Rickey and Robinson (23 page)

“Mr. Rickey had all the arguments and all the figures,” Shea recalls. “He had the whole thing down to numbers. He said that the average fellow coming up to the majors would have something like three years and three months in the minors. He argued that after three years, if we had the opportunity. to get the right players, we would have the cream of the crop and be able to compete with the major leagues.”

In 1959, at the age of seventy-eight, Rickey was appointed president of the Continental League. Within an hour after his appointment, he conducted the new major league’s first meeting. Eight franchises were formed: New York, Buffalo, Toronto, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Denver.

Jack Kent Cooke owned the new Toronto franchise in the Continental League and the old Toronto franchise in the International League. Rickey went to the Canadian city for a victory celebration after Cooke’s team won the International League pennant. But in Toronto, Rickey received the news that his son, Branch Jr., who been suffering from diabetes for quite some time, had died.

Rickey was devastated. The father-son relationship between the “Branch” and the “Twig” had always been very close. Branch Jr. had attended prep schools selected by Rickey and went to Ohio Wesleyan at his father’s urging. With the Cardinals, with the Dodgers, and in the Continental League, Branch Jr. was always his father’s deputy. It was the Twig, not Branch Rickey, who was on the scene that October day in 1945 in Montreal when Jackie Robinson signed his historic contract with the Royals.

The loss of his only son affected Rickey to the very depths of his being. They had shared so much together through the years—religion, family, baseball. “When his son died,” Shea recalls, “Mr. Rickey would not permit anything to be said or done. He stayed until a certain time and then left to go down to his son’s funeral. He was back again at work in a couple of days. His grief was private, but very deep.”

In 1960 the Pittsburgh Pirates won their first pennant in thirty-five years and defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series. Clemente, Law, Friend, and others whom Rickey had acquired for Pittsburgh had come of age. And the Mahatma’s concepts for expansion had also come of age. That same year the American League shifted the Washington Senators to Minnesota, and added franchises in Los Angeles and Washington; Houston and New York were awarded the new National League franchises.

The new home of the Mets in Flushing, New York, was named Shea Stadium in honor of the man who brought back National League baseball. “I didn’t know when they were considering naming the stadium that Mr. Rickey went before the Board of Estimate,” notes Shea. “He went to the mayor and reporters and argued that there should be no other name but Shea Stadium. He was helpful in all the details and the plans for the building of the stadium.

“I thought he was going to be with the Mets,” continued Shea, “but it did not work out. He and Jack Cooke were trying to work out ways to be part owners. M. Donald Grant was a stumbling block. He had other owners in mind . . . and Walter O’Malley figured a lot in the opposition.”

Branch Rickey, who created the farm system, who pioneered dozens of baseball innovations, who shattered baseball’s color line, never did set up the stakes in his last frontier—the Continental League. Rickey’s expansionist vision set off a chain reaction, not only in baseball, but in other sports as well. The American Football League, the American Basketball Association, and the World Hockey Association can all be traced back to the Continental League, the original stalking horse for sports expansion. “The consensus is now that the majors would have been better off accepting the Continental League,” observes baseball executive Bill DeWitt, who began his career in 1913 as an office boy for Rickey. “It would be more feasible to have Rickey’s concept of three major leagues of eight lubs instead of the present four divisions in the two leagues.” It is worth noting that of the eight cities chosen by the Continental League in 1959, six (New York, Toronto, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Atlanta) have major-league franchises today.

In 1963, with the Continental League behind him, now in his eighties, Rickey still quested for new challenges. He returned to the St. Louis Cardinals as a consultant. Rickey was recommended to St. Louis owner August Busch by Bob Cobb, his old Hollywood Pacific Coast League connection. Critical of manager Johnny Keane, general manager Bing Devine, and other St. Louis executives, Rickey fired off cantankerous tirades and pointed memoranda. He ached to be part of one more winner. In 1964, the Cardinals won the World Series. Their last World Championship had come in 1946, when a Rickey-built team had triumphed.

