Although he was now installed at his preferred position, second base, a sore right arm, a nagging back, and a tender knee made him uncomfortable everywhere on the field.

He was still too fat to be truly effective, as reporters quickly noted. He knew this was true, and yet when he read one day that he had “
waddled” after a ground ball, he found the insult hard to take. With his acutely pigeon-toed gait and top-heavy physique, Jack usually walked with an odd,
ducklike stride; somehow, awkwardness fell away as the great body accelerated or feinted sinuously or shuddered to a swift stop. When he was not in shape, the oddness of his stride was more pronounced. But the word “waddled” hurt him to the core. “
He fought against tears,” Arthur Mann stated (perhaps going too far). “No one wrote of how he had worked and was working; how he was undergoing the torture of hunger again in order to diet. His temper flared.” When Jack met Gus Steiger, the author of the remark, his tongue “lashed out in reprisal,” according to Mann; the next day, another newspaperman wrote that Robinson “was developing a swelled head to match his midsection.”

When Jack’s bat stayed cold and his injuries mounted, Durocher removed him from the lineup. Some blacks were dismayed, but Jack would not allow his skipper to be blamed for his own failings. Durocher, he told his readers, was “
a good manager and a fine person.… I sat on the bench because of my arm and not because he didn’t like me.” Then Robinson seemed to return to form. On April 30, in a 2–1 victory, he drove in both runs with singles; the next day, he hit his first home run of the season. But something was not right. His flash and fire running on the bases, his unusual style and daring, were missing. Five weeks into the season, although he was now batting over .300, he had not yet stolen a single base. Late in May, he was sure he was back: “
I think I’m ready for a rough, tough season.” In June, however, as the club struggled, in a shocking but largely symbolic move Brooklyn placed him on waivers; technically he was available to other clubs. In the
Courier,
Wendell Smith, conceding that Robinson was no longer “
the dashing, daring base runner of 1947,” ventured wickedly that Rickey hadn’t forgiven Jack “for his porky-pig appearance last spring.” The New York
Daily Mirror
quoted Rickey on Robinson: “
He has been overweight, sluggish and never has shown the abandon and speed on the bases that caused the opposition nervous spells.” Stunned to be placed on waivers, Jack nevertheless brushed off its import in public. Yes, he wanted to stay in Brooklyn; but he would play just as hard for another club. As for his weight in the spring—“
I’m not worried about that fat anymore. I’m fit as a fiddle and ready to go.”

But by the middle of June, he had still not stolen a base, and his batting average was only .270. At last, on June 24, in a doubleheader at home against Pittsburgh, he pulled out of his slump. In the opener, with two men out in the bottom of the ninth, he broke a tie with a grand slam off Mel Queen, “
the first time in my life that I ever hit a grand-slam homer anywhere.” In the second game, he had three more hits, as his batting average jumped from .279 to .306. He also stole his first base of the season. A few days later, after stealing home for the first time in 1948, he flashed his old speed with
an inside-the-park home run against the Giants. Jack’s reawakening helped to fire up the Dodgers just as Roy Campanella, who had been sent down to St. Paul in May, returned to Brooklyn with a vengeance. In his first three games, Campanella had nine hits in twelve tries, with two home runs.

Next, Rickey shook up baseball by completing an amazing deal that sent Leo Durocher to manage the Giants; Burt Shotton returned to the Dodgers. Despite the tension between them, Jack was sorry to see Durocher go. In the
Courier
he contrasted Durocher, “
a human dynamo” who “loves nothing better than a fighting ball player,” to the mild-mannered Shotton, but expressed no preference for one over the other. But Harold Parrott saw a loss: “
What the black man needed behind him was Durocher’s bark and brass and bellow—and in front of him too, to keep the umpires off him.” To some observers, however, Jack’s late-inning, three-run homer in a victory over Cincinnati seemed a celebration of Shotton’s return. In last place on July 2, the Dodgers piled up seventeen victories in twenty-one games at one point as they pursued the league-leading Boston Braves. Late in August, Brooklyn edged into first place for the first time with a win in which Jack hit his eighth home run of 1948 and scored three runs; then the Dodgers slipped backward again. Another charge recaptured the top spot; in a doubleheader against St. Louis, Jack hit for the cycle—a single, double, triple, and home run—in the first game and then went two-for-four in the second. However, the Dodgers’ effort was in vain. Late in September, the Braves pulled ahead of the pack to claim the pennant. Brooklyn finished a disappointing third.

At the end of the season, Jack led the Dodgers in several categories, notably batting average (.296) and runs batted in (85). He also led in hits, doubles, triples, total bases, and runs scored; as a fielder, he was rated as the best second baseman in the National League, with an average of .979. “
But deep in my heart I was miserable,” he recalled, “because I knew that I should have done better—much better. I made myself a solemn vow to redeem myself and the Dodgers in 1949.” An analysis of his 1948 performance by the statistician Allan Roth of the Dodgers praised him in several categories, including power hitting, overall offense, clutch hitting, bunting, and stolen bases. Adversely, Roth noted that Jack’s hitting against left-handed pitchers “
was only fair” and that his record in night games was ordinary. He was “exceptionally weak against the same two teams for the second season” (Boston and Chicago; he batted .221 as compared to .326 against the other clubs); and Jack had shown “disappointing all-around play the first part of [the] season” despite his decent batting average.

