The Boys of Summer (44 page)

Breaking, Robinson reached full speed in three strides. The pigeon-toed walk yielded to a run of graceful power. He could steal home, or advance two bases on someone else’s bunt, and at the time of decision, when he slid, the big dark body became a bird in flight. Then, safe, he rose slowly, often limping, and made his pigeon-toed way to the dugout.

Once Russ Meyer, a short-tempered righthander, pitched a fine game against the Dodgers. The score going into the eighth inning was 2 to 2, and it was an achievement to check the Brooklyn hitters in Ebbets Field. Then, somehow, Robinson reached third base. He took a long lead, threatening to steal home, and the Phillies, using a set play, caught him fifteen feet off base. A rundown developed. This is the major league version of a game children call getting into a pickle. The runner is surrounded by fielders who throw the ball back and forth, gradually closing the gap. Since a ball travels four times faster than a man’s best running speed, it is only a question of time before the gap closes and the runner is tagged. Except for Robinson. The rundown was his greatest play. Robinson could start so fast and stop so short that he could elude anyone in baseball, and he could feint a start and feint a stop as well.

All the Phillies rushed to the third-base line, a shortstop named Granny Hamner and a second baseman called Mike Goliat and the first baseman, Eddie Waitkus. The third baseman, Puddin’ Head Jones, and the catcher, Andy Seminick, were already there. Meyer himself joined. Among the gray uniforms Robinson in white lunged, and sprinted and leaped and stopped. The Phils threw the ball back and forth, but Robinson anticipated their throws, and after forty seconds, and six throws, the gap had not closed. Then, a throw toward third went wild and Robinson made his final victorious run at home plate. Meyer dropped to his knees and threw both arms around
Robinson’s stout legs. Robinson bounced a hip against Meyer’s head and came home running backward, saying “What the hell are you trying to do?”

“Under the stands, Robinson,” Meyer said.

“Right now,” Robinson roared.

Police beat them to the proposed ring. Robinson not only won games; he won and infuriated the losers.

In Ebbets Field one spring day in 1955 Sal Maglie was humiliating the Brooklyn hitters. Not Cox or Robinson, but most of the others were clearly alarmed by Maglie’s highest skill. He threw at hitters, as he said, “whenever they didn’t expect it. That way I had them looking to duck all the time.” The fast pitch at the chin or temple is frightening but not truly dangerous as long as the batter sees the ball. He has only to move his head a few inches to safety.

On this particular afternoon, Maglie threw a fast pitch behind Robinson’s shoulders, and that
is
truly dangerous, a killer pitch. As a batter strides, and one strides automatically, he loses height. A normal defensive reflex is to fall backward. When a pitch is shoulder-high behind a man, he ducks directly into the baseball.

I can see Maglie, saturnine in the brightness of May, winding up and throwing. Robinson started to duck and then, with those extraordinary reflexes, hunched his shoulders and froze. The ball sailed wild behind him. He must have felt the wind. He held the hunched posture and gazed at Maglie, who began fidgeting on the mound.

A few innings later, as Maglie continued to overwhelm the Brooklyn hitters, Pee Wee Reese said, “Jack, you got to do something.”

“Yeah,” Robinson said.

The bat boy overheard the whispered conversation, and just before Jack stepped in to hit, he said in a voice of anxiety,
“Don’t you do it. Let one of the others do it. You do enough.”

Robinson took his stance, bat high. He felt a certain relief. Let somebody else do it, for a change.

“Come on, Jack.” Reese’s voice carried from the dugout. “We’re counting on you.”

Robinson took a deep breath. Somebody else? What somebody else? Hodges? Snider? Damn, there
wasn’t
anybody else.

The bunt carried accurately toward first baseman Whitey Lockman, who scooped the ball and looked to throw. That is the play. Bunt and make the pitcher cover first. Then run him down. But Maglie lingered in the safety of the mound. He would not move, and a second baseman named Davey Williams took his place. Lockman’s throw reached Williams at first base. Then Robinson struck. A knee crashed into Williams’ lower spine and Williams spun into the air, twisting grotesquely, and when he fell he lay in an awkward sprawl, as people do when they are seriously injured.

