Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  Perhaps the bond of breaking baseball’s color line made their relationship something special. But it was Rickey’s style to watch over all his players. Back then the relationship of the player to the team and the team to the player involved closeness and loyalty. Executives like Rickey considered it their responsibility to involve themselves in many aspects of their players’ lives. “Imbued as I am with the virtues of connubial bliss,” he once said, “I naturally take pleasure in seeing happily married ballplayers/’ He not only took pleasure in seeing his players happily married, but he did all he could to lead them to the altar.

  Rickey was always concerned with what his players did when they were not on the ballfield. This sometimes became a problem in the off-season, when he insisted on keeping tabs on their whereabouts. Irving Rudd recalls an encounter involving Rickey and one of his players.

  “After Don Newcombe won the 1949 Rookie of the Year award, the Buddy Lee Clothing Store in Brooklyn hired him as a greeter. His duties were to shake hands with everyone who came into the store and then suggest that they purchase a half-dozen suits, or some other items of the store’s ample stock. I was hired to publicize the fact that Newk was working there weekends. did this for about two or three weeks,” recalls Rudd.

  “Newk came up with the nickname ‘Meat’ for me. I never knew why. After my third week of working with him he said, ‘Hey, Meat, how’d you like to be my manager? I’ll give you ten percent.’

  “I wondered about it,” continues Rudd. “I thought, ten percent of what? Black guys and gals weren’t even on television much back then. He was the hottest rookie around, but he wasn’t in great demand. He really wanted me as a screener to fend off characters and maybe get him a few bucks for a speaking engagement here or there. Fifty bucks back then was a big touch, a good touch. Today, even a guy batting one forty-six wants five hundred dollars for an appearance.

  “I got Newk some endorsements—Jeris hair tonic, Champ hats, some black insurance company—about ten thousand dollars’ worth of endorsements, which was staggering back then, and then I was approached to book him into a series of exhibition matches as a wrestling referee. We were going to travel about the country. I had to meet with Rickey to get his approval.

  “I went down to Montague Street, and Rickey was sitting behind that desk, all big, bushy eyebrows, brandishing his cigar.

  “‘All right, Irving,’ he said in that great cavernous, oratorical voice. ‘I trust you. You’re a clean young man. I know your reputation.’

  “He was going on. Sometimes I thought if you asked him what time it was, he would tell you how to make a watch.

  “’Go now,’ he said, ‘with Mr. Newcombe, and sin no more. But remember, I reserve the right momentarily to cancel this tour at any time if I feel it is getting out of hand or not projecting the proper image for myself, for Mr. Newcombe, or for the Brooklyn Dodgers.’”

  Rudd left and worked out the details for creating the proper image for his new project. A warm-up jacket was purchased, and across its front were the words: “Don Newcombe, Referee.” The huge Dodger right-hander was then supplied with some basic instructions in the art of being a wrestling official. “We trained him,” recalls Rudd, “always to stay near the head of the guy at the bottom-that was the safest spot in the ring. He was a valuable property, and we were concerned about his getting hurt.”

  The tour proceeded in a crazy-quilt pattern, moving from city to city. In Washington, as the small, slight Rudd and the tall, broad Newcombe were preparing to leave and go by sleeper to North Adams, Massachusetts, a reporter asked Newcombe, “Don, don’t you think you’re worth more money than the Dodgers are paying you?”

  “I don’t think nothin’ “ is the phrase Rudd recalls Newcombe used in response. “He was a very polite guy,” adds Rudd. “We arrived in the sleeper at Grand Central Station in New York City and were out in the street hopping into a cab to go to Penn Station to catch the train to North Adams. Newk had grabbed a newspaper just before we got into the cab.

  “’Well, Meat,’ he said to me, ‘I don’t think this tour of ours is going to last very much longer.’

  “What’s the matter?” Rudd asked. Newcombe handed the newspaper to the surprised Rudd. There was a picture of the Dodger hurler in his pitching pose under the headline “Won’t Pitch, Unless I Get Twenty G’s-Says Newk.” He had been misquoted. The headline was pure fiction.

  Arriving at their hotel in North Adams and entering their room, the duo had barely settled down when their telephone rang.

