Jackie Robinson (53 page)

Nevertheless, Jack was still wearing Brooklyn blue when training camp opened on March 1—although one reason might have been his recent public announcement that he would retire if the Dodgers “
traded him out of New York.” With Cox gone, he arrived seeking to take over third base. Although in 1954 he had played seventy-four games in the outfield without an error, “
I’d rather play third base than anywhere,” he said to a writer. “That’s where I’m best fitted, now, I think.” But he faced stiff competition from Don Hoak, who was nine years younger than Robinson and at least as aggressive. Jack’s position “
could depend on Don Hoak,” Walter Alston told the press, “if Don wins the job.” But Hoak, who had never hit higher than .295 in his career even in the minors, inspired little fear in Robinson. He finished his first day of hard practice quietly optimistic. “
I worked harder than ever,” he wrote home to Rachel, “and will continue to do so until the training is over. None of my injuries bothered me and my legs had a lot of bounce. I was awful hitting but I’ll not worry about that.”

He worried, however, about the way his manager saw him. “
Alston does not seem any better,” he wrote home, “and I am sure he does not want to play me. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and do the best I can until I see what is happening.” In addition, Jack’s efforts to be polite with Alston’s wife were met with stony rebuffs. “Mrs. Alston still does not speak,” he informed Rachel, “and I’ve made my last gesture. It will be her duty to speak first from here in and if she does fine, if not, who cares.” But if he failed with Mrs. Alston, others received him well. “
I am getting along with everyone,” Jack reported home, “and am sure it will be a pleasant year all around.” His strenuous efforts were being noticed. “I have never worked so hard in any training,” he told Rachel, “and I am sure it will pay off. All the
fellows are talking about it and I intend keeping the pressure up. If Alston has not already decided I am sure I’ll be the third baseman. That’s the position I am pointing for and must admit I look very good so far (smile).”

After a few days, even Alston seemed to be thawing out. In a private meeting, he assured Jack that “
he has only had the very best reports on my condition and how I am working and I assured him all I want to do is help the ball club and will do whatever he pleases. I am sure this year will be much better than last and we will get along very well. I am to do my part and I promise whatever happens there will be absolutely nothing to worry about.” Still, Jack found himself competing for playing time not only with Hoak but also with Don Zimmer, another promising prospect. Struggling to get in shape, Jack showed flashes of his old form. In Tampa, before more than five thousand fans (about two-thirds of them black), he got four straight hits, stole home, and befuddled a pitcher into a balk. Marveling at Robinson at thirty-six, a New York writer compared him to Tennyson’s Ulysses, a warrior grown old but still restless and indomitable, “
made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

But on April 1, in Montgomery, Alabama, Jack lost his poise. Snared in a despondent moment by Dick Young, Jack rashly vented his anger at his manager. “
If Alston doesn’t want to play me, let him get rid of me,” he raged. “When I’m fit I’ve got as much right to be playing as any man on this team. He knows it—or maybe he doesn’t.” When a furious Alston asserted that Robinson was injured, Robinson denied that he was. “
I’ve been in shape all spring,” he insisted. “I just can’t play one day and then sit on the bench for four days and do a good job.” His frustration as he saw his career petering out in this way made him lash out. In the
Post,
Jimmy Cannon wrote that “
the range of Jackie Robinson’s hostility appears to have no frontiers.… He is a juggler of a sort, flashily keeping feuds in motion like Indian clubs.” Robinson had gone “beyond the borders of competition,” alienating “even Brooklyn partisans with his undisciplined protests.”

This was an extreme view of Robinson, one promulgated in the newspapers by writers who often both exaggerated his aggressiveness and also refused to admit, much less investigate, the pervasive racism he alone seemed willing to fight in baseball. But to Harold Parrott, writing long after Jack’s death about a similar assessment of his state of mind, “
this was definitely not the Robinson I knew at all, at all. Or that Pee Wee Reese and Ralph Branca and Carl Erskine knew, and will talk about.” To Parrott, Jack had no friends among the owners except for Rickey, and few friends, if any, among the umpires; but almost all the players liked and respected him as a man. Certainly, to new Dodgers, black or white, Jack was usually an embracing
human presence, a man who lived the Dodger ideal of family unity. “
Jackie Robinson is worth his salary to the Brooklyn Dodgers if he just sits on the bench,” the pitcher Roger Craig remarked, shortly after joining the club from Montreal in July. “He took to me the first day I was there.” When Craig returned to Montreal to fetch his wife, Robinson not only drove him to the airport but “on the way he talked to me and gave me a lot of confidence. He’s as good as you’ll find ’em.” Such behavior was nothing new for Robinson. This was exactly the way he had welcomed Carl Erskine to the club in 1948. After playing against him in Fort Worth, Texas, when Erskine was in the minors, Jack had sought him out to praise his pitching. “
I was totally suprised when he came over and asked for me,” Erskine recalled. “It was such a fine thing for him to do, it really boosted my confidence.” Then, when Erskine joined the Dodgers in the middle of 1948, Jack “bonded me to him by the enthusiastic way he greeted me the first day. He stuck out his hand and was very warm; he totally believed in me and my ability.”

