Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  When he came up with the New York Yankees in 1931, Dixie Walker was pegged as the likely heir to Babe Ruth in right field. He hit for high average, reasonable power, and had a shotgun for an arm. After a fine rookie year, however, Walker was beset by injuries. Before long the Yankees gave up on him. After stops with the White Sox and Tigers, he wound up in Brooklyn in 1939. The Dodgers were one of baseball’s bottom feeders at the time, and the eternally optimistic fans of Brooklyn embraced Walker as a potential star. For once, their optimism was rewarded. Walker shone, and, more shockingly, the Bums started winning. They finished second in 1940, and won the pennant in 1941. Walker hit .300 or better in all but one of his full seasons in Brooklyn, and he handled the caroms off the tricky right-field wall as if he’d been born to play at Ebbets Field. “The People’s Cherce,” they called him, conferring upon the Alabaman an honorary Brooklyn accent. Off the field, he was never quite so at ease as he appeared on the field. He was aloof, a bit of a loner. He’d taken a Dale Carnegie course to boost his charisma, and at times he did manage to convey the charm of a southern gentleman, but he was still a little rough around the edges. Dale Carnegie could do only so much.

  Just as Durocher counted on Walker the ballplayer to drive in runs, Rickey counted on Walker the fan favorite and veteran player to ease Robinson’s assimilation. The boss knew Walker’s passion for the game. He believed the outfielder would in good time come to judge the ballplayer on his abilities instead of his color. But Rickey failed to factor in one thing: For Walker, and for others in baseball, the connection to the South and the southern way of life counted for more than his connection to the team. Only two Dodgers had reason to worry about losing their jobs to Robinson: the first basemen, Schultz and Ed Stevens. Yet it was Walker who was most upset about the possibility of playing beside a black man, and it was Walker who apparently decided he would try to do something about it. Some teammates said he circulated a petition among his fellow players. Others said he organized by word-of-mouth.

  Walker’s protest was joined by most of the team’s southern contingent: Bragan, the likable third-string catcher; Higbe, who claimed to have developed his strong arm as a child by throwing rocks at black children in South Carolina; Casey, who had begun his pitching career with the Atlanta Crackers of the Southern Association; and Carl Furillo, the young outfielder from near Reading, Pennsylvania, the only northerner in the bunch. Some reports have suggested that Stanky, too, expressed support for the rebellion. Others have placed Ed Head, the Louisiana-born pitcher, in the cabal. Cookie Lavagetto, a Californian, has been mentioned in some accounts, as well. Higbe always maintained that Reese joined ranks with the malcontents, although many of the men who knew Reese best said they doubted it.

  Years later, Reese said he saw the petition but declined to sign it. In at least one interview, however, he said he could relate to Walker’s feelings and respected him for speaking his mind. Reese hadn’t met Robinson at that point. He’d never shaken hands with a black person, and he was under the impression, fed by a common stereotype, that black ballplayers didn’t perform well under pressure, that they lacked what athletes called mental toughness. He assumed Robinson wouldn’t last. Still, he felt ambivalent about the protest.

  Though he was a marginal player, Bragan played an important part in the movement. “Dixie Walker was my roommate, and he was more established than I, and I guess he influenced me some,” Bragan recalled recently. When he was playing in the minor leagues, back in the late 1930s, some of Bragan’s teammates had stuck him with the nickname “Nig” for his olive-complexioned skin. Bragan liked the nickname well enough that when he ordered his first batch of Louisville Slugger bats he had “Robert ‘Nig’ Bragan” etched into the barrels. Only when he reached the big leagues, breaking in with Philadelphia, did someone point out to him that some might find the nickname offensive, at which point he dropped it.

  Facing the prospect of playing alongside Robinson, Bragan’s biggest worry was how he would explain the circumstance to his friends and family back in Alabama. It wasn’t that he had never been around black people before. His father was in the construction business, and the old man sometimes had twenty black men working for him. On occasion, one of the men would come around the house to borrow a dollar against his salary. A black man had cut the family’s lawn, and when he came inside to cool off, the family invited him to play their piano. A black woman had served as the family’s housekeeper, too. She was well liked by all. But the servants and workingmen had always used the back door and referred to the whites, even the children, as Mister and Miss. “We just grew up segregated,” he said. “People thought whites were supreme.”

