Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Durocher, back in charge of the team after his suspension, was livid. “What in the world happened to you?” he screamed, a quotation no doubt scrubbed of foul language in Robinson’s account. “You look like an old woman. . . . Why, you can’t even bend over!” He was right. Robinson took off much of the weight during training camp, but not all of it, and as the season began, sportswriters said he looked like he was running with a goldfish bowl in his arms. The preseason brought one more bit of unpleasantness: When it came time to settle Robinson’s contract for the season, Rickey proved just how firmly he believed in equal rights by treating Robinson as harshly as the rest of the Dodgers. For all his great play and his success as a box-office attraction, baseball’s black pioneer was still just a second-year man in Rickey’s mind, and second-year men did not get big money. Rickey offered $12,500 and refused to go higher. Robinson was angry. Rachel was angrier. They had both been reading the newspapers and knew that Pete Reiser was getting $20,000, Reese about $17,000, and Branca $14,000. Joe DiMaggio, the only player in Robinson’s league in terms of celebrity, would make $70,000 for the season. Yet Robinson, beholden and grateful to Rickey, accepted the offer and told reporters he was satisfied.

  Rickey could have paid more, especially given that he was in the process of dumping two of his highest-priced players. He traded Stanky to the Boston Braves, thereby permitting Robinson to move back to second base, his more natural position. And, finally, after several aborted attempts, he sent Dixie Walker to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Preacher Roe, Billy Cox, and Gene Mauch.

  Walker had spent a quiet winter back in Leeds, Alabama. Business was fine at his hardware store, his reputation unharmed by his association with baseball’s first black player. In the legend of Jackie Robinson, told over and over in books, movies, and documentaries, Walker’s trade to Pittsburgh came as punishment for narrow-mindedness. But Rickey probably gets more credit than he deserves in these accounts. Had he traded Walker in 1947, or dumped him entirely, for that matter, the Dodger president could have sent the strongest possible signal: No bigots allowed. But to Rickey, RBIs counted for more than ideology at the time. Rickey also recognized that Walker, despite his nickname, had turned out not to be much of a rebel. In fact, after spring training, he put up no resistance at all. He did nothing to disrupt or distract the team as far as anyone could tell. He did nothing to offend Robinson. He never failed to play hard. When it counted, he put the team first.

  By 1948, however, Rickey wanted to unload Walker for all the usual reasons. The right-fielder was old, banged up, and overpaid. He was no longer a good value. What’s more, the Dodgers had a surplus of outfielders. And yet even after Rickey decided that he wanted Walker gone, the boss still didn’t make a clean break. One day in November 1947, he picked up the phone and placed a call to Walker in Alabama. If Walker was ready to retire, said Rickey, the Dodgers had a place for him in their organization as the new manager of their minor-league team in St. Paul. Rather than being punished, Walker was offered a chance to help develop the club’s future stars—including a growing number of black players. Rickey had believed back in the spring of 1946 that players such as Walker would come around once they grew accustomed to playing and living with black men, and the offer to Walker suggested Rickey believed it still. When Walker said he preferred to play another year or two, he understood that it would prompt a trade. A few weeks later, Rickey dealt him.

  “Naturally, I regret leaving Brooklyn . . . ,” the right-fielder said. “In nine years with the Dodgers I’ve made many close friends. I love those Brooklyn people.” He played two seasons in Pittsburgh before beginning a long career as a coach in the minor leagues. As the years went by, Walker occasionally spoke of his relationship with Robinson. He complained to friends back in Alabama that Rickey, in telling the story of Robinson’s breakthrough, found it convenient to add a southern villain to the narrative. He admitted that he felt pressure from his friends and neighbors in Alabama not to play on an integrated team, and admitted taking part in the spring-training protest against Robinson. Yet he continued to insist he was never the leader of the uprising.

