Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Also By Roger Kahn:

  Into My Own, 2006

  Beyond the Boys of Summer, 2005

  October Men, 2003

  The Head Game, 2000

  A Flame of Pure Fire, 1999

  Memories of Summer, 1997

  The Era, 1993

  Games We Used to Play, 1992

  Joe and Marilyn, 1986

  Good Enough to Dream, 1985

  The Seventh Game, 1982

  But Not to Keep, 1978

  A Season in the Sun, 1977

  How the Weather Was, 1973

  The Boys of Summer, 1972

  The Battle for Morningside Heights, 1970

  The Passionate People, 1968

  “Roger Kahn’s classic, The Boys of Summer, changed my life—that and Catcher in the Rye were the two books that made me dream of becoming a writer. Now, Roger returns to the Brooklyn Dodgers to breathe new life into the two familiar men who changed baseball and, in their own way, America. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, but, not surprisingly, I’m still learning from Roger Kahn.”

  —JOE POSNANSKI

  Bestselling author of The Soul of Baseball and The Machine and national columnist for NBC Sports

  “Branch Rickey signed me in 1946, a few months after his historical signing of Jackie Robinson. Jackie and I were teammates with the Dodgers for nine wonderful seasons, including the 1955 World Championship season later memorialized in Roger Kahn’s masterpiece, The Boys of Summer. But Mr. Rickey’s and Jackie’s baseball accomplishments pale in comparison to the cultural impact they had on America, an impact that reverberates to this day. Roger knew both men well—read his words and you will, too.”

  —CARL ERSKINE

  Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, 1948—1959, and author of What I Learned from Jackie Robinson

  “Much has been written about Jackie Robinson and much has been written about Branch Rickey. But, thanks to the legendary Roger Kahn, we are granted front-row access to the inner workings of a fascinating—and historic—relationship. Like its author, Rickey & Robinson is a treasure.”

  —JEFF PEARLMAN

  Bestselling author of Showtime and The Bad Guys Won

  “If you think you know the full Branch Rickey-Jackie Robinson story, you don’t. And you won’t until you read Roger Kahn’s Rickey & Robinson, which tells the tale in new, vivid, unvarnished ways. This, at last, is the definitive account.”

  —WILL LEITCH

  Author of Are We Winning?, senior writer for Sports On Earth and founder of Deadspin

  For the incomparable Katharine

  Who somehow suffers writers.

  Or anyway one writer,

  Gladly.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD:

  “Adventure . . . All adventure”

  CHAPTER ONE:

  Contradictions

  CHAPTER TWO:

  Civil Wrongs

  CHAPTER THREE:

  Coming to Brooklyn

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  The Battle Lines of the Republic

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  The Original Big Red Machine

  CHAPTER SIX:

  A Meeting for the Ages

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Show the Bums the Door

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  The Power of the Prose

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Branch and Mr. Robinson

  CHAPTER TEN:

  North of the Border

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  It Happened in Brooklyn

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Recessional

  AFTERWORD

  CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF STEALS OF HOME BY JACKIE ROBINSON

  THE PIONEERS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  “Adventure . . . All adventure”

  IN 1903, WHEN BRANCH RICKEY WAS STARRING AS A catcher for the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team and coaching the squad though still a student, an incident erupted in South Bend, Indiana, that would change his life and, in time, change the country. The manager of the Oliver Hotel on West Washington Street said that Charles Thomas, Rickey’s black catcher who doubled as a first baseman, would not be permitted to register because “we don’t let in nigras.” That was one persistent and corrosive side of American life in 1903. Bigotry.

  Rickey shouted down the hotel manager and dragged a cot into his own ground-floor room. Thomas would stay with him. Startled by Rickey’s intensity, the manager backed off. “But you gotta keep the colored boy downstairs,” he said. “He can’t go nowhere else. He can’t ride the elevators. And he sure as hell can’t eat with the white folks in our dining hall.” For emphasis the man slammed a fist on the counter.

