Rickey & Robinson (34 page)

Rennie came into St. Louis with the New York Yankees in May 1947. The Yankees were about to play and outclass the St. Louis Browns. Rennie, a highly skilled typist, filed a fast piece and then joined his friend Hyland and some others for an evening of drink and song. “Not opera,” Rennie told me, “or even Broadway songs. Just barbershop stuff. ‘Sweet Adeline’ . . . ’If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ . . .”

As the group sang and drank whiskey that long-ago night hard by the Mississippi River, Doc Hyland turned to his friend and said
, “
Rud, it’s a shame you aren’t covering the Dodgers. If you were, you’d get one helluva story.”

“What might that be?” Rennie said.

“Strike,” Hyland said. “The whole [Cardinal] team is going to strike, rather than take the field with that colored boy.”

“Robinson?”

“You got it,” Hyland said
. “
And not just the Cardinals
. If this thing goes through the way they’re planning it, no team in the National League will take the field on May 21. Not one. And no team will take the field again until the Dodgers release Robinson. What I understand is that the men want the basic contracts changed giving them the right to approve or disapprove of the people they play with and play against.” Incredibly, Dixie Walker’s wild scheme was coming to life.

Rennie was sober enough to think sensibly. Hyland was right. A big-league baseball strike, however insane, would be one helluva story. But Rennie felt he could not be the person to write it. His friendship with Hyland was widely known. If he wrote the piece himself, Rennie feared, Hyland would be suspected as the source. He was the Cardinals’ team doctor and here he was, ignoring medical confidentiality, spilling the team’s darkest secret. Rennie went to a telephone and quietly passed along Hyland’s words to Stanley Woodward, who was relaxing with his wife, Ricie, and a five-to-one martini, in his comfortable apartment on Park Avenue in New York. After Rennie hung up, the Big Coach put down his drink. Then he exploded into action.

Both logic and tradition have made protecting sources the prime commandment in newspaper work. Indeed, newspaper people are forever campaigning—with limited success—to have the confidentiality of sources shielded by law.

Close as we were, Woodward would not tell me much about how he proceeded to confirm Dr. Robert Hyland’s astonishing tip. The identities of most of his secondary sources thus are lost. Which is not to say, as some new journalists do, that they did not exist. The
Herald Tribune
, highly reputable and essentially conservative, for decades retained a renowned libel lawyer, E. Douglas Hamilton of New York. The lawyer reviewed Woodward’s reporting, in utmost confidence
, before recommending that the story be published. Shielded by lawyer–client confidentiality, Woodward disclosed
everything he had and did to Doug Hamilton. Without a shield, speaking with me, Woodward later said, “I talked to Ford. I’ll tell you that much. And no more.”

Ford Christopher Frick, an Indiana native, had been a sportswriter for Hearst newspapers in New York, a baseball publicist and now in 1947 he was president of the National League. Frick confirmed Hyland’s tip and gave Woodward the text of a statement he had prepared for delivery to the entire Cardinal squad.

If you strike, you will be suspended from the League. You will find the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you. You will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended, I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. You will find if you go through with your intention that you will have been guilty of complete madness.

Woodward called this statement “the most noble ever made by a baseball man.” In another century, few would disagree. But in the excitement of the moment, Woodward made a mistake. Frick did not deliver his powerful message to the insurgent ballplayers. Instead he handed it to Sam Breadon, a tough onetime auto mechanic, later a dealer of luxurious Pierce-Arrows and now a self-made millionaire who owned the Cardinals. “I’d like you to pass this on to your team, Sam,” Frick said quietly and very firmly.

Tough old Sam Breadon read quickly. Then he nodded. He did not argue. The Cardinals assembled in a clubhouse at Ebbets Field “to talk about pitching problems.” The real topic was hidden in utmost secrecy. There, in the old Brooklyn ballpark, Breadon read to his ballplayers Frick’s ringing and threatening words.

(Frick later became baseball commissioner and as such he
allowed the Dodgers and Giants to abandon the New York area after the 1957 season, with no replacement teams in sight. Simply wielding a pen he summarily could have stopped both moves. A rational and orderly expansion to California might have followed. Where Frick truly was a hero in 1947, taking on a lynch mob wearing Cardinal red, to many Dodger and Giant fans 10 years later he became a bum. The evidence is irrefutable. Ford Frick was unwilling or afraid to grapple with the Big Oom, Walter O’Malley, conqueror of Branch Rickey, trader of Jackie Robinson and baseball’s all-time ultimate power broker.

