Rickey & Robinson (35 page)

Baseball is supported by the people and I have heard them demand justice for Robinson. If their applause is any indication, they ask that Robinson be accepted as an athlete and is entitled to the right to be judged by the scorer’s ledger and not by the prejudices of indecent men. It is my belief that Robinson is a big leaguer of ordinary ability. If he is not, then he should be sent down to the minors because it is the opinion of all of us who consider baseball a sport that skill and honesty are the only qualifications a man should have. It is doubtful if Robinson has yet shown his true worth. He came up as a shortstop, was transformed into a second baseman at Montreal and now is playing first. It is a tribute to his solidness as a man that he hasn’t fallen apart as a ballplayer. Less heart has burned better ballplayers out of the big leagues. About him rages the silent uproar of a perpetual commotion. He is the most discussed ballplayer of his time and his judges do not evaluate him for his actions on the field alone. But he has concealed the turmoil within him and when you talk to him there is no indication he regards himself as a special man who faces problems no other big leaguer ever faced before. The times I have spoken to him he has praised all those with whom he plays.

What goes on in the privacy of the hotel rooms where the Dodgers gather I don’t know. I have listened to Eddie Stanky praise Robinson for his alertness. Jackie told me himself that Hughie Casey had helped him when he needed practice and advice on making the difficult plays a first baseman must face.

But in the clubhouse Robinson is a stranger. The Dodgers are polite and courteous with him but it is obvious he is isolated by those with whom he plays. I have never heard remarks made against him or detected any rudeness where he was concerned. But the silence is loud and Robinson never is part of the jovial and aimless banter of the locker room. He is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.

We have been involved in a war to guarantee all people the right to a life without fear. The people of the earth are still assailed by the same doubts and terrors. The old men once more talk of violence and only the dead are sure of peace. In such a world it seems a small thing that a man be able to play a game unmolested. In our time such a plea should be unnecessary. But when it happens we must again remember that all this country’s enemies are not beyond the frontiers of our homeland.

Everything in this long, eventful history seemed to be coming down to just a few days in May. The Dodgers headed west to Cincinnati, where they would play three games at Crosley Field against a mediocre Reds ball club. Mediocre but loud.

The paths of glory lay beckoning ahead.

GRAND LARCENY

JACKIE ROBINSON’S CANDLE BURNED BRIEFLY. BLINDED and partially crippled by diabetes, he died in October 1972, at the age of 53. Branch Rickey lived to be 30 years older. Rickey died in 1965 after suffering a stroke, while orating in Columbia, Missouri. I think it is fair to say that the year of major-league integration, 1947, was the climax of the lives of these two extraordinary Americans.

Walter O’Malley, Rickey’s “most devious man,” plotted, schemed and insinuated to drive Rickey out of Brooklyn. Rickey had continued to cut himself in on the receipts from player sales, and to make sure that there were plenty of players to be sold he maintained a Dodger farm system including as many as 25 minor-league teams. Most lost money. Rickey started a professional football team, also called the Brooklyn Dodgers, and despite great work by a tailback named Glenn Dobbs, this venture lost money as well. O’Malley told the other trustees that they, and the Dodger organization, would never turn a profit as long as Rickey remained in charge. The O’Malley gang voted out Rickey after the 1950 season, although the Dodgers had finished a close second to the Phillies.

Rickey owned 25 percent of the Dodger stock, which he was now obliged to sell to O’Malley, provided that O’Malley matched the highest outside offer Rickey could find. O’Malley told me that he thought Rickey’s stock was worth about $250,000. But Rickey produced a bid from William Zeckendorf, an early version of Donald Trump, for nothing less than a cool million bucks. Furious, O’Malley insisted that the offer was fraudulent. But without proof, he had to pay Rickey $1,000,050 (which he borrowed from the Brooklyn Trust Company). After that O’Malley, as the new Dodger president, issued a directive: Anyone mentioning the name of Branch Rickey in the Dodger offices at 215 Montague Street was to be fined $1. “Walter wanted to make Rickey a non-person,” says Frank Graham Jr., the Dodgers’ publicity director at the time. “Shades of Josef Stalin. But since Rickey had signed Duke Snider, Carl Erskine, Jackie Robinson and the rest, you could never make him a non-person in Brooklyn.”