  Robinson posed a threat to that notion. Though he was a .241 hitter and running out of gas at age twenty-nine, Bragan decided it was worth risking his career to make a stand.

  Kirby Higbe also stood firm. Higbe was the grandson of a Confederate soldier. As a boy, he was big and tough, with little interest in school. “Back then,” he recalled, “it seemed like a husky, willing kid could get along all right, the way people always had, without much more than a grade-school education.” When he did go to school, he would walk around or through the Bottoms. “The Bottoms was a colored neighborhood. . . .” he said. “We knew if we went across the Bottoms we would have to fight our way through with rocks. The colored kids were waiting for us with rocks. It was their Bottoms. So we would always fill our pockets with rocks when we left home because there wasn’t time to look for rocks when we got there. When we hit the Bottoms, the rocking started. We would have to throw rocks from the time we entered until the time we got to the top of that steep clay bank.”

  Higbe was brash and difficult to control, but he was also the team’s best pitcher in 1946, with seventeen wins against eight losses and an earned run average of 3.03. Once, during a radio interview in New York City, he was asked how he had developed such a strong throwing arm. He didn’t hesitate: “Throwing rocks at Negroes,” he said, matter-of-factly. The interviewer cut off his microphone. But Higbe protested, saying he was serious, and not seeing why the interviewer was so upset. It was a game, he said, and besides, “they threw as many rocks as we did.” Higbe said many years later that he believed southerners were unfairly characterized as racists, and he insisted he had never mistreated a black person. But just the same, in 1947 he was not inclined to play with one.

  The Dodgers hopped around Central America for exhibition games throughout spring training, and they were in Panama when Leo Durocher heard about the players’ uprising. He roused the team from bed one night for a meeting in the team’s dining room. The players came in various states of undress. Durocher wore a yellow bathrobe atop his pajamas. No one writing of the meeting bothered to mention the color of the pajamas, but even if they had been pink with purple bunnies Durocher’s authority would have been undiminished and unquestioned. The manager had a cinderblock jaw and a piercing stare, which he likely used to full effect in this instance. “I don’t care if a guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra,” he told the team, according to one eyewitness account. “I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays.” Robinson was going to put money in all their pockets by helping to get the team to the World Series, Durocher said, and anyone who didn’t like it would be traded or released as soon as the details could be arranged. As for the petition, he concluded: “Wipe your ass with it!”

  There were no questions.

  • • •

  The next day, Rickey arrived in Panama. No doubt he recalled the advice of Dan Dodson, the sociologist he had consulted in advance of this undertaking. Dodson preached that white people confronting integration should never be asked if they want to make change. They should be told that change is coming and that nothing they say or do will stop it. Dodson told Rickey to describe the experiment in terms having nothing to do with race. The goal should be winning a pennant. The professor also urged Rickey to be firm, never to back down, but to step aside at some point
and let the players work out matters on their own. That’s precisely what he did.

  Rickey summoned the rebels to his hotel room, one at a time, asking each if he was prepared to play on an integrated team. He told them that Robinson was a great player who would help the team win. He also said Robinson was quiet, and that they wouldn’t have to associate with him off the field. Furillo gave in at once and apologized, saying he’d made a mistake. Bragan waffled, saying he’d play, although not happily. Higbe continued to object. Walker, stricken with “an acute attack of indigestion,” according to one reporter, had already left Panama and returned to the hotel in Cuba to get some rest. Another account said he had gone home to handle a family emergency. He left behind a note for his boss, dated March 26. It read:

  Dear Mr. Rickey

  Recently the thought has occured (cq) to me that a change of Ball clubs would benefit both the Brooklyn Baseball club and myself. Therefore I would like to be traded as soon as a deal can be arranged.

  My association with you, the people of Brooklyn, the press and Radio has been very pleasant and one I can truthfully say I am sorry has to end. For reasons I don’t care to go into I feel my decision is best for all concerned.

