Rickey and Robinson (4 page)

Heard, Jackie, Warren Dorn—later mayor of Pasadena and Los Angeles County supervisor—and other youngsters banded together in a loose confederation known as “The Pepper Street Gang.” They were a bunch of kids eager to compete in anything and ready to take risks.

“We all looked up to Jackie,” recalls Dorn, “because he could hide in a storm drain, run out on a golf course, and grab a ball and get back faster than the rest of us. That’s how we got our Coke money—and he could get oranges and a bunch of grapes so fast that he never got caught.

“During the Depression, things were tough for all of us,” Heard remembers. “Things were especially tough for him. He didn’t have a father. We kids all used to go down to chase after golf balls and make three or four dollars a day. He had tremendously good eyesight. We’d be down in the gullies, down among the big boulders. Sometimes he’d find six or seven golf balls. We couldn’t find them. We used to get a quarter apiece for those golf balls. Jackie’d say, ‘Okay, the next one is yours, Pete. The next one is yours, Sid.’ He’d share with us.

“I remember one time we came across a couple of guys on the course finishing up the seventeenth hole. Jack had a couple of balls in his hand. Jack said, ‘Would you like to buy a couple of balls?’ And the two guys smiled. One of the guys said, ‘Double or nothing.’ Jack didn’t know what that meant. ‘What’s double or nothing?’ he asked. The guy said, ‘Well play from right here to the tee, and if you can’t make it in less strokes than me, you give me the balls. And if you beat me, I’ll give you a dollar and you keep the balls.’

“He handed Jack a putter. He took himself a seven iron. How Jack did it I’ll never know, but he took that putter and hit the ball right onto the green just that far, almost right into the hole. Jack won the dollar. He was just about thirteen or fourteen, and the guy was an adult.

“When he’d come home in the evening,” Heard continues, “he’d lay his money out on the table and save a little to go buy himself a pie or something. He loved sweets, big banana pie. He could have kept all the money for himself, but he gave most of it to his mother to help her out.

“The Pepper Street Gang was mostly a sport gang,” Heard recalls. “We loved to compete. We weren’t out to hurt anyone. We’d go miles to get into any type of sport. That gang was where Jackie and the rest of us learned that we all have to be brothers and sisters. We didn’t have any racial restrictions. We played together—blacks, whites, Mexicans, Japanese. Anaheim and Long Beach were cities that were very prejudiced. Jack knew this, but he had no fear. He got us playing there because he knew we could play ball and win.

“Whenever we played, wherever we played, Jack was always the best. The grown-ups, the people from the city yard, used to come and watch us. They would come and watch every evening. They came mainly to see him. He was doing things that you just don’t see young kids do. Jack just excelled in any kind of game, any sport, and he made an individual who played with him play much better.”

The young Robinson followed the accomplishments of white sports stars, especially Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, and marveled at the way the New York Yankees kept winning. Although Sundays were family days, church days, he would rise at four in the morning and set out on his paper route delivering the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Los Angeles Examiner.
He read the sports sections, immersing himself in the·statistics and the glories of the athletic world. Basebalfs color barrier precluded any thought of playing major-league baseball, but he was sure of his talents and sure that his future lay in sports.

Growing up during the Depression, with no father at home, Jackie took any job that was available. He ran errands; he watered shrubs in the languid Pasadena evenings. He built a shoeshine box and went around polishing shoes. He went to many sporting events where, with one eye on the action and the other on hungry fans, he sold hot dogs. He ate meat sometimes on a Sunday when there was some extra money from his odd jobs and the supplemental employment his mother was able to obtain.

Growing into manhood, Jack felt new strength. Tall, lithe, and alert, he exuded the healthy handsomeness of a young man in full possession of his powers. He had the look of an earnest, clean-cut American kid, despite the hardships he had been through.

At John Muir Technical High School, he played with the same frenzy that he displayed on vacant lots with the Pepper Street Gang. He won letters in football, basketball, baseball, and track. Some mistook his will to win and his unwillingness to suffer incompetence gladly as cockiness and arrogance. Teams keyed on him. Rival coaches constructed game plans to cope with Muir Tech teams and ended their lecture with two words: “Stop Robinson.”