Hero to bum, that is a not an atypical career in the mercurial business of sports.)

Woodward’s story, in the May 9th
New York Herald Tribune
, began:

A National League players’ strike, instigated by some of the St. Louis Cardinals against the presence in the league of Jackie Robinson, Negro first-baseman, has been averted temporarily and perhaps permanently quashed.

In recent days Ford Frick, president of the National League, and Sam Breadon, president of the St. Louis club, have been conferring with St. Louis players. Mr. Breadon [a native of New York City] flew east when he heard of the projected strike. The story that he came east to consult with Eddie Dyer, manager, about the lowly state of the St. Louis club, was fictitious. He came on a much more serious errand.

The strike, formulated by certain St. Louis players [outfielder Enos Slaughter, shortstop Marty Marion, team captain Terry Moore], was instigated by a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers who has since recanted [our new old friend, that Southern sipper of fine margaux, Fred “Dixie” Walker].

It is understood that the players involved—and the recalcitrants are not all Cardinals—will say that their objective is to gain the right to have a say on who shall be eligible to play in the major leagues. . . .

This story is factually and thoroughly substantiated. The St. Louis players involved will unquestionably deny it. We doubt, however, if Frick and Breadon will go that far. A return of no comment from either or both will serve.

When “Spike” Claassen, the deputy sports editor of the Associated Press in New York, reached Frick, he drew a somewhat vague reply. “Any player who tries to strike,” Frick said, “will leave me no alternative but to suspend him indefinitely. That’s all I can tell you.”

He was somewhat more assertive with a reporter for the
Sporting News
. Here Frick said, “The National League stands firmly behind Jackie Robinson.”

After that Frick retreated into silence. He came from a generation of baseball people who believed that when something nasty happened in the game, hush it up. Tell no one, least of all reporters. Why then did Frick speak with Stanley Woodward? Because the Coach had the goods on baseball and Frick was sensible enough to realize that a roused Woodward could write up a mighty storm.

Highly pleased, Woodward wrote a few days later, “It can now be honestly doubted that the boys from the Hookworm Belt will have the nerve to foist their quaint sectional folklore on the rest of the country.” But even as Woodward typed, a powerful disinformation campaign was breaking loose.

Protecting his investment, or so he believed, Sam Breadon told outright lies. Robinson trouble? Tut, tut, my man. Sheer nonsense. “I came to New York only because my team was losing ballgames. I spoke to team leaders, Terry Moore and Marty Marion, about stories of excessive drinking on my club.”

Bob Broeg, the preeminent baseball writer in St. Louis and usually a solid reporter, in this instance disgraced himself. There was no strike threat, he said, never was. Woodward? “The son of a bitch is guilty of barnyard journalism. He’s written chicken shit.” For the rest
of his life, Broeg preached this nonsense. Too many people listened.

In 1995, Stan Musial wrote, or lent his name to, a book foreword in which he described baseball’s color line as “reprehensible. I can thank Mr. Rickey for making it possible for me to have teammates like Curt Flood and Bill White. You know,” Musial went on, “Willie Mays says that when he looks at his wallet he thinks of Jackie Robinson. Well, he should think of Rickey, too!”

But where was Stan the Man, the greatest of Cardinal players, in the contentious spring of 1947? Conflicted by his sense of right and wrong and by his sense of loyalty to fellow Cardinals, Musial was paralyzed into silence. He did not confirm the strike story for the rest of his life. But he did arrange for me to meet with Terry Moore in 1991, and he told Moore that I was “fair-minded.” The result was nothing less than a final and conclusive confirmation.

Terry Bluford Moore, called by Joe DiMaggio “the greatest center fielder I ever saw,” and a longtime Cardinal team captain, was retired to a modest home in Collinsville, Illinois, across the big river from St. Louis. A painted cardinal adorned Moore’s mailbox. He was 71 years old and suffering from prostate cancer.