Soon afterward John Galbreath, a multimillionaire real estate developer who was principal owner of the Pirates, brought Rickey to Pittsburgh as de facto general manager. The great performer Bing Crosby, a minority Pirate shareholder, came visiting and spent a few hours in a private conversation with Rickey. “Amazing ideas. Amazing vocabulary,” Crosby told me later. “I thought I’d seen and heard just about everything. But I’ve never met anyone even close to Rickey in Hollywood.”

Unfortunately for Rickey, his Pittsburgh team was slow to develop. He was forced to resign in 1959. But in 1960 the Pirates, with such Rickey stars as Roberto Clemente and Dick Groat, won the World Series from the New York Yankees.

With no National League teams in the New York area, talk began to rise about starting a third major circuit, the Continental League. Rickey now emerged as founding president. He sought backers for franchises from New York to Denver, but the start-up costs were monumental. (Think constructing, all at once, six or eight new big-league ballparks.)

Harold Rosenthal of the
Herald Tribune
asked at a press conference,
“Don’t you think the odds are strong against the Continental League actually getting into operation?”

“Harold,” Rickey said. “My father died at the age of 86, planting fruit trees in unpromising soil.”

Frank Chance, first baseman and manager for the Chicago Cubs early in the 20th century, was widely known as “the peerless leader.” Considering Rickey and his latest venture, John Lardner, the gifted columnist, called him “the peerless leader of the teamless league.”

When the major leagues expanded early in the 1960s, the Continental League ceased to exist. It played a role in the baseball expansion and is a sort of forgotten godfather to the New York Mets. But when the billionaire Whitney family created the Mets, they turned not to Rickey but to old Yankee hands to run the business. With George Weiss supervising the front office and Casey Stengel managing the team, the 1962 Mets lost 120 of the 161 games they played.

August Busch of Budweiser, the brewmeister who owned the Cardinals, hired Rickey as a consultant in 1963. Now in his 80s, Rickey could not get along with general manager Vaughan “Bing” Devine. Busch fired Rickey two years later, on December 9, 1965.

The late years of Wesley Branch Rickey, a family member has told me, were weighted by considerations of the Holocaust. Baseball’s Great Emancipator shared the common revulsion for Adolf Hitler, but his concern was more subtle than simple horror. He knew Germany as a nation of devout Lutherans and Roman Catholics. How, Rickey wondered, could the Holocaust have been spawned in a country that professed to follow the teachings, real or imagined, of Jesus Christ?

Branch Rickey’s final question abides.

The
New York Times
continued its inaccurate and negative reporting on Jackie Robinson into the 21st century. On April 14, 2007, it published a so-called op-ed article asserting that Pee Wee Reese’s memorable embrace of Jackie Robinson was “a myth.”

That embrace took place at Crosley Field in Cincinnati on the Dodgers’ first visit there in 1947. Fans, many from across the Ohio River in segregated Kentucky, began jeering Robinson, who was playing first base during infield practice. A number of Cincinnati ballplayers followed suit. Robinson set his teeth and made no response. At length Pee Wee Reese raised a hand, stopping the drill. Then he walked over from shortstop and put an arm about Robinson’s broad shoulders. He said nothing, but simply stared the racists into silence. “After that happened,” Robinson told me, “I never felt alone on a ball field again.”

The
Times
writer was an obscure journalist named Stuart Miller, who had published a book called
The 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports
. The
Times
headlined the story “Breaking the Truth Barrier.” As I say, the Miller article ran on April 14; a week later the
Times
published two corrections. Miller had misplaced Eddie Stanky’s birthplace by 1,200 miles and he had misspelled the name of the Boston Braves star first baseman, Earl Torgeson. Miller then argued that Reese’s embrace, if it happened at all, occurred in Boston. But Robinson himself told the sportscaster Jack Buck the place was Cincinnati. Reese, as we’ve seen, expansively confirmed that to me.