  Very Sincerely yours,

  Dixie Walker

  Years later, Walker said the letter had been misinterpreted. He said the request for a trade was a response to Rickey’s allegation that he was responsible for the petition drive. Walker insisted he had never seen a petition, and that he had never tried to organize his teammates. If Rickey didn’t believe him, he said, then a trade would be the best thing for everyone. He admitted, however, even many years later, that he was unhappy about the possibility that Robinson might join the team. He also admitted talking to other players about his unhappiness. Most of all, he said, he worried about the reaction he would get back home if he consented to play with a black man. “I didn’t know if they would spit on me or not,” he said. “And it was no secret I was worried about my business. I had a hardware and sporting goods store back home.” He continued: “I grew up in the South, and in those days you grew up in a different manner. . . . We thought that blacks didn’t have ice water in their veins and so couldn’t take the pressure of playing big league baseball.”

  The Dodger right fielder mentioned the hardware store often in explaining his opposition to Robinson. Dixie Walker Hardware was in a white building on the main street in Hueytown, Alabama, next to the Hueytown Café, where the sign out front advertised hamburgers, malts, and “HO-MADE PIES.” Kids used to come into the hardware store to buy pearl-handled Lone Ranger cap guns and marvel at the stuffed bobcat atop the shelf behind the register, while Walker and some of his friends liked to sit around the potbelly stove in back, telling tales and drinking bottled Cokes from the five-cent Coke machine. In 1944, when Gunnar Myrdal published his groundbreaking book on segregation, An American Dilemma, he had surveyed white southerners, asking them to rank the most important forms of segregation. The results, Myrdal noted, were remarkable for their consistency. The southerners worried most about black and white people getting married and having sex. They feared that any breakdown in the social codes of segregation—even a small one—would lead to the amalgamation of the races. Sharing a lunch counter, a bus seat, or a water fountain was the first step down a slippery slope, and the slope led to sex between blacks and whites and the mixing of the races. Though the southerners’ fears were misplaced, they were genuine. And though Branch Rickey, as a northerner, could not relate, Walker had good reason to worry what the men seated around the potbelly stove would say about him when he wasn’t there.

  • • •

  Rickey had made up his mind on two counts: First, though he had not yet told anyone—not even Robinson—the Dodgers would open the season with a black man at first base. Second, the Dodgers would have to trade Dixie Walker.

  Quickly, Rickey tried to work out a deal. Walker would go to the Pittsburgh Pirates for two part-time players and cash. Yet something about the transaction gnawed at the Brooklyn boss. Something made him hesitate. He could see that Walker and Robinson might clash spectacularly, that Walker’s bitterness might spread like typhoid through the clubhouse, destroying the great experiment that he had nurtured so carefully. But he also sensed that Walker was under great stress. He was suffering. He was frightened more than angry. Finally, Rickey considered yet another piece of the puzzle: How would the Dodgers win without Walker’s bat? As usual, Rickey wanted everything. He wanted his integration plan to succeed and he wanted the pennant. He wanted to punish Walker and help him find salvation. So, when he asked the Pirates to include the young slugger Ralph Kiner in the deal and the Pirates refused, Rickey decided to stand pat. The owner and part-time operator of Hueytown’s hardware store remained a Dodger, at least for the time being.

  • • •

  When the Dodgers left Havana and returned to Brooklyn, Robinson went, too, but he made the trip as a member of the Montreal Royals. The Dodgers and Royals would play a series of exhibition contests at Ebbets Field before each team began its regular-season games. Robinson, still unsure whether he would spend the season in the majors or minors, viewed the exhibition games as one last chance to prove he belonged with the Dodgers. Though his stomach remained queasy, there was never any doubt in his mind he would play.