  “I grew up in the South,” he recalled in a 1981 interview, a year before his death, “and in those days you grew up in a different manner than you do today. We thought that blacks didn’t have ice water in their veins and so couldn’t take the pressure of playing big league baseball. Well, we know now that’s as big a farce as ever was. A person learns, and you begin to change with the times. I’ll say one thing for Robinson, he was as outstanding an athlete as I ever saw. He had the instinct to always do the right thing on the field. He was a stemwinder of a ballplayer. But, you know, we never hit it off real well. I’ve gotten along with a lot of blacks since then—I managed ’em in the minor leagues and there’s many I came to respect and like—but Jackie was a very antagonistic person in many ways, at least I feel he was. Maybe he had to be to survive. The curses, the threats on his life. I don’t know if I could have gone through what he did. I doubt it. But we just didn’t gee and haw, like they say down here. Over the years, though, Robinson and I would meet at Old-Timer’s Day games and we sat and chatted some. The other night I watched a television program and heard mention of a number of people who were important in the blacks gaining advantages in America. And the name of Jackie Robinson never came up. It surprised me. I mean, how soon people can forget.”

  The Dodgers started slowly in 1948. They missed Stanky’s great gift for getting on base, and they surely could have used Walker, who proved he had one more great season in his rattled old body, hitting .316 in Pittsburgh. Dan Bankhead spent the season in the minor leagues, and while he pitched well there, he never met with much success in the majors. Roy Campanella made his debut on April 20 and in July replaced Bruce Edwards as the starting catcher, making the Dodgers the first team with two black players in the everyday lineup. Campanella, more easygoing in nature than Robinson, soon became one of the most widely liked men on the team and one of the finest catchers in the game. Shortly after Campanella’s elevation, Bill Veeck signed the legendary Satchel Paige—reportedly forty-two years old—to pitch for the Cleveland Indians. Paige became a huge attraction in ballparks around the American League and helped carry the Indians to the pennant.

  The Dodgers finished third in the National League. Once he burned off the extra weight that slowed him much of the spring, Robinson went on to have another fine season, hitting .296 with twelve homers, eighty-five runs batted in, and twenty-two stolen bases. By 1949, only three teams in the major leagues had black players on their roster: the Dodgers, the Indians, and the Giants. Robinson had broken through, but no great wave followed him. Some teams thought their supply of talent so great that they didn’t need black players. Other organizations simply didn’t want them. Robinson had his finest season in 1949, hitting a league-leading .342 with sixteen home runs, 124 RBIs, and thirty-seven stolen bases. He won the Most Valuable Player award and led the Dodgers to their second pennant in three years (as well as their second loss to the Yankees in the World Series). Freed from his promise of pacifism, he became one of the game’s most vicious bench jockeys, letting the world see some of the hostility that fueled his competitive spirit. He became a mentor to younger black players, pushing them in ways that earned their respect, if not in all instances their friendship. The angrier he got, the better he played. Once, warming up before a game in Milwaukee, he turned suddenly and fired a ball into the Braves dugout, trying to strike the pitcher Lew Burdette. “I wanted to hit him right between the eyes,” he said later, explaining that Burdette had been baiting him. A similar incident today would certainly bring a fine and probably a suspension, but Robinson didn’t even apologize.

  “This guy didn’t just come to play,” Leo Durocher said. “He came to beat you. He came to cram the goddamn bat right up your ass.”

  But the biggest fight for Robinson in 1949 came off the field, when he received an invitation to testify before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. At a peace conference, the singer and activist Paul Robeson had said that black Americans, given their country’s racist history, could never be expected to fight against a communist enemy. HUAC, as it was known, asked Robinson to appear in order to present a more patriotic view from one of the nation’s most widely respected black men. Robinson, urged on by Rickey, agreed to testify. He criticized America’s segregationist policies and vowed to fight racism wherever he found it. He said black Americans were stirred up before the Communist Party started making noise and would be stirred up after the party vanished—“unless Jim Crow disappeared by then as well.” While he refrained from making a blatant attack on Robeson, he said he and his family had too much invested in the future of the country to throw it away “for a siren song sung in bass,” a clear reference to Robeson. The media praised Robinson for his stance (“Jackie Bats 1.000 in Probe of Reds,” read the headline in the New York Age), and his popularity soared. Robeson, meanwhile, had his passport revoked and his career destroyed. Many years later, Robinson would express some regret for having criticized Robeson.

