Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  “Williams got in the way,” Robinson explained later. “He had a chance to get out of the way, but he just stood there right on the base. It was too bad, but I knocked him over. He had a Giant uniform on. That’s what happens.”

  “We looked upon it as dirty baseball,” recalls Irvin. “It was a cheap shot. In fact, it nearly ruined Davey’s career. [Williams, badly shaken up, was removed from the game. He suffered a spinal injury.] When Robinson did it, Durocher called us down underneath the dugout. He was furious. ‘Let’s give it back to him,’ he said. He looked at Hank Thompson and me. ‘How do you guys feel about it?’ We agreed with Leo. I said, ‘We’ve got Giants written across our uniforms and that’s what counts.’ “

  Two innings later, Alvin Dark slugged the ball up the alley in left :field. It was an easy double for the Giant shortstop, but Robinson was playing third base, so Dark streaked around second straight toward third. Reese’s relay throw hit the dirt in front of third base as Dark left his feet and launched into a slide. “Dark jumped at Jackie,” recalls Irvin. “He was going to spike him, to give it back to him.” At the last instant, Robinson stepped back and slammed the ball against the Giant shortstop’s nose. The ball bounced off and Dark was safe. “I would have torn his face up,” said Robinson, “but as it turned out I’m glad it didn’t happen that way. I admired Dark for what he did after I ran down Williams.”

  Irvin observes: “Jackie knew what Dark was doing, but he kinda laughed and the tension was off a little bit, but it was a tough moment. It could have been a real nasty thing if there had been a fight between them. There might have been a riot.”

  The Dodgers won the game, and Robinson said afterward, “I’ve always admired AI [Dark], despite his racial stands. I think he really believed that white people were put on this earth to take care of black people.”

  “Some of the problems Jackie had,” observes Irvin, ‘’he created for himself. Jackie probably had a little rougher time than anybody else would have had because of the aggressive, abrasive nature that he had. If Campanella had been first, he would not have had as rough a time. Campanella is talkative, gregarious, he’s likable. Jackie was not. It got to the point near the end where some of Jackie’s teammates didn’t even like him.”

  Robinson’s former teammate Ben Wade takes a more solicitous view. “If some didn’t like Robinson,” says Wade, “it was for no other reason than he was black. He took it for a long time. Right at the end of his career he said, ‘I’ve taken it long enough; now I’m gonna get back and say what I think.’ He said some things that I didn’t like, but he certainly had the right to say them.”

  Stan Lomax, who was there at the start and at the end, was able to see the change in Robinson. “In his last few years,” notes Lomax, “he was paying off people for those indignities that happened to him whether they were there when they happened or not. He got pretty short-tempered. I wasn’t bothered. I knew the handicap under which he started . . . he was paying off debts . . . and maybe we should balance things.”

  Aggressiveness on and off the field made him a mark as the mild-mannered, soft-spoken, self-effacing image was replaced by one that was determined, outspoken, socially conscious. The code words used to describe him were “hothead,” “crusader,” “troublemaker,” “pap-off.” The hidden definition for these labels was clearly understood by Robinson.

  In 1953, he appeared on “Youth Wants to Know,” a program moderated by Faye Emerson. Responding to a question about why there were no black players on the New York Yankees, Robinson said, “I have always felt deep in my heart that the Yankees for years have been giving Negroes the runaround.” At the time there were seven major-league teams with a total of twenty-three black players. The Robinson comment aroused a lot of people and stirred up much controversy. A Cleveland columnist called him a “rabblerouser” and a “self-proclaimed soapbox orator.” Robinson did not step back. “I’ve a right to my opinions. I’m a human being. I have a right to fight back,” he said. “I will not retract my statement that I feel the New York Yankee management is prejudiced against black ballplayers.”

  Many times his fights were with the press. Some sportswriters told him that his attitudes would cost him awards. His response was that any trophy won for being a “good kid” would be of no value to him.

  “He would get some of the press to feel uncomfortable by bringing up social issues,” Rachel notes. “They’d say, ‘What are you bringing this up for when I’m trying to talk to you about the game, about the score?’ It was a cultural conflict. They were white. He was black. He mistrusted what they could do to him. They mistrusted him. He would challenge them and strike out at them. It was normal, a normal thing surrounding a person ·doing anything not within the status quo.”

