Branch Rickey

by Jimmy Breslin

  “Don’t go,” Garfinkel said.

  “No, I’ll meet Durocher,” Christian said. He was there under the stands after the sixth inning, right on time, and Joe Moore gave him his autograph. It was some clout, Christian testified in court. Then Durocher took his best shot. The claim was Joe Moore held the guy and Leo hit him. Christian went home in a daze, with a broken jaw, a banged-up face, and a realization that this was a matter for the police. Detectives were at Ebbets Field in time to arrest Moore and Durocher before they left.

  Leo always bought trouble wholesale. First, there is the straight news reporting of the assault and arrest. With big pictures taken on the steps of the police station. The following day Christian and his broken jaw were on the front pages and as many pages inside as they could fill. If you sat in a barber shop, your ears were besieged with radio details of Durocher’s attack. Rickey was fearful of losing the best manager he ever saw just at this critical moment. He also had great anxiety over the desperate ability of the Devil to take violence and pass it through the air to tempt others. In this matter, he worried most about Robinson’s ability to follow the Life of Christ and turn the other cheek. “He is a proud man, powerful man and of great intelligence,” Rickey said. “I am fearful of the amount of abuse we ask him to take. Judas Priest! What if he is inundated with the most scurrilous of remarks and regarding them as threats he is driven to defending himself one day. That is precisely what it would be, self-defense against assault. But he cannot do that. Oh, he knows he cannot. Not a raised eyebrow can be contested. Watch the trouble we have now. Leo is the only one I know of who is familiar with this much trouble to be able to assist Robinson.”

  When the Christian assault case was brought into magistrates court, a flotilla of lawyers arrived to defend Durocher. The judge was Samuel Leibowitz, who had been the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys case in the South and the feared jurist for the Murder, Inc., trials in Brooklyn. The Dodgers lawyers suggested to Joe Moore that he take the weight for the good of the Dodgers. It was not advice well taken.

  “You got somebody who doesn’t give a fuck about you,” Joe Moore said. “I don’t give a fuck for anybody. I’ll take everybody with me.”

  Rickey got up at a Rotary Club luncheon and looked at some of the players present and announced, “I apologize for the Brooklyn organization’s failure to give you proper protection against some errant fan maligning our good athletes by making a false claim. The Dodgers must protect the player from receiving unfair, unconscionable abuse from the fans.

  “Look at this case as we have investigated it,” he went on. “The man here slipped on wet cement downstairs, and landed on his face. His jaw was broken, his medical people say. But what preceded this? Constant and complete vilification. No one rose to deflect such humiliating tirades against our defenseless players. And then fashioning a fable, a concocted set of events, yes, Judas Priest! A lie! What must come out of this unfairness is an ordinance, a local law prohibiting the abuse of players.”

  The lawyers scurried to have the case postponed repeatedly and it took a full year to get it settled in a cooler atmosphere. With so much time passed, it was somewhat difficult to ask twelve decent citizens to vote against their place of birth and their team. The lawyers paid Christian about $7,000 and he went away. Even Joe Moore went home.

  But whenever Durocher walked off the field he headed for trouble as if it was his home address. In one instance it was. He let George Raft and a platoon of thieves use his Manhattan apartment for cards and dice that made you lose. A couple of the gamblers let out the loudest sound in sports: a sucker’s holler.

  One day, from Los Angeles, there arose a howl from a man who regarded himself as being married to actress Laraine Day:LEO STEALS HOME—LARAINE’S HUBBY

  Leo had been married twice before. The judge in Day’s divorce case said Leo had to stop being seen with Laraine or he would rule harshly.

  “I am not out in public with her,” Leo told a press conference. “I’m living in her home with her.”

  Then he did a Durocher thing. He took Laraine to Mexico and got her a divorce. Now he went to El Paso, Texas, and married her against California law.

  If there was one thing that could upset the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, it was sex. Instead of inspiring Brooklyn youth, he is sleeping with another man’s wife!