Moore welcomed me to his porch and fetched me a soft drink. “I gotta get radiation for this thing [the cancer],” he began. “They burn me every few weeks. If you live long enough, you’ll get prostate cancer, too.”

“I can hardly wait, Terry,” I said, and we both made sounds of strained laughter.

He unbent slowly. Yes, the Cardinals were talking about a strike. Bob Hyland, the doctor, said, “You fellers don’t have to like Negroes, but a strike is a terrible idea.” Sam Breadon read a threat from the league president that everyone would be suspended. Paychecks would stop. “None of us was making a lot of money,” Moore said. “A suspension without pay would mean some fellers would lose their homes or the family farm. That killed the strike movement right there.

“Look,” the old outfielder said with great earnestness, “Robinson
was a great player. The Dodgers beat us out of the pennant in ’47. They couldn’t have done that without him.” I was taking notes in a steno pad. “I’m being honest with you,” Moore said, “and now I want you to do something for me. I was raised in a small town called Vernon, Alabama. When you write about the strike thing please point out that I was only acting on what I had been taught to believe as a boy.”

We shook hands. I felt we had been men together. When I read that the cancer killed Terry Moore in 1995, I felt a twinge of sorrow. Like Dixie Walker, Terry Moore was a redneck who grew and changed.

The press at large did not do much with Woodward’s story. The
New York Times
belligerently ignored it. Rationalizing, the
Times
’s senior baseball writer, a genial sort named John Drebinger, said to me, “The strike didn’t actually happen, did it? At the
Times
we don’t cover things that don’t actually happen.”

But there was one luminous exception, the gifted and largely forgotten Jimmy Cannon, who wrote for the
New York Post
. A self-educated Irishman from Greenwich Village, Cannon drew on Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway—and of course himself—for a style that many, including Hemingway, found overwhelming. I am here reprinting the entire column Cannon wrote following the Woodward scoop. It dazzled me when I first read it 65 years ago. It dazzles me today.

LYNCH MOBS DON’T ALWAYS WEAR HOODS

by Jimmy Cannon

“America’s ace sportswriter”

New York Post, May 12, 1947

You don’t always lynch a man by hanging him from a tree. There is a great lynch mob among us and they go unhooded and work without rope. They have no leader but their own hatred of humanity. They are quietly degraded, who plot against the helpless with skill and a coward’s stealth and without fear of
reprisal. Their weapon is as painful as the lash, the hot tar, the noose or the shotgun. They string up a man with the whisper of a lie and they persecute him with ridicule. They require no burning cross as a signal of assembly and need no sheet to identify themselves to each other. They are the night riders who operate 24 hours a day.

They lynch a man with a calculated contempt which no court of law can consider a crime. Such a venomous conspiracy is the one now trying to run Jackie Robinson out of organized baseball. It does not go for all ballplayers and not even all the St. Louis Cards, some of whom are accused of trying to arrange a strike to protest against the presence of a Negro in the big league. But such a state exists and we should all be ashamed of it, not only those connected with the sport, but any one who considers this his country. It is an indication, I believe, that as a people we are a failure and not as good as the laws by which we live.

We are a people guaranteed more freedoms than any other on earth. Yet there are among us some who would refute those documents which pledge us the things that people fight for everywhere and rarely achieve. When such persecutions become the aim of a government it is the record of history that men rise in revolt against the leaders of their state. It was to defeat such persecutions that men fought in the undergrounds of Europe and in every righteous army since man first realized freedom is seldom achieved without struggle. We are a people who consider such privileges as ordinary because they were written down in the book for us to live by long ago. But among us are those who consider these liberties as their own and would take them from the defenseless whom they can afford to torment. They form a lynch mob that is out to avenge a right.

Only the stupidly bold among them collect on mountain sides by the light of torches. You find them wherever you go and their lodge is national although they pay no dues and carry no card. It is only natural that baseball, being our country’s sport,
should be played by some of them because they are in all trades and professions and they carry an invisible rope with them at all times. It is my belief that such a philosophy of hate does not dominate baseball. If it does, then they should burn up all the bats and balls and turn cattle to graze on the outfield grass. Baseball is not a way of life but an escape from it. It is to the bleachers and the grandstands that the multitudes flee to forget the world beyond the fences. Such a haven should not be corrupted by senseless hate, but once it is, baseball has no reason to exist.