Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  The Brooklyn Dodgers offices were on the corner of Court Street, wide and busy with cars, with the state and federal courts on the far side across from ten- and twelve-story buildings that hold every title guaranty, lawyer, mortgage broker, and insurance broker in the borough. Montague Street starts at Court Street and runs up a street of business offices in low buildings with restaurants on the ground floor. The street goes into a few blocks of the graceful two- and three-story brownstones of Brooklyn Heights. At the end, there is a walk looking over a harbor of glittering water, in the center of which is the Statue of Liberty, which still, today, no matter how many times you have looked at it, takes your breath away.

  Sukeforth and Robinson went up to the fourth-floor offices of the Dodgers. The scout was there as third-base coach to history.

  They entered Rickey’s large office, which had a fish tank and a blackboard with the names in chalk of every member of the Dodgers organization, down to infielders in Olean, New York, Class D.

  Rickey sat behind a large desk. Sukeforth said, “Mister Rickey, this is Jack Roosevelt Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs. I think he is the Brooklyn kind of player.”

  Rickey put down his cigar and stood up and shook hands. He then sat, and Robinson sat facing him. Off to the side was Sukeforth.

  Rickey stared at Robinson.

  And stared.

  Robinson stared back.

  Their eyes cast across a moat of deep silence.

  The lawyer in Rickey took over.

  “Do you have a contract?”

  “No, players only work game by game in the Negro League.”

  “Do you have anything written or in conversation that ties you to Kansas City?”

  “None.”

  “Do you have a girl?” Rickey asked.

  “I think so.”

  “What do you mean, ‘I think so’?”

  “Baseball keeps me away so much that I don’t know if she’s still waiting for me.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “I love her very much.”

  “Marry her.”

  He told Robinson that baseball was a hard life and a player had best have a strong home life. Rickey now had the cigar waving, the eyebrows coming together, the eyes piercing even more than before.

  “Do you know why we brought you here?”

  Robinson said he understood it was for some new Negro baseball team or league.

  “No,” Rickey told him. “That is not why we went to Chicago for you. You were brought here, Jack Robinson, to play for the Brooklyn organization. We see you starting in Montreal.”

  Robinson became numb. “Montreal?”

  “If you can make it, which everybody says you can. If you make good there, then we’ll try you with the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  There was more silence. Good, Sukeforth remembered thinking. This puts it where it should be. Everybody knows Robinson’s color. We want them talking only about his ability. Sukeforth could think and figure in the silence. Robinson was in clean shock.

  Rickey was waving his cigar. With a wave of a cigar he could cure the wound of a lifetime. He was sure of Robinson’s baseball ability. He had a pile of reports on Robinson by the most famous scouts, men who could look through a sandlot’s dust and see a World Series player. Now Rickey had to learn about the rest. Robinson could control a bat and hit behind a runner. But could he control himself under insults and even assaults and put the attackers to shame? That Sukeforth brought him here said much about his character. But Rickey needed to know even more. It would be easier not to attempt this, he thought.

  Robinson couldn’t open his mouth. Suddenly, Rickey thumped the desk. “I want to win. I want ballplayers who can win for us. Are you one of them? Do you think you can win for us?”

  Robinson had been suspicious of this whole thing. Who was Rickey and what was his record with blacks? But that was before. Now he knew he had to talk; he could not ignore Rickey and what he was saying.

  Rickey pounded the desk again.

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if you have the guts.”

  “I’m not afraid of anybody,” Robinson said.

  “I’m looking for a ballplayer with the guts not to fight back.” Off came Rickey’s jacket. Now he was the evangelist, the minister roaring and whispering to upturned faces. I know this boy has a soul, Rickey said to himself in this surge of emotion. I am going to bring it forth.

  Now Rickey becomes a room clerk. “ ‘We got no room for you, boy. Not even in the coal bin downstairs where you belong.’ How would you handle that, Jack Robinson?”

  “I guess I go elsewhere.”