Jackie Robinson was nearly half Branch Rickey’s age as the turbulent decade of the 196os began. He was still young. He had celebrated his fortieth birthday in 1959. He had spent .ten exhausting years in the frenzied give and take of a difficult and consuming baseball life, in the intrusive eye of the media. Combat had been a way of life; now he could elect harmony. But the beat of a more powerful drummer made him march into new battles. His prime concern, the main issue, was now race.

Robinson was active with the Harlem YMCA and the Freedom National Bank, a project in black capitalism. “There are many of us who attain what we want and forget those who help us along the line,” he remarked. “We say, ‘Why should I jeopardize my position? Why should I slip back? We’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along. The further they go, the further we all go.”

“Jackie never forgot the struggle of his mother, and he never forgot what caused that struggle-bigotry in America,” says Mal Goode. “And to his dying day, he never stopped fighting. There were reporters who abused him in their columns. ‘Why doesn’t Jackie keep quiet? Baseball’s been good to him.’ People said, ‘Where did you ever have the chance to make thirty thousand dollars if not for baseball?’ I’m sure he was offered bribes to keep quiet, to stop complaining. He couldn’t be bribed. He couldn’t be bought.”

Just as Robinson had placed his stamp on baseball, his historic role in baseball had stamped him. It was baseball across those long seasons that had enabled him to experience firsthand how the hearts and minds of people could be changed, how prejudice could be defused, how gains could be made, and how one man could become an instrument of change and make a difference.

In 1960, impressed by Sen. Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights record, Robinson campaigned for Humphrey in the Democratic presidential primaries. Mter Humphrey lost, Connecticut governor Chester Bowles set up a meeting between Robinson and the Democratic victor, Sen. John F. Kennedy.

“He couldn’t or wouldn’t look me straight in the eye,” Robinson said later of the meeting with Kennedy in a private residence in Washington. The Massachusetts senator asked him, “How much would it take to get Jackie Robinson to work for the election of John F. Kennedy?”

“Look, senator,” snapped Robinson, “I don’t want any of your money. I came here simply to determine which candidate was the best one for black Americans because the struggle for civil rights and its solution is basic to making America what it’s supposed to be.”

With Kennedy found wanting, Robinson worked for Richard Nixon. He felt that the Republican had a good civil rights record, and was impressed by a statement made by Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, that if Nixon were elected president there would be an appointment of a black cabinet member. The endorsement evoked much criticism. Robinson’s friends could not understand his support of the Republican candidate.

“Jackie saw no grays; he just saw black and white. The issue was right or it was wrong,” explains Irving Rudd. “He went for Nixon because Nelson Rockefeller, a master politician who had stroked him, had convinced him that Nixon was a man who could do great things for the Negro.”

Events disillusioned Robinson. Nixon never publicly acknowledged the statement made by his running mate, Lodge.. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed in Georgia for a minor traffic violation, Robinson urged Nixon to intervene. He refused to get involved. John F. Kennedy did, even using his brother Bobby to work on obtaining King’s release.

There was mounting pressure on Robinson to dissociate himself from the GOP. He stayed. He argued that it helped keep the Republican party from going completely “white,” and gave blacks a chance of at least being represented in both political parties.

Robinson was a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It hurt him badly that it was difficult to get black athletes to support the organization,” Goode recalls. During a period of internal strife in the NAACP, Robinson quit the national board rather than choose sides in the struggle.

He was a friend and admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Paradoxically, the man who wore the badge of martyrdom to break baseball’s color line did not accept King’s philosophical approach to civil rights. “As much as I loved him,” said Robinson, “I would never have made a good soldier in Martin’s army. My reflexes aren’t conditioned to accept nonviolence in the face of violent provoking attacks.” Robinson’s development from pacifist to activist was a living embodiment of the direction the civil rights movement was to take. During his first two years as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers he was, willingly or not, the personification of the nonviolence Martin Luther King would transform into an internationally recognized crusade. One may only wonder just how much of an influence Robinson’s behavior during his early years as a pioneer had on King. Vigorous outspokenness and activism characterized Robinson in the latter years of his career. This was again a precursor of the direction the civil rights movement would take.