  After 1949, Robinson went on to play five more splendid seasons and two less-than-splendid ones. From 1949 through 1954, he hit .320 with an average season total of sixteen homers, ninety-three RBIs, and 23.4 stolen bases. In 1955, at the age of thirty-six, he began to slip, his batting average dropping. He sat out games with an assortment of mild injuries. His body thickened, his hair grayed, and his speed, always the key to his game, left him. The Dodgers tried him in the outfield and at third base, in part because he was no longer nimble enough for second base, and, in part, because a younger black player, Jim Gilliam, had come along to stake a claim to second base. Robinson remained a tough player. He seldom struck out, he bunted beautifully, and he still ran the bases boldly, if more slowly than in his prime. In 1955, he suffered a lackluster season but played well down the stretch, helping the Dodgers reach the World Series, giving them yet another shot at the Yankees. In the first game, to the surprise and delight of fans, Robinson stole home, sliding in under the tag of his old rival Yogi Berra, who, to this day, still believes Robinson was out (although rare film footage at the Baseball Hall of Fame appears to show that Berra missed the tag). The Dodgers, to the even greater surprise and delight of their fans, went on to win their first championship, beating the Yankees in seven games. But Robinson did not play in that seventh and decisive game, manager Walter Alston deciding that his team had a better chance to win with Gilliam at second and Don Hoak at third.

  Branch Rickey had left the Dodgers after the 1950 season, no longer able to work with his fellow owner, Walter O’Malley. “A psalm-singing faker,” O’Malley called Rickey. Rickey soon landed with the Pittsburgh Pirates, which seemed like a natural fit, since he had already traded half of his former team there. But, for the first time in his great career, he failed to build a winner. He lasted a mere five years with the Pirates. He retired from big-league baseball in 1955 and died ten years later.

  By the time the 1955 season ended, Robinson was thinking about retirement, too. He and Rachel had three children now, and they had just moved to an expensive new home in Connecticut. That winter, on the evening of December 1, a black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested in Alabama for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger. News of the incident must have reminded Robinson of his own bus protest and ensuing court-martial eleven years earlier. Rosa Parks’s action sparked a massive boycott of the Montgomery bus system, a protest that riveted the nation’s attention and launched a new, more confrontational phase in the fight for civil rights. From Florida the following spring, Robinson wrote to Rachel, “The more I read about the Montgomery situation, the more respect I have for the job they are doing.” Eight years earlier, Robinson had been the most prominent symbol of change for the black community, but much had happened since then. Martin Luther King, Jr., only eighteen years old at the time of Robinson’s rookie season, emerged now as a powerful leader of a more provocative brand of activism. Later, King would call Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” Yet Robinson stayed mostly on the sidelines in the early years of King’s movement.

  Robinson the ballplayer had difficulty fitting in among his peers during the last years of his career. He showed energy on the field and in the dugout, but in the clubhouse he was perceived by some as a grouch. He played better in 1956 than he had in 1955, but not well enough to change the trajectory of his career. His knees and ankles hurt all the time. His throwing arm grew tired. His weight continued to balloon. He suffered from diabetes. He knew time was running out, but he did not yet know what he would do with his life after baseball, nor how he would replace the lost income. He had a clothing store in Harlem, but business there was not good, and his new construction business had so far not constructed a thing. He thought about managing and believed he would be good at it, but almost any managing job would require a move from the New York area, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to spend an entire season away from his family.