  Now Rickey is a headwaiter who knows that Robinson has just come off a long trip with the team. He doesn’t even look at him. Finally, he says. “ ‘Whatchu want, boy?’ ”

  “A seat.”

  “ ‘Didn’t you see a sign at the door says no animals allowed in here?’ He turns his back on you. What do you do now, Jack Robinson?”

  “Go someplace else to eat, I guess.”

  Rickey said, “They’ll throw at your head.”

  “They’ve been throwing at my head for a long time.”

  Rickey growled. “I’m a player who runs right into you and gets knocked down. I’m getting up and I only see your black face. You knocked me down, you dirty black sonofabitch.” Rickey stepped up and threw a fist, a broken baseball catcher’s right hand. It just missed grazing Robinson’s cheek.

  “What do you do now?”

  “Mister Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who is afraid to fight back?”

  “I said I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back. You’ve got to win this thing with hitting and throwing and fielding ground balls. Nothing else!”

  Sukeforth remembered Rickey shivering with tension as he shouted, “We’re in the World Series. I’m at first. It’s a key part of the game. You are going to throw to first for a double play. And I come into you. You don’t give ground. Here are my spikes. You still don’t move. You jab that ball into me. I hear the umpire shout, ‘Out!’ And I see your black face. You dirty black son of a bitch!”

  The right hand came at Robinson’s face again. He did not move. “His eyes had a lot of sparks in them, I can tell you that,” Sukeforth recalled later.

  “What do you do?” Rickey asked again.

  “Mister Rickey, I’ve got two cheeks.”

  It was after lunch, and the afternoon crowd of businessmen was walking by 215 Montague without hearing a murmur of the thunderous American history unfolding nearby. Upstairs, a black man was being signed to a Brooklyn baseball contract that assigned him to the Montreal team of the International League. He would get a signing bonus of $3,500 and a salary of $600 a month. Done.

  “First meeting,” Branch Rickey began one afternoon when asked what he remembered about this, “lasted about four hours. When he came to me, he came secretly. He came with the idea that he was going to join the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, a colored entry in the so-called professional colored league . . . And he didn’t understand and it was hard for him to believe that day that I had meant for him to become ultimately a member of the Brooklyn club, the Dodgers.”

  Rickey’s plan was to ease Robinson into the league through the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal, “which was a very handsomely acceptable place for the trial of a Negro,” he said later. “There is no prejudice in that country. And I knew that. And Brooklyn owned Montreal, and we placed him there on this optional agreement basis.

  “Now we had a manager who came from the South, Greenwood, Mississippi. Clay Hopper. Charming fella. Graduated Mississippi A&M. Really, a scholarly type. And fine . . . he was a cotton buyer or sorter working with a dozen other white men and a great number of Negro employees in Greenwood, Mississippi. He was a manager. He was a major league manager in my book . . . If I had a major league club, I wouldn’t hesitate to employ him. But this fella felt that his job and his standing and his self-respect was at st
ake. And I remember that day . . . this fella Robinson made a couple of great plays and I remarked about them and I turned to Hopper on the second one which was a test play, a slide on his belly to the left toward first playing second base he was. He stabbed the ball, kaleidoscopically changed it to the right, retired a front runner at second, and completed a double play from the shortstop to the pitcher. A tremendous play. A test play. A man can do it, you know that he can always do that. And I turned to him . . . and I said there’s no man in baseball can beat it. And he turned to me and said, ‘Mr. Rickey—’ The tears were almost in his eyes. Serious as he could be. ‘Do you really believe that he . . . that a colored man’—he didn’t really call him that—‘a colored man can be a human being?’

  “Well, we had to wait for time to change him. Then did it ever!