  Durocher also was ordered to stay away from Memphis Engelberg, the gambler; Connie Immerman, who ran the Cotton Club for New York mobsters; and Joe Doto, aka Joe Adonis because he looked so good. Adonis was one of the great New York mobsters in a period when they were treasured for the excitement they could cause.

  Durocher’s sins were so much greater than homicide. His was the mortaller: sex. Leo complained that Larry MacPhail of the Yankees was with more women than he had ever known. And that nobody cared. MacPhail started a squall. The Catholics were the loudest, and in Brooklyn they had numbers. The office of the Bishop announced it was considering having the Catholic Youth Organization withdraw from the Knothole Gang because of Durocher’s public immorality.

  They were playing Walter O’Malley’s tune. He was a heavyset, pure Irish backpatter who came out of mortgages and business loans and limited partnerships, and had attached himself to the Brooklyn Trust Company. Rickey was having trouble with the Brooklyn Catholics. He asked fellow baseball man and team co-owner O’Malley if he could keep the Catholics on his side. Sure, purred O’Malley. Instead, he went to Bishop Malloy of Brooklyn and said: “Isn’t it a hideous thing to have this Durocher with his three wives and adultery being held up as an example for good Catholic youth? I truly can’t understand why Rickey allows this to happen. I am distressed to talk about this, but your Father Powell is correct, I feel, in protecting the Catholic Youth Organization by keeping the children away from Dodgers games.”

  Of a Brooklyn morning in April 1947, Rickey had a large meeting at the Dodgers office about the season that was starting, and the farm teams, when his private phone interrupted him. He took the call and listened in silence. Then he roared, “You son of a bitch!” Nobody had heard him swear before. When he hung up, he informed Durocher, “That was the commissioner. You’ve been suspended from baseball for the year.”

  “For what?” Durocher cried.

  Officially it was for gambling, but really it was for everything. Small, large. He had them crazy. What hurt Rickey most was that Durocher wouldn’t be on the field when Robinson needed help.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Early in the morning of April 10, 1947, Branch Rickey woke up Jackie Robinson and told him to come to the Dodgers offices right away. When Robinson got there, he was given a contract to sign. He was told to report to the clubhouse at Ebbets Field, where the team was playing an afternoon exhibition game against its Montreal farm club, the last before the regular season. At the field he would find the interim manager, Clyde Sukeforth, with whom he might be somewhat familiar.

  Rickey then dictated a memo to his secretary, Jane Ann Jones. He told her to make one carbon. It read:The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jack Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals. He will report immediately.

  Branch Rickey

  Jane Ann’s nephew, a detective I knew from out on the streets, told me that Rickey took the original and put it in his inside jacket pocket. The carbon was given to Arthur Mann, an assistant. Mann brought it to the ballpark and passed it down the line in the press box during the sixth inning. Of course the paper was then lost. It wound up under the feet of one of those Phi Beta Kappas in the press box and thereafter in the dust pan of a cleaning man.

  It was the great historical document of the time. Over the years, we heard that Rickey’s family had the original. Or maybe it was in a desk someplace, who knew? Burt Roberts, a judge in the Bronx, and I thought that maybe if it was around in a drawer someplace, we could find it and donate it to the Brooklyn Museum or to the Library of Congress and have the satisfaction of being civic heroes and of course having a small plaque hung
near the memo thanking us profusely for the donation.

  I took a chance and called Rickey’s daughter in Elmira, New York.

  “Oh, the nicest man bought that from Daddy and donated it to the Library of Congress,” she said.

  “What happened?” Burt Roberts asked.

  “We got thrown out at first,” I said.

  “Hey, nigger!”

  Here is Ben Chapman, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, standing on the top step of the dugout at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in April of 1947.

  “Hey, nigger, go back to the cotton field where you belong.”