  “Irving, Harold Parrot,” Rudd recalls the ominous voice of an aide on the other end of the phone. “Mr. Rickey would like to speak to you.”

  “Hello, Irving,” Rickey said. “You do recall what I told you when we sat in my office at Two fifteen Montague Street.”

  “And then,” Rudd recalls, “it was blah, blah, and blah, blah, and blah, blah and ‘Irving, you have to call the tour back now!’

  “Mr. Rickey,” said the struggling Rudd, “I presume that you are calling me because of the newspaper story this morning. Newk never said that . . .”

  “The tour,” Rickey interjected, “must be ended!”

  “But . . .”

  “It cannot go on any further.” “But . . . but . . .”

  At this point Newcombe, who began his career in 1944 as a seventeen-year-old with the Newark Eagles and claimed that major-league baseball didn’t interest him until Jackie Robinson came along, grabbed the telephone.

  “Meat,” Newcombe told Rudd, “don’t argue with the man. Yeah, Mr. Rickey. Yeah, Mr. Rickey. Yeah, Mr. Rickey. We’ll take the train right home today, Mr. Rickey.”

  With Newcombe, with Robinson, with the other players on the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rickey’s mandates were followed. His age, his experience, his reputation earned him influence, power, and respect among the players. He was the boss. Beyond Rickey’s powerful personality was the strength of his position as general manager. In those days players either obeyed general managers or found themselves playing ball for other teams—or playing not at all. Newk had no alternative but to yield to Rickey. Yet for all his power over the players, in the corporate in-fighting for control of the Dodgers, Rickey remained the abstemious midwesterner, the outsider, the loner.

  In mid-July of 1950, John L. Smith, vice-president and part owner of the Dodgers, died. His death created a bitter power struggle between Branch Rickey and Walter O’Malley. Smith’s widow and the Brooklyn Trust Company became co-executors of the $4-million estate. Control of Mrs. Smith’s stock passed to the Brooklyn Trust. O’Malley, firmly entrenched in the Irish Catholic Brooklyn p61itical power bloc that had influence in utilities, insurance companies, and banking, was now able to control two of the three votes on the Dodgers.

  Youthful, ambitious, O’Malley is remembered by Irving Rudd as “a great guy—avuncular, cheerful, courteous, but no bucks. No self-respecting Jewish kid should ever work for someone like that. . . . It was Brooklyn Union Gas Company, no-bucks wages.”

  With O’Malley in control, Rickey was in a difficult position. Mired in a tough pennant race, he was frustrated by a shortage of pitching. His plan to buy St. Louis southpaw Howie Pollet, a twenty-game winner in 1949, for $6oo,000 had been spurned by the Cardinals. Rickey was in debt to bankers for his share of the Dodgers, and his five-year contract was about to expire with no indication that it would be renewed. “I have tried repeatedly,” Rickey told members of the Dodgers board of directors, “and without success to have my contract introduced and considered by the bank.”

  The harried executive, realizing his efforts to renegotiate his contract were futile, proceeded to arrange for the sale of his Dodger stock. An ownership clause gave him the option to sell his stock back to the other shareholders at cost. However, he had no intention of exercising this option, since Dodger stock had tripled in value during his tenure. He reached out, as he had so many times in the past, to his network of friends. John K. Galbreath, an Ohio Wesleyan fraternity brother and pre
sident of the Pittsburgh Pirates, arranged a meeting between Rickey and William Zeckendorf, a New York City real-estate tycoon.

  An agreement was reached. Zeckendorf pledged himself to purchase Rickey’s stock for $I million. The offer was good for ninety days. “If your partners meet the offer,” Zeckendorf informed Rickey, “you will have to pay me fifty thousand dollars for tying up my funds.”

  O’Malley was livid. Determined not to let any outsiders into the Dodgers’ inner circle, he met the offer. Zeckendorf was not let in. Rickey was let out.

  On October 28, 950, a press conference was held at the Hotel Bossert in Brooklyn, just a few blocks away from the Montague Street office of the Dodgers, where Rickey had smoked his cigars and met with Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and thousands of other players, executives, reporters.