  “Hopper has the player at Montreal. They win the pennant. They carry him, the manager, off on their shoulders. They carry Robinson off on their shoulders. And on his way back to Greenwood, this man just stops in my office . . . He said, ‘I’ll take only a minute of your time.’ He said this fella can make good on your Brooklyn club if you give him a good chance. But he said if he doesn’t, Mr. Rickey, he said, don’t send him to Hollywood. Don’t send him to St. Paul. Let me have him back. He says he’s not only a great player, he’s a gentle man.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the fall of 1945, with Robinson under a contract that was about to be announced, Rickey decided to get out of social engineering for a few moments and pull some money out of the sky. He rented Ebbets Field for a black-versus-white exhibition game. That Sunday in October came up with a light, cold rain. Pitching for the black team was Don Newcombe, nineteen, of the Newark Eagles. He had been told that major league scouts would be watching. He was enthralled. There was one scout there for sure: Clyde Sukeforth sat in a box behind home plate. When Newcombe threw his fastball, Sukeforth watched with eyes that saw something of the pitcher’s future. Someday a big winner, the scout thought. And everybody says he can hit.

  Newcombe pitched two innings. His arm grew heavier by the throw and throbbed in the rain, and soon he had to get out. He walked off with tears in his eyes. In the dressing room he cried some more. He was sure he had just blown a career. No white scouts were ever going to see him in Newark. Through his tears Newcombe saw one white man in the room. It was Sukeforth, who came up to him and ignored both his color and his tears.

  “I like the fastball,” Sukeforth said. He asked Newcombe to be at the Dodgers office in the morning. Newcombe thought it was for the Brown Dodgers team. When they met, Rickey never told him anything different. Just as a day or so later he left Roy Campanella thinking about a Negro league team. Rickey talked for hours but never mentioned the Dodgers except as something attainable someday, maybe. He wanted to know everything about Campanella because he wanted Campanella to handle his Dodgers pitchers, but he couldn’t say that yet. Rickey’s plan consisted of causing an explosion by signing Robinson to play with Montreal. Once that blew over, he could sign and announce both Campanella and Newcombe.

  In January of 1946, Emil “Buzzie” Bavasi returned from three years of infantry fighting in Italy to a job as business manager in the Dodgers farm system. It was good that he had a steady job waiting, but he wasn’t ready just yet. He asked Mr. Rickey if he could have some time off to travel to Sea Island, Georgia, to throw the war out of his life and feel the sand on his feet. Of course Rickey said yes.

  “Bask in the surroundings and love your wife,” he told Bavasi.

  A few days later Rickey called and said, “I need you.” Bavasi flew up and walked into the Dodgers office in time for a meeting with Rickey and the organization’s six top scouts. These men were known wherever anybody played the game: George Sisler, Mickey McConnell, Wid Matthews, Eddie McCarrick, Clyde Sukeforth, and Tom Greenwade. Bavasi made the eighth at the table. The meeting was about the three black prospects—Robinson, pitcher Don Newcombe, and catcher Roy Campanella. All would be brought up through minor league teams. The first would be historic. The other two would follow shortly.

  Scouts Andy High and Wid Matthews pushed as forcefully as they knew how for Newcombe to go first.

  “He has a powerful arm,” Matthews said. “And besides, he is a good hitter. There isn’t a pitcher in either league who can hit like he can.”

  Andy High was even more vehement—Newcombe first.

  If the scouts had their way, the team wouldn’t be stopping at three black players. When the Montreal team needed a second baseman, Mickey McConnell insisted that they get Jim “Junior” Gilliam of the Baltimore Elite Giants. Rickey said, “Try to acquire him for four thousand.” McConnell tried. The Baltimore owner said the team was broke and needed a new bus. For $5,000 Gilliam was Dodgers property, and to acknowledge receipt of their new transportation, Baltimore threw in a pitcher named Joe Black. Sukeforth dived into the pile of files and saw reports that Black was going to win a lot of big-league games.

  There would come a day when Sukeforth told Rickey that he had had the greatest luck imaginable: he got two World Series players for $5,000.

  Rickey answered, “Luck is the residue of design.”

  As part of his master plan, Branch Rickey took the sport of baseball into politics, of which nobody in baseball today knows anything beyond giving city council members free box seats. Early on a Sunday in 1945, Rickey and his wife drove up to Quaker Hill, near Pawling, north of the city, a place where there was as much money showing as grass, to visit an old friend from college.