  Jackie Robinson, in one of his first times to bat as a Brooklyn Dodger, walks pigeon-toed to the batter’s box. His face shows nothing. He fights to keep down everything he ever believed. If hit, hit back. Can’t do that now. When challenged, smack first. Can’t do that, either. Insulted, call them on it, right in their faces. No good, either. I can’t even turn my head to look at him, Robinson thought. If I see him, I’m not going to be able to stop myself.

  Chapman had been a thoroughly forgettable outfielder and pitcher with the Dodgers and Yankees, during which time he made frequent anti-Semitic remarks. We were fighting World War II but he reserved his patriotism for home.

  Upstairs, in his box suspended from the upper tier, Branch Rickey was hunched forward, kneading his hands anxiously. “Papini,” Buzzie Bavasi remembered him saying. On that first day in the Dodgers offices at Montague Street, he and Robinson had read the parts of Giovanni Papini’s book Life of Christ that inspired Robinson to accept the ideal of turning the other cheek. It is a lofty thought, and one that Robinson has promised to keep and knows that he should, but it is so immensely difficult because somebody just said he was a nigger again and his bones are raging.

  In his box, Branch Rickey calls out, “What are they saying to Robinson?” Looking down, he knows the answer. A concession man selling beer behind home plate is waving to another one a few rows up and this one comes down, balancing his beer, and now the two of them stand excitedly and Rickey knows exactly what it is about and he goes down onto the field and speaks to Robinson.

  “We have an agreement. That you ignore these people for three years.”

  “I’m supposed to let them do this to me?”

  “For three years. Here you’re not even here for a week.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to have somebody doing this to you?”

  “No, you do. And I can tell you precisely what you can do about it. Stand up and hit. Walk up there and listen to none of this and show them what you do with a bat.”

  He did nothing the first time up. Later in the game, he singled. When the Phillies kicked the ball around, he went to third, and then scored on Gene Hermanski’s single. The Dodgers won, 1-0, and the pitcher, Hal Gregg, decided it wasn’t so bad to have Robinson out there behind him.

  The next day, Chapman got right back up on the top dugout step, chesty and cheap, and continued a career of lousiness by calling more names at Robinson.

  “Hey, nigger . . . ”

  This time, Eddie Stanky of the Dodgers stood in front of the Phillies dugout and snarled at Chapman: “You yellowbelly. You know he can’t answer you. I’d like to see you do it if he was free to fight back.”

  Rickey used the 1947-48 off-season for speaking. He made a speech at Wilberforce College in Ohio that was somewhat longer than a full reading of the Constitution. Wilberforce was a black school that was a part of the foundation of America. By then so was Rickey, and he made sure you knew it. The young students couldn’t contain themselves. The man speaking to them had just reached out and pointed to the world and told them it was theirs. They had heard so many people talking to them and of course nothing was learned, except to reiterate that black is black. Suddenly, dramatically, they were hearing that color no longer mattered from a man who had an official license to say so. He was Branch Rickey, who had put Jackie Robinson into baseball and he was telling them that this big, new, wide-open world is theirs and get out there and take it.

  “I believe that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what men can do,” Rickey said. “The denial of equality of opportunity to qualify for work to anyone, anywhere, any time, is ununderstandable to me.”

  He then reported to the audience, and for the first time anywhere, that the baseball owners had tried to keep Robinson out of baseball by a 15-1 vote. In giving a meticulous account of his Robinson adventure, Rickey was often unable to overcome shyness about his vote.

  A bone spur in the ankle had Jackie limping by the end of 1947. An operation during the off-season left him unable to do anything. He gained weight. Around this time, his close friend, the Reverend Karl Everette Downs, who had married Rachel and Jack, had a heart attack and was turned away by the white doctors at the hospital in Austin, Texas, and died. This drove Robinson to candy bars, which were his enemy. He put on thirty pounds at least.

  At spring training in 1948, Durocher, back from his year’s suspension, watched Robinson come onto the field as one would inspect livestock up for sale.

  “How can he put his shoes on?” Durocher wondered. “Last year he was great. I get here and he shows up a fat cook.”