  “It was sad the way he had to take shit, real shit, from people most of whom he could have broken in half,” recalls Irving Rudd. “Robinson was a man among men, a powerful man, an intellectual . . . who had at first to take being called a nigger by some fucking imbecile. He had to release some of those frustrations later . . . and when he did there were always those who waited to find fault with him.”

  Throughout his career, there were the phone calls and the visits back to Pasadena. “All along,” remembers Mack, “we knew Jack had a tremendous burden to carry, but we knew he would succeed. We never kept a scrapbook, but we strained for every scrap of information we could get about him. We listened to the radio broadcasts, the re-creations, and we read all the newspaper stories about him. . . . Seeing him play made me very proud, made the whole family very proud. You couldn’t go around with your chest pushed out saying ‘that’s my brother.’ You’d lose a certain amount of respect . . . but we were proud, real proud. Although we used to go and see Satchel Paige and others play, this was different.”

  Willa Mae remembers the phone calls and the visits. “When he came back to Pasadena after each season, he never forgot to go and see the old people. He loved them and they loved him. He would call and he would say, ‘I’m going to be over for three hours. Get the Pepper Street Gang. Have them come over. I want to be with them again.’”

  Mallie Robinson worked as a domestic until Jack’s entrance into baseball. Then she stopped. “Jack wanted to move her to another house,” recalls Willa Mae, “another location, but she wouldn’t move.

  “When he called or came over, he used to talk sometimes about the things that had been done or said to him.” Willa Mae learned about the cold sweats, the indignities, the sleepless nights. “They took their toll on him,” she recalls. “He said that if it had not been for his people, that he was doing it for his people, he would have quit after that first year. It was really too much for any human being to take.”

  Sidney Heard would sit with his childhood friend on the stoop in the California evenings and muse about old times and learn about the people in Brooklyn and what Ebbets Field was like. “Jack did a lot of talking about Rickey. He used to tell us how he loved Branch Rickey; he used to tell us how Branch Rickey was the only father he ever remembered.”

  “Jack would talk to Mother and ask her to pray for him, to pray for all of the Dodgers,” remembers Willa Mae. “And how she did. She was called the praying mother for the whole team. She went to church every Sunday and prayed. It wasn’t just Rickey and the ballplayers that helped Jack. It was the Lord working through him.

  “My mother was always concerned about Jack, but she was worried about Pee Wee [Reese], too. My mother prayed for Jack, and she prayed for Pee Wee. I always prayed for Pee Wee, too.”

  The family was deeply moved by an incident in Cincinnati early in Jackie’s career. The ballpark was jammed, and thousands of country people had come down from the hills of Kentucky. The atmosphere was racially charged. When the top of the first inning ended, the Dodgers took the field. Reese stopped to talk to Robinson and placed his right arm around the black man’s shoulder. The gesture triggered absolute silence in the stands.

  Much has been made of that incident
as the one that symbolized the Reese-Robinson friendship. Much has been made of the gesture of the white arm on the black shoulder. Reese today claims he does not even remember doing anything. “I put myself in Jackie’s shoes,” says Reese. “I think of what it must have been like for him. I think of myself trying to make it in an all-black league. I know I couldn’t have done it. I remember people in the stands calling Robinson a watermelon-eater. I never went up to get anybody for saying that because Jackie Robinson could take care of himself. I know he always talked a lot about my putting my arm around his shoulder in Cincinnati, but I don’t even remember doing it.”

  Rachel Robinson admits she is as subject to the myths that had developed as anyone else. Like Reese, she intimates that the media and the public at the time sought to come up with symbols that fit their own needs. “Pee Wee was a good working colleague, a good team man,” she says. “He was able to put aside the racial prejudice that allegedly was in his family. We were friendly with the Reeses, the Hodgeses, the Erskines, the black players and their families, especially.”