He was the catcher on Muir’s baseball team and played on the Pomona Tournament All-Star squad in 1937. His teammates included outfielder Ted Williams of San Diego Hoover and third baseman Bob Ll;lmon of Long Beach Wilson.

Robinson;s athletic career in college is the stuff of storybooks. He began inauspiciously as a freshman at Pasadena Junior College. In his first football practice, he broke an ankle. He missed the first four games. Pasadena lost every one of them. When he returned to action, the Bulldogs began a winning streak that did not end as long as Robinson was on the team.

He was the piston that powered Pasadena to eleven straight triumphs in 1938 and the junior college football championship. Churning out over one thousand yards from scrimmage, he scored seventeen touchdowns and accounted for 131 of his team’s 369 points. He paced Pasadena’s 33-0 victory over San Francisco with a seventy-six-yard touchdown run on the second play from scrimmage; he scored three touchdowns in the game. Against San Bernardino, he ran for three touchdowns and passed for three more. He drew thirty-eight thousand fans to Pasadena’s game against Los Angeles. In a 31-19 victory over Santa Ana, he racked up an eighty-three-yard run, a field goal, and four conversions. More than forty thousand watched him in action against Compton Junior College. He scored two touchdowns and passed for another. In the stands that day was a Compton student named Edwin “Duke” Snider.

“Jackie was the star,” recalls Snider. “He wiped us out in

football, basketball, baseball. He could have been a pro in all three. I still remember that game he played against Compton when he ran back that kick. He must have reversed his field three times. I think everybody on the field took shots at him, but they couldn’t touch him.”

At the Rose Bowl, where Robinson had chased rabbits as a kid, he brought thirty thousand fans to their feet in the season-ending game against Cal Tech as he dodged and scampered and powered his way for a 104-yard kickoff return.

On May 8, 1938, his multiple talents presented a problem, but in legendary fashion, he overcame this too. He competed in two different events in two different cities in the same day, and excelled in both. In the morning in Claremont, he was given permission to take three early broad jumps. His third jump measured 25', 6½", breaking his brother Mack’s national junior college record. “I couldn’t get over it,” Jack said, “breaking Mack’s record. My big brother had always been my idol, making the Olympics and all that . . . running second to Jesse Owens in the two hundred meters at Berlin in 1936.”

Then racing to a waiting car, like Clark Kent transforming himself into Superman in a telephone booth, Jack Robinson, track-and-field star, changed into Jack Robinson, baseball player. The car took him to Glendale. He arrived in the third inning, took over at shortstop, and helped lead his Pasadena team to a 5-3 victory for the southern California baseball championship. Named the Most Valuable Player in Southern California Junior College baseball, he batted .417 and stole twenty-five bases in twenty-four games.

At Brookside Park, where Jack had once played baseball using a broomstick bat and a tennis ball, he played in an exhibition game against the Chicago White Sox. The date was March 14, 1938. The White Sox had agreed to the contest to help raise funds for Pasadena’s baseball program. Robinson slapped out two hits and made three exceptional fielding plays—on one of them going deep in the hole at short to turn a sure run-scoring hit by Luke Appling, the American League batting champ, into a double play.

“Geez,” exclaimed White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes. “No one in the American League can make plays like that. If that kid was only white, l’d sign him right now.”

Dykes’s statement did not surprise Robinson. “Growing up, I really gave no thought to becoming a baseball player,” he recalled. “There was no future in it for colored players. I did love softball. I played it better and played it before anything else. I was really shooting at becoming a football, basketball, or track star. But I didn’t think much of a chance existed for me in baseball.”

California newspapers recounted his exploits. Robinson was referred to with hyperbolic nicknames—”Midnight Express,” “The Dusky Flash,” and “The Dark Demon.” He was termed “the greatest all-around athlete in California sports.”

As a forward on PJC’s basketball team, he averaged nineteen points a game and was named to the all-state team. He led Pasadena to the California Junior College championship. He started alongside four white players : Clem Tomerlin, Al Sauer, George E. McNutt, and Les O’Gara. During one game, a white opponent continually fouled Robinson and kept up a running stream of curses. “You’ve got no guts, Robinson,” the player shouted. “You’re afraid to fight.”