The pitching prospects Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax, and Tommy Lasorda each would recall the warm welcome extended by the most embattled Dodger. In part, this was a Dodger tradition. “
No matter who you were,” Drysdale wrote, “if you had a Dodger uniform on, they made you feel like you were one of them—like part of the family, the Dodger family.” But no one seemed to believe in this spirit more than Robinson did—although Drysdale recalled him also as “
an awfully intense man. I could see the frustrations he had to endure, and the battle scars.” Insulted everywhere, Jack had to walk a fine line: be aggressive, “because that was his style,” but also “sit there and take a lot of crap. Try that sometime.…”

Jack’s unhappiness with Alston continued right up to the start of the season. Robinson was hardly alone. Russ Meyer publicly complained about being ignored. Campanella, fighting back after his terrible 1954 season, revolted against being asked to bat at number eight. “
That’s fine encouragement he’s giving me,” Campy snarled to a writer, “having me hit with the batboy.” But, miraculously, none of this squabbling mattered once the season started. Of their first twenty-five games, Brooklyn won twenty-two, including the first ten (a National League record); less than one month into the season, the Dodgers led by ten games. The heroes were numerous, including Carl Furillo, who hit seven home runs in the first two weeks; but Robinson also shone. On opening day, in the sixth inning, he prevented a sure double-play by craftily allowing a grounder (by Campanella) to hit him as he ran the bases. He was automatically out, according to the rules, but Campanella also had a hit, under the rules, and the double play was avoided. The cheeky shrewdness of the play was widely noted. “
Robinson Can Still Do It All,” the New York
Post
proclaimed. “I
didn’t think of it before,” Jack said coolly. “It just happened and there’s nothing in the rule book to prevent it.”

The ten-game opening streak ended with victories by the Giants in games marked at times by brutal intensity. As usual, Jack was at or near the center of action. Struck by a pitch in a game against the Phillies, he was thrown at again first by Jim Hearn and then, on April 23, by Sal Maglie of the Giants. Looking for revenge against Maglie, Jack went perhaps further than he intended. Laying down a bunt, he hoped that Maglie would rush to cover first, where Jack would try to level him. Instead, when the second baseman, Davey Williams, raced over to take the throw, Jack barreled into him. Williams was hurt but Robinson was unrepentant. “
I got nothing against Williams,” he told the writers. “Maglie was the one I wanted to get even with.” Sure, he had seen Williams come over, but decided, “Heck, I’m not going to get out of his way; let him get out of mine.”

Although Jack would never admit that Alston was an astute manager, he was not above defending him. Early in May, he sided with the Dodger brass when a frustrated Newcombe, without a complete game in three starts, was suspended and fined by Bavasi for refusing to pitch batting practice. (A few days later, a contrite Newcombe tossed a one-hitter against the Cubs.) When a writer saw racial turmoil in the complaints of Robinson, Campanella, and Newcombe, Jack hurried to disagree. In a letter to a columnist, Bob Quincy, Jack was blunt: “
Sportswriters in general have been very fair and I certainly hope they are not going to make any racial trouble on our club. I had my say but Walt Alston will tell you, I am sure, my first interest is the ball team and if I felt I could not help it win I would be the first to tell the manager.” Elsewhere, he dismissed as “
a lot of baloney” the charge that Dodger infighting was out of hand. “How can this club keep winning like it has if there is trouble?” He admitted “a great deal of scrambling for jobs,” but saw it as “a healthy thing.”