  On the playing field, Robinson was a part of it all. Off the field, those who knew him saw him as a complicated man, set apart from his colleagues. “There was respect, but also a lot of ambivalence in his relationship with the other blacks on the Dodgers,” Irving Rudd recalls. “They were not home-and-home visitors.”

  For the Robinsons, home at the start was the tiny spot at the McAlpin Hotel in Manhattan, then an apartment at Bainbridge Street in Brooklyn. As the Robinson family grew, their need for space grew. The Robinsons moved from their tiny apartment to 5224 Tilden Avenue in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, not too far from Ebbets Field. A daughter, Sharon, was born on January 13, 1950, and on May 14, 1952, a second son, David, was born. There was another move to a larger house on 177th Street in St. Albans, Queens. Some of the Robinsons’ neighbors were Roy Campanella, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie.

  While Robinson may not have been much of a socializer and while he may have had his differences with some of the black players on the Dodgers, he made a difference in their careers and their lives. “The drunks at Toots Shor would talk about stand-up guys,” Irving Rudd recalls. “What they meant was that if you stood a guy up against the bar and he didn’t fall down, he was a stand-up guy. But Robinson really was a stand-up guy. What a firm friend to have.”

  “I was pitching one day in Pittsburgh,” recalls Don Newcombe. “I had an eleven-run lead. I let up a little and loaded the bases. Ralph Kiner was coming up. Jackie came over from second base to talk to me. ‘If you don’t want to pitch,’ he shouted, ‘go back to the hotel. Get the heck out of here.’ I got so mad I struck out Kiner and got out of the inning. The next day Jackie told me, ‘The only time you pitch good is when you get mad. That’s why I said what I did. From now on I’m going to keep you mad.’ And when- ever I needed it, he got on me.”

  Robinson used the opposite approach with Joe Black. “It was the first time I ever pitched in St. Louis,” recalls Black. “Stan Musial was at bat. A voice in the Cardinal dugout called out, ‘Stan, you shouldn’t have any trouble seeing that white ball against that black background.’ I was furious. Robinson called time. ‘I know you want to punch that guy in the mouth,’ he said. ‘Forget it. Pitch.’ That calmed me down. I got Stan out and pitched a good game. Later Stan apologized for what his teammate had said.”

  Robinson felt an obligation to all his teammates, the white players as well as the blacks, the average ones as well as the stars. “I wasn’t a star when I pitched for the Dodgers,” recalls Ed Roebuck, “and they had so many stars on that team that I was almost in awe of them. But Jackie—who was the Brooklyn Dodgers—made me feel more at home. He’d come out to the mound. He knew how I felt. ‘C’mon, Ed,’ he would say. ‘You can do it. You can pitch up here. We all know you can.’”

  Robinson also felt an obligation to all black players, not just his teammates. Even Willie Mays sometimes received advice. “Jackie would call me up at night at home and give me little tips, how to get the jump on certain pitchers, but not the Dodgers,” explained Mays. Of course, Robinson’s concern for the young Mays didn’t get in the way of his competitive drive. Once he into the wall at Ebbets Field going after a line drive and collapsed on the dirt warning track. “The next thing I knew,” recalled Mays, “Jackie was out there, turning me over, checking to see if the ball had dropped out of my glove.”

  In 1951, the Giants, propelled by the twenty-year-old Willie Mays, and the Dodgers, powered by thirty-two-yearold Jackie Robinson, battled through 53 games of the 54- game schedule. On the final day of the season, the two teams were tied for first place. It was deja vu for Brooklyn. Knocked out of the pennant by the Phillies on the last day of the 1950 season, the Dodgers were again pitted against Philadelphia on the final day of the 1951 season. “What happened on that day,” Rachel recalls, “always ranked as one of Jack’s biggest thrills in baseball.”

  In the seventh inning of their game, the Dodgers received the news that the Giants, behind Larry Jansen, had nipped Warren Spahn and the Braves, 3-2. It was the seventh straight win for the Giants, and clinched at least a tie for the pennant.

  Stan Lomax went into the Giant dressing room anxious to “get something on tape for my radio show, to get one or two of the Giants to say We won it all; we won the pennant.’ They would not say anything. One of them explained, ‘The Dodgers are still playing in Philadelphia—Robinson is there—anything can happen.’”