  Rickey turned away and took Thomas by an arm. “After we got into my room and I closed the door,” Rickey told me years later, “tears welled in Charles’s large eyes. His shoulders heaved convulsively and he rubbed one great hand over another with all the strength and power of his body. He was muttering, ‘Black skin . . . black skin. If only I could make my black skin white.’”

  Rickey’s sense of drama was extraordinary. He paused to let Thomas’s words and pain impact me. “Looking at Tommy that day,” Rickey said finally, “I resolved that somehow I was going to open baseball and all the rest of America to Negroes.” Large, assertive eyebrows moved closer together. Rickey bit his cigar and puffed a thundercloud of smoke. “It took me many decades, but I did it.”

  “Forty-four years later,” I said. “When you signed Jackie Robinson, did you know how good a ballplayer he was going to be?” Many suggest that Rickey was the greatest talent scout in all of baseball history.

  He made a rumbling laugh. “Adventure,” he said. “Adventure. Show me a ballplayer with a sense of adventure and I’ll show you a great one. Adventure, all adventure . . . that was the Jackie Robinson I signed.”

  The implications of that signing and indeed the significance of Branch Rickey’s long life and of Jackie Robinson’s life, which was all too brief, transcend the game and the business of baseball. But wasn’t integration coming to America anyway? Wasn’t integration an irresistible wave of the American future, as women’s suffrage once had been? Possibly so. Perhaps even probably so. But before Rickey–Robinson, America’s movement toward integration was so slow as to be barely discernible.

  Marian Anderson, the great black contralto, was barred from singing at the Metropolitan Opera until she was almost 60 years old. Paul Robeson, the matchless bass baritone, was hounded to death by right-wingers citing Robeson’s defiant, leftist politics. Arrant bigotry played a major role in the persecution of Robeson, who had also been one of the first blacks to play in the National Football League. Turning on Joe Louis, the hammering heavyweight champion, functionaries at the Internal Revenue Service demanded enormous payments in Louis’s later years. They flatly refused to give him credit for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had donated to Army and Navy family relief during World War II. Louis was careless with money, but government bigotry was a major reason that the Brown Bomber died broke and broken.

  As Robinson told me on many occasions, “When you think about it, my demand was modest enough. I wasn’t asking to move into your neighborhood, or send my kids to school with your kids, and I certainly was not proposing to join your golf club. All I wanted was the right to make the kind of living that my abilities warranted.”

  Obviously Rickey–Robinson could not and did not categorically end American bigotry, but they significantly diminished it. At the very least, they played a clear white light into corners that had been crawling and ugly. I used to say, “No Jackie Robinson, no Martin Luther King.” I expand that statement today. Without the f
oresight and the high moral purpose of Branch Rickey, and without the radiant courage of Jackie Robinson, Barack Obama could not have been elected president of the United States.

  A nice touch to this rousing saga is the element of unpredictability. Close as I was to Jackie, intimate as I was with Branch, all the time I thought that the first minority American president would be a Jew.

  —Roger Kahn

  STONE RIDGE, NEW YORK

  ONE

  CONTRADICTIONS

  LIKE MOST OF US WHO TAKE WRITING AND BASE-ball seriously, Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith retained a soft spot in his portable typewriter and a valentine in his heart for Wesley Branch Rickey. Mister Rickey, as generations of ballplayers were required to call him, was the game’s greatest orator, a clubhouse Churchill, its preeminent theoretical thinker, its talent scout beyond compare and, most important in America’s social history, its noble integrator. Rickey’s polysyllabic eloquence made the craft of baseball writing easier. Quote him accurately and the eloquence edged into your own prose. That may be what inspired Smith when he created this enthusiastic and extraordinary paragraph.

  Branch Rickey was a player, manager, executive, lawyer, preacher, horse-trader, spellbinder, innovator, husband and father and grandfather, farmer, logician, obscurantist, reformer, financier, sociologist, crusader, father confessor, checker shark, friend and fighter. Judas Priest, what a character.