  Robinson had to suffer through a spring training of sweat and groans. Flop on your belly and come right off the ground and flop on the ground and come off the ground and do this again because this is a drill without end.

  By season’s end Robinson had been in 147 games and hit .296. Pretty good.

  In 1949 Robinson exploded. He was in 156 games, had 203 hits, 16 home runs, 124 runs batted in, and hit .342. Each time he got on base, the crowd shimmered with excitement. He walked right off the bag in the pitcher’s face. He danced, faked, started, stopped, and then ran. His slide was pure form. He stole 37 bases in that season. “He prepared himself for this,” Rickey said, extolling his sliding pit exercises in spring training. That season, Robinson was named the Most Valuable Player, which was an understatement.

  Behind him, applauding, crying compliments, was Rickey. He did a great thing in American life, yet he was mortal. He soon came to illustrate perfectly the mutual envy of politicians and businessmen. The politician cannot restrain himself from taking his brilliance into the world of business. Before long, he is on a breadline. The businessman is sure that he can run the world, and given a chance he is out there on the public stage. Soon the people are ready to garrote him. The wise shoemaker sticks to his trade and maintains a mouth filled with nails. That was not to be Rickey or Robinson.

  This particular thing began on April 19, 1949, when Paul Robeson, the magnificent singer and actor, speaking in Paris, said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.”

  “They won’t fight for their country?” In the halls of Congress, that cry was heard, most loudly in the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was sending out telegrams asking public figures to appear at a special hearing on Robeson’s speech. An early wire went to Robinson.

  Rickey could not wait to send Robinson to testify about Robeson’s speech. “I was in France in World War I,” Rickey said. “There were men of color dead. I believe they fought for their country. Jackie Robinson was in uniform. What does this man Robeson know about such things?” At a meeting, Buzzie Bavasi and nine others in the Dodgers office were against Robinson testifying. They thought he would show too much anger. Then Rickey cast his vote, which weighed more than all the others.

  Rickey sat at his desk and began writing a statement for Robinson to give before Congress. He had everybody in the room do the same. Rickey ended up with many drafts but he suspected that something was wrong with all of them. He was right: white men were trying to write the passion of a black man. He asked Lester Blackwell Granger of the Urban League to lend a hand. They sat in Rickey’s dining room and worked on a
script that seemed fine and suddenly Robinson was talking about it to a United Press reporter.

  “I’ll fight any aggressor,” Robinson said. “Any aggressor as well as the Russians . . . I’ve been treated very well. I’ll fight anyone who tries to take away my American heritage. I want to fight for my child’s right to live in this country and for any other child’s.”

  A few days later, on July 18, 1949, Robinson and his wife, Rachel, came into a congressional hearing room that was crowded and tense. He read his script, which ended with him saying, “We can win our fight without the Communists, and we don’t want their help.”

  Rushing then from Congress to Ebbets Field, he drew a walk in the sixth inning and immediately, rocking back and forth, taunting, he stole second. The catcher threw wild trying to stop him. He flew to third. Now he prowled down the base line. The Cubs pitcher watched him over and over. Robinson was gone in the middle of a look.

  In the eighth inning he hit a triple, and the instant he got his foot on the bag off it came and he started down that line and in the confusion the pitcher balked and Robinson walked home.

  “He thrilled his country all day and saved the last great thrill for Brooklyn at night,” Rickey said after the game.

  Robinson started in six All-Star games. He played in his first World Series in 1952 and in game one hit a home run against Allie Reynolds of the Yankees. By then he was no longer unique in baseball. Don Newcombe, the black pitcher Clyde Sukeforth saw in the rain, was on the mound for the Dodgers. Soon the Dodgers had three blacks, and the team won six pennants, a World Series, and finished second three times and third once. Robinson was Rookie of the Year, National League Batting Champion, and Most Valuable Player. Roy Campanella was voted Most Valuable three years. Don Newcombe was Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable once.