There was public disagreement between Robinson and black activist Malcolm X. Robinson defended United Nations Undersecretary Ralph Bunche late in 1963 against attacks by Malcolm X that the black diplomat was muzzled because of the job “the white mob” gave him. Malcolm X then turned against Robinson. He charged that Robinson too tried to please the white bosses. Robinson’s reply was that he did nothing to please white bosses or black agitators “unless they are things that please me.”

In 1962, in his first year of eligibility, he became the first black man admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Even here there was controversy.

“I was really proud that Jack made it into the Hall of Fame and just could not understand Bob Feller saying he did not want to go in with Jackie,” Willa Mae recalls. “He wanted to go into the Hall of Fame with Campanella. Jackie told him, ‘Go wait on Campanella.’ Maybe it was a racial thing, and maybe it was just dislike. In Feller’s mind and in a lot of the others’, their mind was made up before they started playing as soon as they found out the black was coming.”

The Hall of Fame plaque reads:

JACK ROOSEVELT ROBINSON

Brooklyn N;L, 1947-1956

Leading N.L. batter in 1949. Holds fielding mark for second baseman playing 150 or more games with .992. Led N.L. in stolen bases in 1947 and 1949. Most Valuable Player in 1949· Lifetime batting average .311. Joint record holder for most double plays by second baseman, 137 in 1951. Led second basemen in double plays 1949-50-51-52.

During the ceremony at Cooperstown, Robinson called three people up from the audience to stand beside him, three people who had special significance in his life and career: his mother, Mallie; his wife, Rachel; and his friend and confidant, Branch Rickey. It was to be one of the last times together for Rickey and Robinson.

On November 13, 1965, against the advice of his doctors, the eighty-three-year-old Rickey insisted on being released from a St. Louis hospital where he had been confined aft r suffering another heart attack. He said he wanted to watch the Missouri-Oklahoma football game that day, and he had to make an acceptance speech that night for his induction into the Missouri State Hall of Fame. He promised his doctors that he would return to the hospital after the speech.

The pale Rickey watched Missouri’s football team defeat Oklahoma on that cold November day, and went almost immediately afterward to the early dinner in Columbia, Missouri.

“He got to his feet as the final inductee,” Bob Broeg, sports editor of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
recalls. “He was inducted along with George Sisler and the late publisher of the
Sporting News,
J. G. Taylor Spink. He wove a tale of three types of courage: physical, mental, and spiritual. And he had just launched into a parable about a biblical tailor when he suddenly put his hand over his heart and said, ‘I don’t believe I can continue.’”

The audience was stunned. Rickey had suffered another heart attack.

“He sat slumped down at the head table in the modestsized dining room of the old Daniel Boone Hotel,” Broeg remembers. “He would have died at once if it had not been for the presence of a Kansas City doctor, Dr. D. M. Nigro, the last man to see his old friend Knute Rockne alive when he put the famed coach on the fatal plane in 1931.”

An ambulance sped Rickey to Boone County Memorial Hospital. Placed in the intensive care unit, supplied continuously with oxygen, the dying Rickey lay, his wife keeping a constant vigil at his bedside.

Branch Rickey died at 10:oo P.M. on December g. It was just eleven days before his eighty-fourth birthday. His father, of whom he often spoke, lived to the age of eighty-six and “until the very end was still planting peach and apple trees on our farm near Portsmouth, Ohio,” Rickey was fond of saying. “And when I asked him who would take care of the fruit, he said, ‘That’s not important. I want to live every day as if I’m going to live forever.’” The Deacon left behind his wife, five daughters, many grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. Strangely, few blacks attended the funeral of the man who had given Jackie Robinson the chance to break baseball’s color line. Rickey had always refused to accept any public honors for signing Robinson. “I have declined them all,” he said. “To accept honors and public applause for signing a superlative ballplayer, I would be ashamed.”