  The Dodgers scored three times in the eighth inning to tie up their game, 8-8. More than thirty-one thousand watched the action play out as darkness descended over Philadelphia. Sunday blue laws prohibited them from turning on the lights.

  In the bottom of the twelfth inning, with the score still tied, Eddie Waitkus of the Phillies slammed a low liner over second base. Robinson, moving with the crack of the bat, made a lunging, bellyfl.opping grab of the drive to stave off the threat. Jackie’s elbows were jammed into his chest and he lost consciousness for a few moments, but he held on to the ball. Another player at that point would have left the game, but Robinson, shaken and smarting, stayed.

  “I was on third base,” remembers Robin Roberts, who was pitching against the Dodgers that day. “Robinson dove for the ball. I still think that he trapped the ball. I touched home and thought the game was over, but I was told by the umpire that Jackie had caught the ball. Years later I met Robinson at a dinner and asked him if he really caught the ball. He smiled and asked me, ‘What’d the umpire say?’”

  In the top of the fourteenth inning, with the score still tied, Robinson came to bat. There were two out. He slammed Roberts’s pitch into the upper left-field stands for a home run. Deliriously happy, his Dodger teammates hoisted him onto their shoulders. The game-saving catch of the Waitkus liner and the game-winning home run by number 42 set the stage for the second playoff in National League history. Robinson, who had batted .338 and recorded his fifth straight year of thirty or more doubles, had been a Montreal Royal when Brooklyn and St. Louis met in the first playoff in 1946.

  The Giants and Dodgers split the first two games of the playoff. After seven innings of the third and final game, the score was tied, 1-1. Newcombe announced in the Brooklyn dugout that he was too exhausted to continue. “We’re all tired,” Robinson exploded at the huge pitcher. “You’ve got two more innings to go-six outs. You just go out there and pitch!”

  The Dodgers scored three times in the top of the eighth inning. Robinson’s fury seemed to spur Newcombe on. He struck out the side in the bottom of the eighth inning, but he faltered in the ninth. The Giants scored once. With runners on second and third base, Newcombe exited and Ralph Branca came in to relieve.

  On the job, in schoolrooms, in prisons, on car radios, and in candy stores, New York City was plugged into the war between the two historic rivals, the Jints and the Bums.

  The precise moment was 3:58P.M., October 3, 1951. Bobby Thomson smashed a home run over the wall in left field, le
ss than 315 feet from home plate. Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” gave the Giants a stunning comefrom-behind pennant victory. An instant before, the huge Polo Grounds crowd had been mesmerized by Branca pitching to Thomson. Now thousands were climbing out onto the playing field. “Holy hell broke loose all over,” recalls former Giant Wes Westrum. Only Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn defenders in the field remained at his position. Hands on hips, a scowl on his face, he waited and watched to make sure that Thomson, trotting out the home run, touched every base. “That was so characteristic of Jack,” observes Rachel Robinson. “It was typical of his need to win.”

  Even when Robinson tried to relax, his competitive instinct asserted itself. Irving Rudd recalls one winter weekend in 1954 spent with Robinson. “My wife Gertrude and I and Jackie and Rachel were up in Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills,” he remembers. ‘We were all near the ice-skating house, where there was also a toboggan ride.

  “‘Hey, Jack,’ I said, ‘Let’s hit the toboggan!’

  “He gives me a withering look. ‘Who you racing against?’ he asks. ‘You skate?’

  “‘Not very well.’

  “‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘let’s go skating anyway.’

  “I said okay, and we all go to the ice house. We put skates on. The wives go to the rail to watch. He goes out on the ice and proceeds to lose his balance and fall flat on his back. GeeeezI The image of [Walter] O’Malley came into my head. I just blew my job. He fractured something, and why didn’t I stop him from skating? He gets up . . . brushes himself off.

  “‘C’mon, Irv, let’s race!’ He gives me that big smile.

  “So the two of us go like two drunks around the rink at Grossinger’s. He’s flopping on his knees, I’m sliding on my ass. We get up and keep going and flopping and going, and he beats me by five yards.