  Well aware of Rickey’s merits, a college professor named Judith Anne Testa, who wrote an excellent biography of the intimidating pitcher Sal Maglie (whom she called “baseball’s demon barber”), raised an interesting question. “How,” Judy Testa asked when I was working on this book, “are you going to write something consistently interesting when one of your principal characters has no vice worse than smoking cigars?” It is true that Rickey neither drank nor caroused. He was unfailingly faithful to his wife, Jane, and to the Christian religion as he perceived it. He was a doting father to his diabetic son, Branch Rickey Jr., who in later years became, for whatever reasons, a heavy drinker. (Branch Jr. died at the age of 47.)

  But there existed another side to the Mahatma. Rickey was a greed-driven man, obsessed across the nine decades of a remarkable life with amassing and guarding a personal fortune. He never once went to a ballpark on Sunday, citing a promise made to his mother always to observe the Christian Sabbath. That oath, however solemn, did not prevent him from banking the gate receipts of Sunday games.

  His penury became legendary, notably among the men who played for him. “Mr. Rickey,” Enos Slaughter remarked to me one day at Cooperstown, “likes ballplayers. And he likes money. What he don’t like is the two of them getting together.”

  A journeyman outfielder named Gene Hermanski hit 15 homers and batted .290 for the 1947 Dodgers. The following winter he strode into the team’s Brooklyn offices, where Bob Cooke of the New York Herald Tribune was loitering in search of a story. “This time,” Hermanski said to Cooke, “I’m gonna get the raise I deserve.” Half an hour later Hermanski emerged from Rickey’s presence smiling.

  “You got the raise?” Cooke asked.

  “No,” Hermanski said, “but he didn’t cut me.”

  After the star-crossed pitcher, Ralph Branca, appeared in 16 games for the wartime Dodgers of 1945, Rickey offered him a 1946 contract calling for a salary of $3,500, which, on an annual basis, comes out to about $67 a week. Branca was only 20 years old, but locally prominent. He had been a two-sport (baseball and basketball) star at New York University and possessed a good fastball and a snapping curve. He consulted with his older brother, John, himself a pretty fair pitcher and later a New York state assemblyman. John thought his kid brother deserved $5,000 and Ralph returned the contract unsigned with what he recalls as a courteous letter “to Mr. Rickey” requesting an additional $1,500.

  The response was silence. After a bit, Ralph telephoned the Dodger offices. Rickey would not take his call. When the 1946 Dodgers assembled for spring training in Florida, Branca still had heard nothing. Further, he was not invited to the camp. He borrowed money from his brother and drove a battered car to Vero Beach. There, alone and unhappy, he checked into a motel he recalls as being both ugly and dirty. “I was worried,” he says, “that my big-league career might be over before it really began.”

  Following two weeks of increasingly frantic telephone calls—the borrowed money was running out—Ralph reached a secretary, who said, “Mr. Rickey will see you at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  When Branca appeared, Rickey produced the $3,500 contract. “Sign this immediately,” he ordered.

  Branca did. “You may now check with the equipment man about your uniform,” Rickey said. He paused and fixed Branca with a gelid stare. “And Branca, one more thing. Don’t you ever hold out on me again!”

  For the record, Branca, at $67 a week, went out and won 21 games for the Dodgers in 1947, when he was 21 years old. But he seldom seemed happy as a ballplayer, and a few years after Branca threw the notorious home run ball to Bobby Thomson, his career tanked and he went into the insurance business. Before reaching his 30th birthday, Branca, the pitcher, was finished. He had the good sense and good fortune to marry a wealthy woman, but even half a century later, when I see Branca, I sense a man with a battered and unrecovered psyche.

  Would a gentler, less parsimonious Branch Rickey have given the large, sensitive Branca the confidence he lacked? Would a confident Branca then have gone on from his 20-game season and etched out a career that brought him into the Baseball Hall of Fame—not as a sometime guest, but as a member?

  Perhaps.