  “Comest thou here to see the reed driven in the wind?” Rickey’s booming voice greeted the press. His eight years with the Dodgers at an end, Rickey announced his resignation and added, “It is my duty and privilege to introduce the new president of the Dodgers, a man of youth, courage, enterprise, and desire.” A great deal of stress was placed on the last word.

  The forty-seven-year-old O’Malley faced reporters. “I would like to say that for the past seven years that I have been associated with Mr. Rickey, I have developed the warmest possible feelings for him as a man. I do not know of anyone who can approach Mr. Rickey in the realm of executive baseball ability. I am terribly sorry and hurt personally that we will now have to face his resignation.”

  It was a polite passing of power. The emnity that existed was not for public display. The bitter dislike that both men felt for each other was carefully masked. O’Malley had won the battle, but it had been Rickey who had transformed a struggling Dodger franchise not only into a powerhouse team on the field but also into a thriving economic enterprise.

  The 1950 Brooklyn organization had 635 players dispersed among twenty-five teams, in contrast to 250 players in 1943, 150 of whom were in the armed forces. Three minorleague franchises were totally owned; Montreal was valued at $1 million, Fort Worth at $400,000, and St. Paul at $350,000. The 1943 Dodgers was a team in debt; the 1950 Dodgers had a capital surplus of $100,000, available cash of almost $900,000, and an earned surplus of $2.6 million. Rickey had diligently supervised· Brooklyn’s balance sheet.

  Chapter Eleven

  Speaking Out

  Rickey’s departure from the Dodgers left a huge void. Perhaps none of the players felt it as profoundly as Jackie Robinson. “I never had any difficulties with the Dodger organization until Branch Rickey left,” Robinson noted.

  With Rickey’s exit, his title of general manager was never to be used again in the Dodger organization. Buzzy Bavasi, Montreal general manager from 1948 to 1950, took over most of Rickey’s functions, but not his title. Mention of Rickey’s name in Dodger circles was officially forbidden. Violators were subject to a one-dollar fine that was allegedly deposited in an office pool. Anti-Rickey revisionism was in vogue under O’Malley. “That whole Galbreath-Zeckendorf thing made O’Malley real bitter,” remembers Lee Scott. “And that’s one of the reasons when Rickey went to the Pirates that Brooklyn never booked exhibition games with Pittsburgh. O’Malley said, ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with him. I won’t play his team if I don’t have to.’”

  Robinson was distressed by the purge of many of Rickey’s aides and the negative feelings openly expressed about him by O’Malley. When Robinson defended Rickey in O’Malley’s presence, the former Brooklyn lawyer was miffed. “I will always defend Mr. Rickey,” Robinson told O’Malley. “I owe him a debt of gratitude. I will always speak out with the utmost praise for the man.”

  Robinson commented that he was not “O’Malley’s kind of black; Campanella was.” During the 1gsos, the Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation in schools precipitated bombings of churches in the Miami area. Campanella expressed the opinion that the trouble was caused by “Negroes wanting too much, too soon. They should stop pressing.” Robinson flailed out at the racist behavior, further alienating O’Malley, who saw a more limited, more circumspect role for an athlete than that of civil rights spokesman.

  Next to Robinson, Roy Campanella was perhaps the most famous black baseball player of the period. There were, however, marked differences in background and personality between the two teammates. Campanella had had little formal schooling, and had begun his pro career at the age of fifteen with the Baltimore Elite Giants. He was fond of telling about the old days, when he caught both ends of a doubleheader and then slept on a bus before catching another doubleheader the next day in a town a few hundred miles away.

  “I remember when I played not one game, not two games, but three games in one day, and all I got was a dollar fifty,” says Campy, who hit more home runs than any other catcher in Dodger history. “Being up in the big leagues is heaven. Baseball had been good to me. I can’t complain. I don’t want to cause any trouble. I’m not a man for controversies. I !?hy away from them like the plague.”

  It was in this respect that the differences between Robinson and Campanella were most pronounced. A story told by Irving Rudd illustrates Campanella’s attitude toward Robinson’s increasing outspokenness in racial matters.

  “An organizer came to a meeting in some backwoods town in Georgia. ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘we blacks must stand up for all our rights. Don’t let the sheriff cow you. Don’t let the whites bully you.’

