Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  On January 28, 1958, Roy Campanella, bulwark of that team, was severely injured in an automobile accident. He had been set to move with the Dodgers to Los Angeles. The accident subjected the three-time National League Most Valuable Player to the agonies of multiple operations and rehabilitation treatments. He remains paralyzed from the waist down and is barely able to use his arms. Campy was placed in the Rusk Institute for rehabilitation treatment. In August 1958, the once-powerful slugger was given permission to receive visitors for the first time.

  A stooped figure leaning on a cane entered Campanella’s room. It was early morning. The visitor had once had a deadly fear of flying in airplanes until he was cured by going up in an open-cockpit plane in the I 930s. Branch Rickey had suffered a heart attack just three weeks before. He had been told by doctors to remain in bed for three months, but when he learned that his old catcher could have visitors, he climbed aboard a plane. He wanted to be one of the first visitors.

  “Well, Campy, how are you feeling?” The familiar voice was low. “It appears that the two of us have been having our troubles.”

  Campanella’s eyes blinked. “Mr. Rickey, I wasn’t that good, but now that I see you, I feel just fine.” He smiled. “How are you?”

  “There’s nothing much wrong with me,” Rickey responded in a stronger voice, “just a little battle with the old pump. These doctors, Campy, they can be a lot of trouble. But they do know what they are doing. You must follow their advice. Campy, tell me what they have you going through.”

  Campanella went into much detail explaining the extensive and complex exercise program he was undergoing.

  “Exercise like that,” Rickey said with the old conviction Campanella remembered from so many talks in the Montague Street office, “has got to help you. It’s like a bruised finger on a ballplayer. The player is told to soak it in hot water for long periods of time, but instead of giving it a half hour of soaking, he gives it only five minutes and thinks he has met his responsibility.

  “Don’t do what some ballplayers do, Campy. Never give it less than what they ask. Continue to do more, and I know that when I see you the next time, I’ll bet you a quarter that you’ll be able to grab my hand instead of my having to reach out for yours.”

  Campanella still remembers the visit. ‘1t made me feel wonderful,” he says. “That Branch Rickey just about determined my future. He was as close a personal friend as anyone I’ve ever had in my life. He was someone special, someone as close to me as my own father.”

  The following year, there was a reunion of the Gashouse Gang in St. Louis. The twenty-fifth anniversary dinner of the 1934 team was a much more lighthearted get-together for Rickey than the one he had with Campanella. The seventy-eight-year-old Rickey praised Leo Durocher for “having the most fertile talent in the world for making a bad situation infinitely worse.” Continuing his wry commentary about the old Cardinals, he said, ‘Why, they loved the game so much, by Judas Priest, I believe those boys would have played for nothing.”

  “By John Brown,” Pepper Martin cut in, “thanks to you, Mr. Rickey, we almost did!”

  Rickey was not the only man protesting the National League’s abandonment of New York. William Shea, a Manhattan attorney, was appointed by Mayor Robert F. Wagner to head a committee to bring National League baseball back to New York City. Shea had first met Rickey when Shea was a young attorney working for the Brooklyn Trust Company. They had stayed in touch over the years.

  “One of my first plans,” Shea recalls, “was to have Mr. Rickey bring Pittsburgh into Ebbets Field and occupy it while we were in the process of building a new stadium. That did not pan out.” Things, though, were beginning to “pan out” with the Pirates. The 1958 team finished in second place. The young talent that Rickey had signed and nurtured was maturing.

  In 1959, Rickey resigned as Pirate chairman of the board. “He gave up a very fine contract with Pittsburgh,” says Shea. “He came over to work with us for expansion at a personal financial loss. He felt the need for expansion to give more players a chance to play, to make baseball more competitive.”

