Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  “Of course he lost when he tried to plead Durocher’s case with that priest. He wasn’t trying to embarrass Rickey. He just lost.

  “I wouldn’t have let O’Malley plead a parking ticket for me.”

  By far the best of recent Dodger books is Bob McGee’s affectionate biography of Ebbets Field, The Greatest Ballpark Ever. McGee writes, “It was inconceivable that Walter O’Malley’s influence within the Church could not defuse the [Durocher] situation. But the fact was O’Malley didn’t much care for Rickey or Durocher and enjoyed their difficulty.” McGee then cites a voluble Dodger executive named Harold Parrott. “One word from O’Malley and the anti-Leo priests would have piped down.

  “But the Big Oom never gave the word.

  “Rickey had reason to wonder who had put the churchmen up to this. The Catholics never boycotted Hitler or Mussolini the way they went after Leo Durocher.”

  I am a little regretful that in all of my conversations with Walter O’Malley, stretching across 35 years, I never asked him about Durocher and the Roman Catholic Church. As I say, a little regretful, but no more than that. Walter was an outstanding fabulist. Had I asked, there is no reason to think he would have responded with the truth.

  The continuing Catholic threats so alarmed Rickey that he dispatched his personal assistant, Arthur Mann, to the offices of the new commissioner, Happy Chandler, in Cincinnati. Mann was to “air out” the Durocher situation. Chandler insisted that he was already on top of the matter because had been reading Judge Landis’s Durocher file. “There are certain people,” Chandler said, “that Leo simply has to stop seeing.” He named Raft and Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis. Mann was surprised Chandler had so much information, but he agreed and said he spoke for Rickey, whose opposition to gambling was resolute.

  A few weeks later Chandler ordered Durocher to meet him at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, California. Leo later said, “Happy had always been a good friend. I used to see him with fast company at the Stork Club in New York. Always gave me a big hello and that hamfat drawl. ‘Ah loves baseball!’” At the Claremont, Chandler bought lunch and then produced a sheet of paper with a list of now familiar names. Durocher was surprised. He had thought, he told me, Chandler wanted to talk about the Laraine Day affair. But as always Durocher responded quickly to an unexpected situation.

  Bugsy Siegel? “I was introduced to him once in a barber shop.”

  Joe Adonis? “Never even met him, but he would say hello to me at the ballpark. I would nod. I told Chandler, Okay, I’ll stop nodding.”

  Memphis Engleberg? “Sure, he was a friend. Whenever we went to the racetrack, he’d mark my card. But I sure as hell can’t tell you whether he ever bet on baseball. I know I never did.”

  Connie Immerman? “If the casino he runs in Havana is controlled by criminals, hell, that’s news to me. I thought it was controlled by Cubans.”

  George Raft? “We’ve hung around together, but if you tell me I can’t stay at his house anymore, and I gotta turn down his invitations, well, you’re the commissioner. I’ll feel like a louse, but I’ll do it.”

  The claims of innocence sound a touch belligerent. Durocher was endlessly a belligerent character. But the Durocher gambling issue of the mid-1940s ran deeper than questionable associations. Bill Veeck, the brilliant and inventive executive who variously owned the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, always had a fondness for gangsters. He explained this to me one day: “When my daddy was on his death bed he said all he wanted on earth was a final glass of Napoleon brandy. This was during Prohibition time. You couldn’t just go out and buy the stuff. So I went down to Al Capone’s headquarters at the old Lexington Hotel and explained the situation. Capone knew about my daddy. My daddy was president of the Cubs. Al said, sure kid, and gave me a bottle of the best Napoleon brandy in his stock. That made my daddy’s final wish come true. Ever since I’ve been a little soft on hoodlums.”

  When Veeck took over the Cleveland Indians in 1946, the Plain Dealer was calling a swaggering local named Alex “Shondor” Birns “the city’s No. 1 racketeer.” Birns supposedly ran Cleveland’s numbers game and was also operating a restaurant, the Alhambra Lounge on Euclid Avenue, “that was considered the in place to go. Famous persons [including Bill Veeck] were frequent customers.

  “The secret charges against Leo Durocher,” Veeck told me, “were that he dumped the 1946 pennant race to the St. Louis Cardinals. At least that’s what Shondor Birns told me. He said he and some other gamblers paid off Leo to mishandle the Dodger pitching rotation. Shondor said that’s what Leo did. Shondor said he personally made a killing.”