  On April 9, the Dodgers received a surprise from the commissioner’s office. The commissioner, Happy Chandler, was the former governor of Kentucky and a former U.S. senator. Chandler strongly backed Rickey’s plan for integration, and he seemed to be in full support of Robinson’s ascension to the major leagues. It was Leo Durocher with whom he had a problem. Religious leaders had been complaining for months about Durocher’s recent marriage to the newly divorced actress Laraine Day. The Catholic Youth Organization was vowing a boycott of baseball if something wasn’t done to punish the manager for his “moral looseness.” Chandler said years later that Durocher was out of control and Rickey seemed incapable of reining him in. The only thing to do, he thought, was to put him out of action. In March, when the Yankee general manager Larry MacPhail sat beside a couple of well-known gamblers at an exhibition game, Durocher complained publicly, saying in effect that if he’d been seen sitting with a couple of gamblers, he would have caught hell for it. Durocher’s comments gave Chandler the excuse he was looking for. Citing an accumulation of unpleasant incidents, the commissioner suspended Durocher for one year.

  The news hit Branch Rickey like a fastball to the forehead. The start of the season was less than a week away. Now the Dodgers had a right fielder threatening not to play with the team’s black first baseman, and the manager who had been expected to keep the peace was gone. Rickey decided there was nothing to do but carry on.

  The next morning, he had his secretary call Robinson, telling him to come to Brooklyn for a meeting. It was on that morning, April 10, that Robinson got the news he’d been waiting for. But, still, Rickey asked him to play one more game with the Montreal Royals, one more game as a minor-leaguer, before telling anyone of his promotion.

  In the sixth inning of that game, with Robinson at bat, the Dodgers handed out a press release to reporters. “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals,” it read. “He will report immediately.”

  At that very moment, Robinson bunted into a double play.

  FOUR

  OPENING DAY

  Robinson woke early for Opening Day. By now, his wife and five-month-old son, Jack Jr., had joined him at the McAlpin Hotel in Manhattan. The room was a mess, with diapers drying on the shower rod, baby bottles sitting on the bathroom sink, and a small, electric stove perched precariously atop one of their trunks on the floor. Silverware and dishes were often shoved under the bed, out of sight, in case a newspaper reporter dropped by. Though Branch Rickey had tried to think of everything, it would appear he hadn’t given much consideration to the Robinsons’ living arrangements, which were growing more difficult b
y the day.

  Robinson dressed and got ready to leave.

  “Just in case you have trouble picking me out,” he told Rachel on his way out the door, “I’ll be wearing number forty-two.”

  She looked up at her husband, her Jack, who wore the pride and determination of his mother on his face in his strong chin and his bright smile. He was Hollywood handsome, with a high forehead, stern eyes set far apart, a wide nose, and full lips. He might flash a boyish smile from time to time, but for the most part his dark face cast an image of manly strength. If he was nervous before his big first day, he didn’t betray it. He joked like a man born to privilege, a man whose lifetime of experience had taught him that one way or another everything was going to work out to his advantage.

  He took the subway to work, tabloid newspaper in hand, dressed in a suit and tie and a warm, camelhair overcoat. He was twenty-eight, big and strong and ready. He understood the importance of the day. He was about to become, as the New York Post put it, “the first colored boy ever to don major league flannels.” The black-owned Boston Chronicle gave the story a more rhapsodic spin with its top-of-page-one headline: “Triumph of Whole Race Seen in Jackie’s Debut in Major-League Ball.”

  Truly great athletes tend to be those blessed not only with physical skills but also with a gift for psychological segregation—keeping complicated thoughts apart from the simple ones needed to perform the task at hand. Whether he is smart as a whip or dumb as an ox, getting married later that evening or in the process of losing his wife to another man, whether he is playing before a crowd of fifty thousand or fifty, the great athlete knows how to draw lines, keeping emotion at a distance. Some ballplayers focus so tightly on the ball hurtling toward them that they wouldn’t notice if the grass were on fire beneath their feet. Others concentrate on nothing more than the wad of gum crackling in their mouths. Others still become convinced they can read a pitcher’s mind and foresee the next pitch he will throw. Robinson was different. He tuned out nothing—not the catcalls from the grandstand, not the cold shoulders turned by teammates, not the angry glares from the opposing dugout, not the expectations of the millions of black fans across the country who were counting on him to prove they belonged. He sucked it all in the way competitive swimmers suck in air. He turned it into energy.