  Bobby Bragan, his former teammate, had just become the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1947, Bragan had bucked at the notion of playing with a black man. But as a manager in the minors he had developed a reputation as an equal-opportunity employer, and he was said to be especially good at working with black ballplayers. That reputation no doubt impressed the man who hired him in Pittsburgh: Branch Rickey. Robinson knew that Bragan, Walker, and several other former teammates had made the transition to coaching. If he did decide to pursue such a job, he wondered if his color would hold him back. In an article called “Why Can’t I Manage in the Majors?” he explored some possible answers to the question. “Because I am a Negro? Because I am emotional? Because I can’t get along with people, no matter what the pigmentation of their skin? Because white players would resent me and would be reluctant to take orders from me? Because baseball isn’t ready now or never will be ready to accept a Negro as a manager at the major league level? Because I’m not qualified by experience or ability?” He concluded that none of those were legitimate reasons.

  After the 1956 season, the Dodgers did not ask Robinson to coach. Instead, they traded him to the Giants for the pitcher Dick Littlefield and thirty thousand dollars in cash. Robinson, already leaning toward retirement, refused the trade and formally announced his departure from the game. He ended his ten-year career with a .311 batting average, 137 home runs, 734 runs batted in, and 197 stolen bases. When he was voted to the Hall of Fame five years later, his plaque cited his batting average, his fielding percentage, even his record at turning double plays, but not his race or the impact he had made on baseball and America. In his ten years with them, the Dodgers won the pennant six times. Teams that followed the Dodgers’ lead and accepted integration (the Indians and Giants, most notably) became consistent winners, while teams that dawdled or stalled for time (the Cardinals, for one) struggled for years to keep up with the competition. Robinson showed black Americans what was possible. He showed white Americans what was inevitable. At the simplest level, it is the athlete’s job to win, which Robinson did during his career in almost every way imaginable.

  After baseball, success became more difficult to measure. He went to work for Chock Full o’Nuts, a popular chain of coffee shops, as vice president in charge of personnel relations. The job paid thirty thousand dollars and provided a company car and stock options. The president of the company was worried at the time that his workers, many of them black, might soon unionize. He thought Robinson could help prevent such action. Though he had never expressed any interest in this sort of work, Robinson leaped at the offer. In January 1957, he went to Ebbets Field to clear out his locker.

  From his desk at Chock Full o’Nuts, Robinson became a passionate letter writer—one of the nation’s most outspoken advocates for civil rights, or, as some saw it, a professional scold. He had opinions on almost everything. He played a lot of golf, attended a lot of banquets, raised money for civil rights groups
, campaigned on behalf of a few politicians, dabbled in businesses ranging from banks to fast-food restaurants, and published a weekly column in the Amsterdam News. But as the fifties turned to the sixties and the civil rights movement grew more radical, many in the black community began to perceive Robinson, whose politics skewed Republican, as out of step. Malcolm X, once a great fan, ridiculed Robinson now for kowtowing to a series of white masters, from Branch Rickey to Richard Nixon to Nelson Rockefeller. Robinson’s brand of integration, characterized by patient suffering and a zipped lip, seemed out of date.

  In 1961, Rachel earned a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from New York University and went to work at the First Day Hospital in the Bronx. Before long, she became head of psychiatric nursing at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Though she still woke early every day to make breakfast and get the three children ready for school, it was her mother, Zellee Isum, who saw the children out the door and greeted them again when they got home. Rachel loved the work and became widely respected in her field. Sometimes, when asked if she was Mrs. Jackie Robinson, she denied it, preferring to be judged on her own qualifications. Jackie had mixed feelings about his wife’s work. He sounded jealous at times, but he confided to one friend that he had never seen his wife happier.

  Jack Jr., meanwhile, suffered in the shadow of his father’s fame. Robinson had always been disappointed by his son’s lack of interest in athletics and his poor performance in school. At the same time, he admitted that he hadn’t paid enough attention to his son. Still, he struggled to understand why his other children, daughter Sharon and younger son David, were determined to make the most of their talents, while Jackie Jr. consistently foundered. The relationship between father and son grew chilly. In 1964, Jack Jr. joined the army, and in 1965 he shipped off to Vietnam, leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend. He returned a junkie and went through rehab. In 1971, at the age of twenty-four, he died in an automobile accident.