He was carried from the field. Two innings after that, Alvin Dark, the Giant captain, lined a two-base hit to left field. Dark did not stop at second. Instead, he continued full speed toward third base and Jackie Robinson. The throw had him beaten. Robinson put the ball into his bare right hand and decided to tag Dark between the eyes.

As Dark began to slide, Robinson faked to his right. Dark followed his fake. Robinson stepped aside and slammed the ball at Dark’s brow. To his amazement, it bounced free. He had not gotten a secure grip. Dark, avenging Davey Williams, substituting for Sal Maglie, was safe at third.

Both men dusted their uniforms. Lockman was batting. Staring toward home, Robinson said through rigid lips, “This isn’t the end. There’ll be another day.” But when the game was over, Dark asked a reporter to carry a message into the Brooklyn clubhouse. “Tell him we’re even,” the Giant captain said. “Tell him I don’t want another day.”

The next afternoon I stood in the Giant clubhouse, watching a trainer rub Dark’s shoulders. Alvin had straight black hair and deep-set eyes that seemed to squint, the kind of face, Leonard Koppett said, that belonged on a Confederate cavalry captain.

“What do ya thinka Robinson?” Dark said softly, as the trainer bent over him.

“A lot. I think a lot of Robinson.”

“I don’t know how you can say that,” Dark said. “Do you know what he is?” He sought a metaphor to stir me. “Don’t you understand?” Dark cried. “He’s a
Hitler.”
(“And Maglie is Mussolini,” I thought.) “Anybody can do something like that to Davey is a Hitler,” Dark said.

He paused in thought. “Ah know ahm right,” Dark said. “A little higher, Doc.” Watching the deep-set angry eyes, I could not forget that when combat reached close quarters, it was the Southerner not the black who had backed off.

After baseball, the executive saddle was something Robinson bore to earn a living. He moved from Chock Full O’Nuts to an insurance company to a food franchising business. Politics was his passion. He supported Nixon for President in 1960, when Kennedy won, and he endorsed Rockefeller for the Republican candidacy in 1964, when Barry Goldwater stormed the San Francisco convention. We met from time to time and chatted.

“I wanted to be fair about things,” he said, “so I went to see both Kennedy and Nixon. Now, Nixon seemed to understand a little bit of what had to be done. John Kennedy said, ‘Mr. Robinson, I don’t know much about the problems of colored people since I come from New England.’ I figured, the hell with that. Any man in Congress for fifteen years ought to make it his business to know colored people.”

“Credibility is the question.”

“Well, I trust Nixon on this point.”

“All right,” I said. “Even if your analysis is right as far as it goes, civil rights isn’t the only question. There are a dozen other issues.”

“Sure,” Robinson said, “and there are pressure groups working on all of them. I’m a pressure group for civil rights.”

Goldwater’s capture of the candidacy shook him. He recognized the nature of the campaign, Goldwater playing to conservative whites, Lyndon Johnson courting liberals and blacks, and said that we could well have a white man’s party and a black man’s party in America. “It would make everything I worked for meaningless,” he said, “if baseball is integrated but the political parties are segregated.” In Nelson Rockefeller he saw a great dark hope. He might have been appointed to the cabinet if Rockefeller had been elected President, but Robinson’s political career, unlike his baseball life, trails off into disappointments and conditional sentences.

He came walking pigeon-toed through the doors of the Sea Host, a food franchising company, at 12:30, suddenly and astonishingly handsome. Under a broad brow, the fine features were set in a well-proportioned face. What was most remarkable was the skin. It shone, unsullied ebony. I should expect that Shaka, the chieftain who built the Zulu warrior nation, had that coloring, imperial black. Robinson’s hair had gone pure white, and the contrast of skin and hair make a dramatic balance.

“You look better than when you played,” I said.

“Lost weight,” Robinson said. We walked to Morgen’s East, a restaurant off Madison Avenue, which Robinson finds convenient. A few heads turned when we entered, but no one bothered him. “I lost weight on doctor’s orders,” he said. “I have diabetes, high blood pressure, and I’ve had a heart attack.” He grinned. “That’s because I never drink and I don’t smoke.”

“Bad heart attack?”

“Bad enough. I was at a dinner. It started out like indigestion,
only worse. I had three weeks on my back.” He looked at the menu and ordered a salad and said, “Low cholesterol.”

“I don’t know how to ask you about your boy.”

“You just did.”