  The gregarious New York lawyer and the sagacious former Latin instructor formed an imposing duo. The two men were together continuously from 1958 to 1961. ‘We spent much time in Washington lobbying to prevent the Senate from adopting legislation that was passed in the House that would have banned any baseball expansion except by existing leagues,” recalls Shea. “Mr. Rickey was always on the go. He had a heart condition, and he was always taking pills. He had several heart attacks, but he kept going forward all the time. I don’t know how the man was able to do so much at his age. I don’t think I ever worked harder in my life than the times I worked with him.

  “Every time he went to a game,” Shea continues, “he kept his own notes. He was a doer. He loved life. He was not a cheap man, as some have charged. He was not an exponent of overpaying, but when he worked for someone, he felt he would pay employees what the value of these employees was to the owner. He was not generous to himself. He never held anyone up for any real monies. He used to get checks from Pittsburgh and stuff them into his pocket. . . . Two months later the checks were still there. He may have had three suits but not more than that. He had the same hat, the same bow tie.

  “We were fighting to bring another team into New York City to replace the Dodgers and the Giants. We were turned down cold by the National League. They appointed a committee that never met. Mr. Rickey said the only thing to do was to create a third major league.”

  Many baseball writers, politicians, and major-league executives were intrigued by Rickey’s ideas on the need. for a third league and its chances for success. He argued that the existing arrangement was too cumbersome, that too many teams were out of pennant contention, and that contention and competition were needed for financial success in baseball.

  “Mr. Rickey had all the arguments and all the figures,” Shea recalls. “He had the whole thing down to numbers. He said that the average fellow coming up to the majors would have something like three years and three months in the minors. He argued that after three years, if we had the opportunity. to get the right players, we would have the cream of the crop and be able to compete with the major leagues.”

  In 1959, at the age of seventy-eight, Rickey was appointed president of the Continental League. Within an hour after his appointment, he conducted the new major league’s first meeting. Eight franchises were formed: New York, Buffalo, Toronto, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Denver.

  Jack Kent Cooke owned the new Toronto franchise in the Continental League and the old Toronto franchise in the International League. Rickey went to the Canadian city for a victory celebration after Cooke’s team won the International League pennant. But in Toronto, Rickey received the news that his son, Branch Jr., who been suffering from diabetes for quite some time, had died.

  Rickey was devastated. The father-son relationship between the “Branch” and the “Twig” had always been very close. Branch Jr. had attended prep schools selected by Rickey and went to Ohio Wesleyan at his father’s urging. With the Cardinals, with the Dodgers, and in the Continental League, Branch Jr. was always his father’s deputy. It was the Twig, not Branch Rickey, who was on the scene that October day in 1945 in Montreal when Jackie Robinson signed his historic contract with the Royals.

  The loss of his only son affected Rickey to the very depths of his being. They had shared so much together through the years—religion, family, baseball. “When his son died,” Shea recalls, “Mr. Rickey would not permit anything to be said or done. He stayed until a certain time and then left to go down to his son’s funeral. He was back again at work in a couple of days. His grief was private, but very deep.”

  In 1960 the Pittsburgh Pirates won their first pennant in thirty-five years and defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series. Clemente, Law, Friend, and others whom Rickey had acquired for Pittsburgh had come of age. And the Mahatma’s concepts for expan
sion had also come of age. That same year the American League shifted the Washington Senators to Minnesota, and added franchises in Los Angeles and Washington; Houston and New York were awarded the new National League franchises.

  The new home of the Mets in Flushing, New York, was named Shea Stadium in honor of the man who brought back National League baseball. “I didn’t know when they were considering naming the stadium that Mr. Rickey went before the Board of Estimate,” notes Shea. “He went to the mayor and reporters and argued that there should be no other name but Shea Stadium. He was helpful in all the details and the plans for the building of the stadium.

  “I thought he was going to be with the Mets,” continued Shea, “but it did not work out. He and Jack Cooke were trying to work out ways to be part owners. M. Donald Grant was a stumbling block. He had other owners in mind . . . and Walter O’Malley figured a lot in the opposition.”