Robinson answered calmly: “If you want to fight, we’ll do it after the game. I’m not going to get thrown out and hurt my team. We’ll fight later, and we’ll see who has more guts.”

The reply infuriated the player, who slammed into Robinson, slugging away with both fists. Robinson did not strike back, realizing that the racial overtones of a physical confrontation might trigger a riot. Officials intervened, and the opposing player was ejected from the game.

The athletic skills and winning ways he had displayed on championship teams in elementary school, junior high, high school, and junior college attracted scouts from many colleges. There were offers of athletic scholarships and parttime employment. “I chose UCLA,” he explained, “because I planned to get a job in Los Angeles after I finished school, and figured I’d have a better chance if I attended a local university. . . . In school I majored in phys. ed. . . . My mother wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer, but I never wanted to be anything but an athlete.”

He became UCLA’s first four-letter man, starring in basketball, football, baseball, and track. Sportswriters began to refer to him as “the Jim Thorpe of his race.” He became college football’s top ground gainer in 1939, averaging a dozen yards each carry. He also returned punts for a twenty-one-yard average.

Willa Mae recalls what it was like to have a brother who was a big football star: “I went to a football game and took along my oldest son, Ronnie, who was six. He started to scream, ‘C’mon, Uncle Jack! C’mon, Uncle Jack!’ And soon the whole stadium was calling out, ‘C’mon, Uncle Jack! C’mon, Uncle Jack!’ Jack didn’t like that kind of publicity, and I knew I was in for it. After the game he came home and I hid. He was calling out, ‘Willa Mae, who started that Uncle Jack?’ I said, ‘I couldn’t help it. What was my Ronnie gonna call you?’ And Jack laughed.”

Jackie Robinson was not just Saturday’s hero. It seemed that every day of the week he performed heroics in some athletic event or other. He won the Pacific Coast League conference championship in the broad jump, and a month later captured the national collegiate broad-jump title. He starred on the UCLA basketball team and twice paced the Pacific Coast League’s southern division in scoring. Ironically, he only faltered in baseball, batting under .200.

Sidney Heard recalls Jackie, the 1941 football AllAmerican: “Most people did not see him at his greatest like they saw Willie Mays, who came up when he was young. If Jack had gone up when he was twenty, there’d be records now they’d still be chasing. . . . I saw him run down to home plate and get within three feet and then go back to third base and be safe . . . that was his way. Whatever little flaws an individual or a team had, he took advantage of them.”

Sidney’s wife, Eleanor Heard, who was sixteen years old when she played with Jackie Robinson in the Pacific Coast Tennis Tournament, recalls how he capitalized on the weaknesses of opponents and maximized his own strengths: “Jack played to win, I can tell you that. He urged me to play in the singles. I knew I would be matched in the competition against this woman who was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. He urged me to play her first in an intermission contest, just for fun. She beat me. Jack watched the contest carefully. Afterward he took me aside, and he knew all the things that she did that I could overcome. I played her again, and I beat her.

“Jack was a really fine tennis player. He would outfinesse you. If you had a strong serve and a strong volley, he’d pit-pat the ball and use his speed. He could move from one part of the court to another so fast you wouldn’t even know he was moving. He had the ability to stop suddenly and get off a shot. He had a terrific cut that would make the ball hit the ground and just stay there. Nobody taught him these things. He just had to learn them himself. We won the Pacific Coast mixed doubles championship. But that was it. At that time, no matter how good blacks were, they were not allowed to compete in national tournaments.”

Jack played tennis with Eleanor Heard, but the girl he fell in love with was Rachel Isum. An honor student majoring in nursing at UCLA, she was introduced to Jackie one afternoon in 1940. Rachel had no interest in sports. She agreed to the meeting only to be polite to the twenty-one-year-old athlete. She was refined, serious, intelligent, and outspoken. At this point in her life, she saw no reason to become involved with a cocky, highly publicized football hero.

“I could count on one hand the number of girls I went out with before Rachel,” Jackie observed. With the feel of the poverty of his childhood still clinging to him, he was shy and unco:m.fortable in the affluent world of UCLA. Only in the arena, where his athletic talents cut off any feelings of inferiority, was he at ease.