  “The love of money,” St. Paul wrote in an epistle to his disciple, Timothy, “is the root of all evil.” Not, as in the common misinterpretation, money, but the love of it—the sheer, unbridled, salivating lust for lucre—is what Paul insisted causes disaster. Few have read the King James version of the Bible as studiously as the devoutly Methodist Branch Rickey. Few, considering cupidity, have paid the words of St. Paul so little heed.

  When Rickey was signing star athletes out of the Negro Leagues—Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe followed soon after Robinson—he refused to pay Negro League owners for their contracts. These owners, Rickey maintained, setting an unofficial record for sporting rationalization, were shady characters. Therefore they did not deserve to be paid.

  But compared to Rickey’s greatest accomplishment, integration, parsimony becomes a minor shortcoming. Under close scrutiny no figure remains flawless. Even as Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he kept slaves. While Abraham Lincoln was composing the Emancipation Proclamation, his family finances were in shambles. “No man,” Montaigne supposedly has written, “is a hero to his valet.”

  Nor is any man necessarily a hero to his wallet.

  In Rickey’s halcyon years, running the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers, he demanded and got a percentage of receipts from the sale of ballplayers’ contracts to other major-league clubs. The costs of developing baseball players—paying managers and coaches, building and maintaining fields, buying uniforms, bats, baseballs, clubhouse hamburgers and all the rest—were paid by the organization at large. (Professional ballplayers must purchase only their spikes—now cleats—and gloves, although some finesse these costs with endorsement deals.) Presiding with care and penury, Rickey supervised expenditures from an executive suite, and often did hands-on coaching and evaluating around home plate. Or even in his office.

  Carl Erskine, late of the Dodgers, who set a World Series record by striking out 14 Yankees on a cool October afternoon in 1953, remembers one of Rickey’s unique tests. He directed a pitcher to hold a baseball with his palm inward, facing his nose. Now bend the elbow as deeply inward as possible until the ball touches the shoulder. From that position throw the baseball as far as you can. (That will not be a very great distance.) “Mr. Rickey,” Erskine says, “could tell from that little toss just what kind of an overhand curve a pitcher would have.” Mister Erskine�
�s overhand curve was good enough for him to throw two no-hitters during a relatively brief but glorious Dodger career, mostly as a teammate of Robinson.

  Rickey justified his percentage of player sales as fair compensation for his expertise. But the unusual arrangement raised at least one troubling question. Wasn’t it tempting for Rickey to sign more young ballplayers than his own major-league team could possibly use? Surplus athletes would mean more player sales and more cash in Rickey’s personal percentage piggy bank. Rickey never acknowledged that this issue might represent a conflict of interest. When he died in 1965, he left an estate of roughly $1.5 million. It would have been considerably greater had his personal avarice not antagonized other executives. Sam Breadon, the Cardinals’ president, who forced Rickey out of St. Louis in 1943, subsequently sold the team for $4 million. After Walter Francis O’Malley, Rickey’s fierce Brooklyn rival, died at the Mayo Clinic in 1979, the O’Malley estate amounted to an estimated $350 million. Baseball is a game for small boys and flinty businessmen.

  Rickey’s covetous acquisition of young talent became so extreme that Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball from 1921 until his death in 1944, released 91 St. Louis Cardinal farmhands in March 1938. That is to say, Landis overruled what was then baseball’s prime directive, the reserve clause, and made these young players free agents, suddenly able to sell their services to the highest bidder. This was a revolutionary act, coming as it did during baseball’s feudal years. The total number of players “Czar” Landis released was more than enough to stock four full teams. Landis’s decree cost the Cards a lot of talent and might well have been a deathblow for Rickey’s baseball career, seven years before Rickey signed Jackie Robinson.

  But Rickey survived. He was not only eloquent, but shrewd and tough. Besides, his great idea, the baseball farm system, worked. It worked so well that it became the wave of the future. Fighting against it—an idea whose time had come—Landis learned what Nicholas II of Russia discovered earlier when he went up against Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Even the power of a czar has limitations.