  Pherbia and Pinky Thornburg lived splendidly. Pinky had spent many years in China and always was exhilarating in conversation. His wife’s brother was a famous radio commentator, Lowell Thomas, who lived nearby. On the grounds of their golf course was a clubhouse called the Barn, which was a large room of high ceilings and dark wood and a stage where Thomas put on Sunday seminars for residents and visitors. On the walls were pictures of the club’s Nine Old Men softball team, whose roster included Quaker Hill farm owner Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York. There were pictures of Dewey, in farmer’s overalls hunched forward to pitch, and with Franklin D. Roosevelt, from nearby Hyde Park. One year before Rickey’s visit, the two had squared off in a presidential race, and poor suckers all over the country had taken sides, expected to bring at least hatred to the polls. If the voters ever knew that these enemies were happy to be associated with the same softball team of the rich, they might have realized that it was proper to detest them both.

  An actress named Tallulah Bankhead, a loud dimwit from Alabama, once proclaimed Dewey to be the “little man on the wedding cake.” That caused great giddiness through a couple of elections. But Dewey, the record happens to show, did more for civil rights than any of the giggling Democrats. Branch Rickey knew this as he walked into the clubhouse that Sunday. Here was Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of the state of New York, talking with neighbors. Already, Rickey had met Dewey around state Republican politics. Correct politics were the social conditions for a handshake. But in the informality of the Barn, with Thornburg as his sponsor, Rickey was determined to get help from Dewey. Not jobs for relatives, nor road-paving contracts, nor state grants for the team. Branch Rickey wanted Thomas Dewey to pass a law that would put the first black man into baseball.

  In 1943, somewhere in these Sunday seminars in the cabin on Quaker Hill, Irving Ives, a state assemblyman, got a powerful new idea: all working men are created equal, and that includes circus performers and baseball players and anybody else who has to perform in public, and should not be penalized for any reason, including race. He started writing a law to that effect. He merely had to turn around to ask Dewey for help, and he already had a Democratic cosponsor, Elmer Quinn, a state senator from New York City, from Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, St. Veronica’s parish.

  There was another strong man in the Barn on this day. He was Charles H. Tuttle, a Republican favorite who had run for governor against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1930. Rickey loved that
, as he had no use for any Democrat, and Roosevelt in particular. His hopes lifted even more as he realized that Tuttle had been raised by a grandfather who was the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. Rickey could live with an Episcopalian. Why not? He was already the ally of a Roman Catholic

  Right off, Rickey told him the story of Charlie Thomas. “They can’t ignore the Constitution like that,” Tuttle said.

  “We have to fight it,” Rickey said.

  “Always stand up straight and free,” Tuttle said. “Hold fast to your faith and face the future.”

  Rickey told Tuttle of the St. Louis Browns, whose players were off to war, forcing them to play Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder, even when there were plenty of blacks with two arms eager to play. When Gray caught a ball, he had to tuck his glove under his stump so he could make the throw. He hit as best he could, which wasn’t much, but he was white.

  Then they talked about Prohibition, which Tuttle said had harmed thousands of brewery workers, decent people who had to feed their families. For so long, Rickey had believed that working in alcohol was a sin, but now he finally had to admit that Prohibition had been a disastrous failure.

  On Monday, Rickey stuffed religious tracts and clippings of talks he had given into a large envelope and sent it to Tuttle. It was the first of many. And it put Rickey into direct touch with a man he felt sure was going to change baseball.

  Rickey’s hopes also went on the night train with Ives and Quinn to start two weeks of campaigning for passage of their bill in Albany. Opposition came from everywhere. John A. Davis, a Lincoln University professor, had written a handbook calling for gradual integration of Negroes into war industries. He wrote, “Successful companies start their programs with a neat, efficient, attractive, well-qualified colored girl in the employment office itself.” Robert Moses came out loudly against the bill. Why a state parks commissioner would be against a fair-employment bill can be explained quickly: he didn’t like blacks.