The season was by no means a total loss. Jack had survived his sophomore season, a noted jinx. He had also reached a new height of personal
confidence; more readily accepted, he was also less willing to be meek. Two incidents in August underscored this change. Against the Chicago Cubs, he twice disputed an umpire’s decision with a vehemence that would have been impossible in 1947. Now he was just another squawking ballplayer—or almost so. “Yes sir,” he wrote happily, “
when a Negro gets to the place when he can argue over a decision and no one makes anything of it, I begin to feel as though we have really arrived in the big leagues.” His sense of arrival was tested again on August 24, at Forbes Field against the Pirates. Bitterly protesting the ejection of his teammate Bruce Edwards by umpire Butch Henline, Robinson was himself tossed by Henline—Jack’s first ejection in the majors. “
Jackie came rushing out of the dugout,” according to one reporter, “as if he were possessed with the very devil itself and proceeded to give Henline a verbal lacing down that had all the characteristics of a three-ring circus.” Just one year before, such behavior would have been unthinkable.

B
ETWEEN SEASONS
, Jack made sure he did not repeat his patterns of the previous year, when he had eaten himself into trouble. Instead, he and Campanella went on a barnstorming baseball tour of the South and California with two teams sponsored by Alejandro Pompez, the veteran owner of the colored New York Cubans. After a month, the tour ended in Los Angeles with a series against Satchel Paige’s All-Stars.

Back among the Negro leaguers, Jack was not always welcome. In July, he was elated when Paige, his former Kansas City teammate, made a belated but distinguished major-league debut with the Cleveland Indians. But the month before, in the popular black magazine
Ebony,
Jack had drawn on his mixed experience as a Monarch in 1945 to launch a devastating attack on the Negro leagues. Written “
all by himself,” as an astonished Wendell Smith (Robinson’s main ghostwriter to this point) hastened to make clear, this essay sent the owners “into a frenzy.” To them, Robinson seemed ungrateful and inconsiderate of the fact that integration was killing the Negro leagues. But Jack did not back down. “
I certainly want to see Negro baseball continued,” he insisted, but only after “a lot of house cleaning.” The feud continued later in the year when Effa Manley, the mercurial owner of the Newark Eagles, comparing him to Larry Doby of the Cleveland Indians (formerly of the Eagles), sneered openly that Robinson “
can’t carry Doby’s glove” as a player. Calling the statement “
utterly ridiculous and childish,” Jack reaffirmed both his admiration for Doby and his criticism of the leagues. To some blacks, Robinson was once again bravely speaking the truth; to others, he had gone too far and was forgetting where he had come from.

Jack himself had no fears about losing his place in the black world. When the tour ended in November, he reported for duty, along with Campanella, as a coach and counselor in the Boy’s Work Department of the Harlem branch of the YMCA on 135th Street. The pay was negligible, but the work was important. In October, the two Brooklyn stars had signed contracts with the branch director, Rudolph J. Thomas, one of Jack’s closest advisors and friends in Harlem, to work during most of the off-season. To celebrate this coup, the Y honored the men on November 17 with a gala dinner. “
Both Roy and I like this kind of work,” Jack told the press, “and we are both crazy about children.… We are proud to be getting this chance to work at a job so near our hearts.” The hiring was an experiment, but also a success; juvenile membership at the Harlem YMCA quickly doubled, and Jack began an association with the Harlem YMCA that would last the rest of his life. “
We are very much encouraged by the results,” he declared at the end of his stint. At first, the boys were awed, but soon found out that “we were just ordinary beings like themselves. Soon they were kidding and joking with us, but we had their respect, too. We were their pals.”

That fall, he also experienced “
a big thrill,” as he put it, when WMCA, the largest independent radio station in New York City, signed him to conduct a fifteen-minute show on the air, six days a week. (Harold Parrott was his main writer.) From the start, in yet another breakthrough by a black American in the white world, Robinson looked forward to talking about more than sports. “During my broadcast,” he wrote, “I will also get a chance to fight my pet peeve, juvenile delinquency.” With more interviews scheduled than on any other show at the station, Jack proved adept as a radio personality. His voice was clear and resonant, if surprisingly high, and his diction excellent; he prepared well and asked solid questions. His favorite guest, late in December, was undoubtedly his old pal Joe Louis, now near retirement. “
By his gentlemanly conduct and great sportsmanship,” Robinson wrote that year, “Joe has made it easy for me and the other fellows now in baseball.… I have tried to follow his footsteps when it came to meeting the public and doing a good job.”