  “An old pappy guy in the back raised his hand to speak. ‘Yessir, mister organizer. I dern lissin’ to you speak an’ I jest git the feelin’ you blacks are gonna git us niggers killed!’ “

  Part of the Robinson-Campanella conflict grew out of the “old pappy guy” attitude. Part of it was rooted in the fact that Campanella felt obliged to perform as Branch Rickey advised; Robinson ultimately responded to his own instincts and to the years of Mallie’s teachings to defend his rights and be unashamed of who and what he was.

  “We had many meetings with Mr. Rickey,” recalls Campanella. “Jackie and I were to avoid arguments on the field. We were not to get put out of ballgames. Not only would we hurt the issue, we hurt our team, and our team couldn’t replace us in the positions we played. I was put out of two games in my career. I would squawk if I had a squawk comin’, but I knew how to squawk as Mr. Rickey taught me.

  “One day Mr. Rickey had Jackie and me in hjs office. He said, ‘I have stuck my neck out of the window for you fellows. Please don’t let them chop it off.’ And silently within myself I took a vow. I said to Mr. Rickey, ‘I would never do anything to harm this situation.’

  “Jackie was a politician, wanted to be a politician. I didn’t. I would exercise my vote and urge all blacks to exercise their vote, but I’d be darned if I’d get up on a soapbox and preach for one party or another. Jackie was a Republican. I was a Democrat. Mr. Rickey never wanted us to get into politics. He asked us, ‘Please don’t ever say vote for this person, vote for that person.’ I took this to heart. Jackie didn’t. Mr. Rickey didn’t see eye to eye with Jackie on this.”

  Robinson’s increased militancy, his public stands, his civil rights involvement, his goading of players like Campanella to become more racially conscious, his assertiveness on the playing field-all of this made him a controversial figure. “When Ted Williams opened his mouth,” Willa Mae notes, “nobody made much of a fuss. But because my brother Jack was black and the first one to break the color line, everyone got excited. He had a right to his opinion.” He seemed to have an opinion about everything, and everybody seemed to have an opinion about him.

  Monte Irvin shared with Jackie Robinson the bond of being black pioneers in New York City baseball in the golden age of the sport. “We used to talk superficially, nothing about nothing,” the handsome Irvin recalls. “And then when we found ourselves on the ballfield, we tried to beat each other’s brains out, which is the way it should be.

  “In the early years we used to go out
barnstorming after ths season and play many exhibition games. Wherever we went, he was the man. People did not pay much attention to anybody but Jackie. He was the one that had broken the color line. Again it’s a natural thing to feel a little jealousy, to feel left out. I’m talking about Larry Doby, about Don Newcombe, about Roy Campanella, about myself. We started to call Jackie ‘Mr. America’ to kid him a little. He didn’t appreciate that at all.”

  There were those who did not appreciate his outspoken views. “Most players,” Irvin notes, “thought Jackie was interjecting himself into situations where he shouldn’t have been. He was not a politician. He was not a spokesman for anybody. Here he was assuming that role. Most thought he was setting himself up as a leader and some thought, Don’t think for me, and tell me what I should do. Since he was the first, maybe he thought he had the responsibility, but most of the black baseball players thought he was setting himself up as spokesman for the entire Negro race.”

  There was one moment in all the supercharged moments of Brooklyn Dodger–New York Giant confrontations that Irvin still feels somewhat bitter about. Sal Maglie was toying with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, shaving the plate, throwing the ball dangerously close to each batter.

  “We’ve got to do something about that guy throwing at us,” Reese told Robinson. “If we don’t, somebody’s going to get hurt,” continued Reese, the only captain the Brooklyn Dodgers ever had. “When you come up next time, Jack, drop one down the first-base line and try to dump Maglie on his butt.”

  Jackie Robinson was a baseball player on a ballfield, but he was also a gladiator in an arena. He came to bat and deftly dropped a bunt down the first-base line. The crafty Maglie stayed on the mound. He was unwilling to plant his body in front of an impassioned Robinson charging down the line. Giant second baseman Davey Williams covered first. Robinson barreled into him, sending the smaller player sprawling hurt onto the grass. Robinson was surprised it was Williams he had bowled over and not Maglie, but running with his head down, Jackie would have gone through any obstacle to reach base safely.