At the
Herald Tribune
long ago I was taught “If you didn’t write something yourself, then don’t deny it.” But today the
New York Times
is archived and its reportage can be found in most libraries. To let Miller’s sloppy little op-ed story become part of history is unacceptable.

Jackie Robinson played 10 seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and during that time the team won the National League pennant six times. In its entire pre-Robinson history, stretching back to the 19th century, the Brooklyn team previously had finished first on only three occasions: 1916, 1920 and 1941.

Robinson’s best single season came in 1949, when he was 30. He led the league in hitting at .349, and stolen bases with 37, including 5 steals of home. Following his rookie season he played second base into the mid-1950s, then moved to third and put in some time as an outfielder. After the Dodgers had clinched the pennant in 1952, I covered a game where Robinson played every position but pitcher. It was a publicity stunt, of course, but interesting. He made no errors anywhere.

One of Robinson’s fortes was baserunning (as opposed simply to base stealing). He went from first to third on an infield out at least 10 times. He always took a daring lead off first. “If the pitcher throws and I don’t have to dive back,” he told me, “then I haven’t taken a big enough lead.” I saw him pivot on hundreds of double plays, but I never saw a baserunner crash into him. Never. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “I’m fast. I get to second before the runner. Then I feint. He slides toward my feint. I move the other way and throw on to first.” He was a brilliant student of the art of playing baseball.

After the 1956 season, when age and diabetes were slowing Robinson, O’Malley told Buzzie Bavasi, “Get rid of him.” Among other things, this may have been a final jab at Robinson’s sponsor and O’Malley’s adversary, Branch Rickey.

That December Bavasi dealt Robinson’s contract to the New York Giants for $50,000 and rights to a journeyman left-handed pitcher named Dick Littlefield. O’Malley then dictated a remarkably cynical letter.

Dear Jackie and Rachel:

I do know how you and your youngsters must have felt
.

The roads of life have a habit of re-crossing. There could well

be a future intersection. Until then, my best to you both
.

With a decade of memories
.

Au revoir,

Walter O’Malley

Instead of reporting to the Polo Grounds, Robinson quit. He then sold the announcement of his retirement to
Look
magazine for $50,000. In a rare burst of public anger Red Smith attacked Robinson “for peddling his retirement announcement.” Jackie responded without raising his voice. “Red Smith doesn’t have to send my kids through college. I do.”

That is as much of the story as has been reported up to now. But on one of my last meetings with Buzzie Bavasi, in his mansion overlooking the deep and dark blue ocean, Bavasi added significant detail. He and O’Malley joined the Dodgers in Milwaukee during a western trip in 1956. The two executives shared a suite at the Hotel Schroeder.

“We were starting downstairs for breakfast,” Bavasi said, “when Robinson came out of a room down the hall with a nice-looking white woman on his arm. It was pretty obvious to us that they had spent the night.”

O’Malley elbowed Bavasi and the two retreated into their suite. O’Malley then said the four fateful words. “
Get rid of him
.”

I was not on the scene but Bavasi’s story rings true. Jackie always had a keen eye for the ladies. “You know,” he told me once, “more white women want to take me to bed than I’ve got time for.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Eat your heart out,” said Jackie Robinson.

After baseball Robinson worked for a chain of fast-food restaurants, a bank, an insurance company and campaigned with Nelson Rockefeller. His particular focus was housing. “Everybody talks about integrated schools,” he said, “but regardless of the schools, if the housing is bad, children are going to hang out on the streets. And find trouble.”

In his last years diabetes left him virtually blind. But he kept going. He was preparing to fly to Washington to lobby for a housing
bill on October 24, 1972. Early that morning, in his imposing home on Cascade Road in North Stamford, Connecticut, a heart attack ended his life.

Feeling that the end was coming, Jackie Robinson composed his own epitaph. The words are carved on his stone in Cypress Hills Cemetery, an historic resting place located in Brooklyn. “A life is important only in the impact it has on other lives.” Perhaps one final word is appropriate here.

Amen
.