“And the arrest.”

“Two arrests, one in March and one in August. The second time the court ruled that he was a narcotics-dependent person. I can talk about Jackie. Rachel and I have been able to piece things together. He’s a bright boy and a good athlete. If he’d worked, I think he could have become a major leaguer.”

“Would you have liked that?”

“Yes,” Robinson said, “I would have liked that. But he’s an independent kid, and look where he was. You know Rachel has a master’s degree. She teaches at Yale. So there was the culture stuff. He felt blocked there. And he was Jackie Robinson Junior so he felt that he was blocked in sports. He wanted to be something; he wanted to be great at
something.
So he decided, when he was pretty young, that he was going to be a great crook. There are some Mafia people around Stamford. It began with smoking pot. And after a while, it turned out, he knew about Mafia contracts, about murdering people. Then he went off to the war. He was wounded. He learned how to kill. When he came back, he couldn’t handle anything himself. Heroin. When he was picked up, with some other kids who possessed marijuana, he started fighting the police.

“It could have been jail, but the sentence was suspended with the understanding that he’d go into treatment to cure himself of addiction. There’s a place called Daytop, in Seymour, Connecticut, where rehabilitation is done by former addicts. That’s where he decided to go.

“When he went in, a psychiatrist talked to Rachel and me for a long time. They wanted to explain what was going to happen so we could deal with it. The psychiatrist said that in the cure Jackie would have to confront himself and that one of the patterns
is that the addict runs home to his parents. It seems to happen.

“Now, he told us, the important thing was that when Jack came home, we shouldn’t let him in. He had to confront himself and this thing on his own. If we let him in, then all the Day top work could be undone. Jackie might see it as something he could quit when the going got tough. So there we are, Rachel and me, and there is the psychiatrist saying when your own son comes to the door begging for help, you must not under any circumstances let him in.

“And I nodded and I didn’t look at Rachel, because I knew if I looked at her and she looked at me, she’d start to cry.”

“How could your son have been involved with dope and crime without you or Rachel suspecting?”

“I told you that he wanted to be a great criminal. I didn’t tell you what he really was.”

“What was he?”

“A great liar,” Robinson said.

We sat silent. Robinson continued to eat slowly. “You see any of the old writers?” I said. “Dick Young?”

“I respected Dick as a good writer. We disagreed, but I give him that. A lot of writers were as uninformed as fans. What did they know how it was? What did they know how it felt to win, to lose? And they expected me to be grateful for what they wrote. Once a writer came up and said I better start saying thank you if I wanted to be Most Valuable Player. I said if I have to thank
you
to win MVP, I don’t want the fucking thing. And I didn’t thank him, and I won it.

“I was a great thing for those guys. They could sell magazine stories about me. That was the difference between hamburger and steak.” He picked at his salad.

“How do you do with the young militants?”

“A while ago in Harlem these kids started threatening me. The Governor asked me to speak for the new state office thing and it got rough.”

Nelson Rockefeller had sponsored a high-rise state building at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, the core of Harlem. The plan would encourage integration, Rockefeller said. But ever baronial, he neglected to bring local black leaders to planning conferences. The initial leveling was messy. People had to be dispossessed. To certain blacks, the whole scheme reeked of colonialism. One night, thirty militants advanced with pup tents and occupied the site. Without neighborhood support for his benign intention, Rockefeller turned to Robinson.

“When I went there to talk,” Robinson said, “the kids were angry. A detective with me said I better watch it, but I’ve been in that scene before, with angry kids. They see me in a suit and tie and they look at my white hair and they’re too young to remember what I did, or they don’t care. I began to talk and some shouted ‘Oreo.’ You know. The cookie that’s black outside and white underneath.

“When I get with militant kids, I can handle myself. I curse.” Robinson smiled to himself. “All of a sudden this gray-haired man in a suit and tie is calling them mothers. Well, you know.”

He repeated some of the speech he had made. “ ‘Maybe this isn’t the best thing in the world, but it’s something. It’s a chance. And if you block it, then that’s it. You’ve lost, not Governor Rockefeller. Nobody’s gonna try and build here again. And it’ll be over. Nobody’11 invest and nobody’11 want to come here and nothing will happen except the neighborhood’ll get worse. You bastards are wrong to turn against this thing.’