In May, Jack made good on his promise to tell his manager if he could not help the club. With his batting average at .244 and sinking, he asked Alston to bench him. “
I’m doing as lousy as I’ve ever done,” he conceded to reporters. “I can’t seem to do anything right.” Hoak replaced him, but also struggled at bat; Alston then decided to give Robinson his chance to nail down third base. Praising Jack’s all-around play, he stressed his versatility as a hitter and his disruptive base running: “
On top of it all, there is that terrific competitive spirit which keeps the entire club going.” The move paid off; over the following month, Jack batted .328. Later, in the
Courier,
Ric Roberts spoke of Robinson’s almost magical ability to inspire victory. As “
the owner of psychic, spiritual force” that lifts his teammates, Robinson exemplified the “key guy, the very essence of truculence and heroism,
whose reassuring presence paves the way to collective poise and confidence and eventually to a team victory.” Roberts approvingly quoted another sportswriter, Bill Corum of the New York
Journal-American:
“Jackie is the pressure valve on the pressure cooker.”

By mid-season, however, Robinson was back on the bench as often as not, hobbled by knee and ankle problems even as Brooklyn forged ahead. For the first time since 1949, he was not voted to the All-Star team. He was assuredly on the way out. But the following month, August, he took some consolation as a few sportswriters noted the tenth anniversary of his first interview in 1945 by Rickey. Now, almost forty black men played in the majors. The Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Detroit Tigers still held out, but integration seemed irreversible, not least of all because of the high quality of these black players. With Campanella, Robinson, Doby, and Monte Irvin still epitomizing the brilliance of the pioneers, a number of sensational younger players, notably Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, and the rookie Roberto Clemente, had built on that foundation. “
The Negro player is no longer a novelty,” the Chicago
American
noted. “The clubs that haven’t any on their rosters are the novelties.” (On the Yankees, Elston Howard, a catcher playing the outfield because of Yogi Berra’s brilliance, had integrated the team.)

As the season drew to a close, Robinson enjoyed a stretch of inspired playing that helped forestall any notion of a Dodger collapse like that of 1951. “
It’s just that I made up my mind to go out there and hustle,” he told the press. “I didn’t expect to have the success that I did, but I felt if I started running, the others might take the cue. You know something? It worked.” On September 8, leading the second-place Milwaukee Braves by eighteen games, Brooklyn clinched the pennant. No National League team had ever won the pennant at an earlier date.

Once again, they faced the Yankees in the World Series. Should Alston start Robinson? “
Jackie Robinson was born to play and excel in the awful pressure of a World Series,” Leo Durocher declared. “The Dodgers are not yet ready to win without him, no matter what the calendar says. Keeping the amazing leadership that is Robinson’s on the shelf would be like pinch-hitting for Ruth in the clutch.” Jack’s physical gifts were fading, but his passion to win was as intense as ever. With an unflagging stream of chatter, with quips and barbs and taunts and insults, as well as a constant pushing forward of himself to center stage, he urged the Dodgers on.

In the first game, after the Yankees’ Billy Martin was thrown out trying to steal home, Jack stole home himself (for the eighteenth time in his career). However, Brooklyn lost that game, and the next. Back at Ebbets Field, Jack again roused the crowd in the third game with his flashy base
running; once, luring Elston Howard into throwing behind him, he turned a likely double into the most nonchalant of triples. With the same fierce hitting that had accounted for more than two hundred Dodger home runs for the second consecutive year, Brooklyn swept the three home games. In Yankee Stadium, the team lost the sixth to tie the series. Again the Yankees seemed poised to prevail. But in the seventh, behind the superb pitching of Johnny Podres and a fabulous running catch by Amoros followed by a relay via Reese to Hodges at first for an amazing double play, the Dodgers won the World Series for the first time in team history.

Although Jack did not play in the last game, veteran writers praised him lavishly. “
His hair is gray,” the Boston
Globe
noted. “His body is almost portly. And he can’t run the way he did in his days in the Negro league.” But “he showed his teammates, he showed his opponents, he showed a nation—that the Dodgers can beat the Yankees.” “
Aging Robinson Sets Dodgers Afire,” headlined one newspaper after the third game. “
Perhaps never in the history of the World Series,” the broadcaster Harry Caray declared, “has one man played such a unique role as has Jackie Robinson this year.” Through “the inspiration of his own play … his own daring and imagination,” Robinson, as if carrying on “a personal crusade,” had succeeded at last “in breathing life into a Dodger team which from the start of this series seemed destined for the embalmer.” The Yankees, confident about beating Brooklyn, found out “they could never whip Robinson.”