  Branch Rickey, who created the farm system, who pioneered dozens of baseball innovations, who shattered baseball’s color line, never did set up the stakes in his last frontier—the Continental League. Rickey’s expansionist vision set off a chain reaction, not only in baseball, but in other sports as well. The American Football League, the American Basketball Association, and the World Hockey Association can all be traced back to the Continental League, the original stalking horse for sports expansion. “The consensus is now that the majors would have been better off accepting the Continental League,” observes baseball executive Bill DeWitt, who began his career in 1913 as an office boy for Rickey. “It would be more feasible to have Rickey’s concept of three major leagues of eight lubs instead of the present four divisions in the two leagues.” It is worth noting that of the eight cities chosen by the Continental League in 1959, six (New York, Toronto, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Atlanta) have major-league franchises today.

  In 1963, with the Continental League behind him, now in his eighties, Rickey still quested for new challenges. He returned to the St. Louis Cardinals as a consultant. Rickey was recommended to St. Louis owner August Busch by Bob Cobb, his old Hollywood Pacific Coast League connection. Critical of manager Johnny Keane, general manager Bing Devine, and other St. Louis executives, Rickey fired off cantankerous tirades and pointed memoranda. He ached to be part of one more winner. In 1964, the Cardinals won the World Series. Their last World Championship had come in 1946, when a Rickey-built team had triumphed.

  Jackie Robinson was nearly half Branch Rickey’s age as the turbulent decade of the 196os began. He was still young. He had celebrated his fortieth birthday in 1959. He had spent .ten exhausting years in the frenzied give and take of a difficult and consuming baseball life, in the intrusive eye of the media. Combat had been a way of life; now he could elect harmony. But the beat of a more powerful drummer made him march into new battles. His prime concern, the main issue, was now race.

  Robinson was active with the Harlem YMCA and the Freedom National Bank, a project in black capitalism. “There are many of us who attain what we want and forget those who help us along the line,” he remarked. “We say, ‘Why should I jeopardize my position? Why should I slip back? We’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along. The further they go, the further we all go.”

  “Jackie never forgot the struggle of his mother, and he never forgot what caused that struggle-bigotry in America,” says Mal Goode. “And to his dying day, he never stopped fighting. There were reporters who abused him in their columns. ‘Why doesn’t Jackie keep quiet? Baseball’s been good to him.’ People said, ‘Where did you ever have the chance to make thirty thousand dollars if not for baseball?’ I’m sure he was offered bribes to keep quiet, to stop complaining. He couldn’t be bribed. He couldn’t be bought.”

  Just as Robinson had placed his stamp on baseball, his historic role in baseball had stamped him. It was baseball across those long seasons that had enabled him to experience firsthand how the hearts and minds of people could be changed, how prejudice could be defused, how gains could be made, and how one man could become an instrument of change and make a difference.

  In 1960, impressed by Sen. Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights record, Robinson campaigned for Humphrey in the Democratic presidential primaries. Mter Humphrey lost, Connecticut governor Chester Bowles set up a meeting between Robinson and the Democratic victor, Sen. John F. Kennedy.

  “He couldn’t or wouldn’t look me straight in the eye,” Robinson said later of the meeting with Kennedy in a private residence in Washington. The Massachusetts senator asked him, “How much would it take to get Jackie Robinson to work for the election of John F. Kennedy?”

  “Look, senator,” snapped Robinson, “I don’t want any of your money. I came here simply to determine which candidate was the best one for black Americans because the struggle for civil rights and its solution is basic to making America what it’s supposed to be.”

  With Kennedy found wanting, Robinson worked for Richard Nixon. He felt that the Republican had a good civil rights record, and was impressed by a statement made by Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, that if Nixon were elected president there would be an appointment of a black cabinet member. The endorsement evoked much criticism. Robinson’s friends could not understand his support of the Republican candidate.

  “Jackie saw no grays; he just saw black and white. The issue was right or it was wrong,” explains Irving Rudd. “He went for Nixon because Nelson Rockefeller, a master politician who had stroked him, had convinced him that Nixon was a man who could do great things for the Negro.”

  Events disillusioned Robinson. Nixon never publicly acknowledged the statement made by his running mate, Lodge.. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed in Georgia for a minor traffic violation, Robinson urged Nixon to intervene. He refused to get involved. John F. Kennedy did, even using his brother Bobby to work on obtaining King’s release.

  There was mounting pressure on Robinson to dissociate himself from the GOP. He stayed. He argued that it helped keep the Republican party from going completely “white,” and gave blacks a chance of at least being represented in both political parties.

  Robinson was a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It hurt him badly that it was difficult to get black athletes to support the organization,” Goode recalls. During a period of internal strife in the NAACP, Robinson quit the national board rather than choose sides in the struggle.

  He was a friend and admirer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Paradoxically, the man who wore the badge of martyrdom to break baseball’s color line did not accept King’s philosophical approach to civil rights. “As much as I loved him,” said Robinson, “I would never have made a good soldier in Martin’s army. My reflexes aren’t conditioned to accept nonviolence in the face of violent provoking attacks.” Robinson’s development from pacifist to activist was a living embodiment of the direction the civil rights movement was to take. During his first two years as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers he was, willingly or not, the personification of the nonviolence Martin Luther King would transform into an internationally recognized crusade. One may only wonder just how much of an influence Robinson’s behavior during his early years as a pioneer had on King. Vigorous outspokenness and activism characterized Robinson in the latter years of his career. This was again a precursor of the direction the civil rights movement would take.

  There was public disagreement between Robinson and black activist Malcolm X. Robinson defended United Nations Undersecretary Ralph Bunche late in 1963 against attacks by Malcolm X that the black diplomat was muzzled because of the job “the white mob” gave him. Malcolm X then turned against Robinson. He charged that Robinson too tried to please the white bosses. Robinson’s reply was that he did nothing to please white bosses or black agitators “unless they are things that please me.”

  In 1962, in his first year of eligibility, he became the first black man admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Even here there was controve
rsy.

  “I was really proud that Jack made it into the Hall of Fame and just could not understand Bob Feller saying he did not want to go in with Jackie,” Willa Mae recalls. “He wanted to go into the Hall of Fame with Campanella. Jackie told him, ‘Go wait on Campanella.’ Maybe it was a racial thing, and maybe it was just dislike. In Feller’s mind and in a lot of the others’, their mind was made up before they started playing as soon as they found out the black was coming.”

  The Hall of Fame plaque reads:

  JACK ROOSEVELT ROBINSON

  Brooklyn N;L, 1947-1956

  Leading N.L. batter in 1949. Holds fielding mark for second baseman playing 150 or more games with .992. Led N.L. in stolen bases in 1947 and 1949. Most Valuable Player in 1949· Lifetime batting average .311. Joint record holder for most double plays by second baseman, 137 in 1951. Led second basemen in double plays 1949-50-51-52.

  During the ceremony at Cooperstown, Robinson called three people up from the audience to stand beside him, three people who had special significance in his life and career: his mother, Mallie; his wife, Rachel; and his friend and confidant, Branch Rickey. It was to be one of the last times together for Rickey and Robinson.

  On November 13, 1965, against the advice of his doctors, the eighty-three-year-old Rickey insisted on being released from a St. Louis hospital where he had been confined aft r suffering another heart attack. He said he wanted to watch the Missouri-Oklahoma football game that day, and he had to make an acceptance speech that night for his induction into the Missouri State Hall of Fame. He promised his doctors that he would return to the hospital after the speech.

  The pale Rickey watched Missouri’s football team defeat Oklahoma on that cold November day, and went almost immediately afterward to the early dinner in Columbia, Missouri.