  Mob reports of a Durocher fix also reached the offices of Ford Frick, president of the National League. Frick asked New York district attorney Frank Hogan to investigate. Nothing materialized.

  The 1946 pennant race ended in a tie with both the Dodgers and the Cardinals finishing at 96 victories and 58 losses. Frick then ordered a best-of-three playoff series, the first in the long history of the National League.

  For the opening game at Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis, Eddie Dyer, the Cardinals manager, went with his 20-game-winning ace, the slim, elegant left-hander Howie Pollet. Durocher responded with a young right-hander, who in time would become famous as the worst pitcher in all the history of post-season playoffs, Ralph Branca. Only 20 years old back then, Branca spent much of the season with the Dodgers’ St. Paul farm team. Brooklyn’s big winner had been the hard-drinking, hard-throwing veteran, Kirby Higbe.

  The Cards scored once in the first and two innings later knocked out Branca. Then, with the game slipping away, Durocher called on Higbe. Too late. Pollet stayed in command and the Cardinals won, 4 to 2.

  Back at Ebbets Field, Durocher started a durable left-hander, Joe Hatten, in Game 2. The Cards knocked him out in the fifth inning and went and won handily, 8 to 4. (The Cards then defeated the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, four games to three.)

  By themselves box scores will not always reveal crooked play. Shoeless Joe Jackson admitted that he was paid $5,000 to help lose the 1919 World Series when he was playing for the Chicago White Sox. Dumping that Series, Jackson batted .375. So you cannot say for certain that Durocher’s unusual decision to start a rookie in the playoffs is proof of any criminal intent.

  While working on my book The Era in 1990, I had several conversations with Durocher. In one I brought up the 1946 rumors. He gave me a very hard look. “Outrageous,” he said. “Fucking outrageous. You writers either say I tried to win too hard or that I didn’t try to win at all. Double fucking outrageous, and you can print that anywhere you want.”

  Earlier, in 1973, I had no more success in developing a dialogue with Frick, who retired as baseball commissioner in 1965. We were seated side by side at a winter baseball banquet and I said, “Ford, what can you tell me about the Durocher gambling rumors of 1946?”

  “Have you ever seen the Ardsley Curling Club? “ Frick said.

  “I’ve been trying to get a line on that pennant race.”

  “Curling is truly an underappreciated sport,” Frick said. “If you come by the club I’ll give you some pointers.”

  “About Durocher . . .”

  “It is critical to use your curling broom vigorously.”

  This remains one of the more interesting no-comments of my experience.

  What about word from Bill Veeck’s underworld acquaintance, Shondor Birns? I was late getting to him. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer of March 29, 1975:

  Alex (Shondor) Birns, Cleveland numbers racketeer, was blown to bits at 8 last night, seconds after he entered his car parked behind a West Side bar.

  Police, who made the identification, said Birns was hurled through the roof of a 1975 light blue Lincoln Continental Mark IV. The upper torso was found beside the opened front passenger door. . . .

  Police speculated that the car’s ignition may have been wired to several sticks of dynamite. . . .

  On April 9,
1947, four days before opening day, Happy Chandler suspended Durocher for one year. He cited “conduct detrimental to baseball.” He would have no further comment on the matter then or ever.

  Few, if any, anticipated the ruling. By a stroke of a novice commissioner’s pen, Branch Rickey had lost his reckless, fiery manager and, on the very brink of the integration of major-league baseball, Jackie Robinson had lost the man who would have been his champion.

  When Chandler’s contract as commissioner expired in 1951, it was not renewed.

  EIGHT

  THE POWER OF THE PROSE

  DAVE ANDERSON, THE VETERAN SPORTS columnist for the New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, has called Dick Young the best newspaper baseball writer of his experience. Anderson, who has a well-deserved reputation for fair-mindedness, covered the Dodgers during the team’s final five years in Brooklyn. Rickey was gone by then, exiled to Pittsburgh, where his masterly touch was not yet clearly evident. (A season later, 1958, the Pirates finished second and the Dodgers, disoriented in their new Los Angeles surroundings, finished seventh.)

  Why didn’t Rickey remain in Brooklyn, where his signing of Jackie Robinson and his creation of the team I called the Boys of Summer became a triumph, glorious to behold? There had never before been such sociological drama and baseball success anywhere from Canarsie to Brooklyn Heights. Surely one huge factor in the exile was the maneuvering of Walter O’Malley, whom Rickey called “the most devious man that I have ever met.” O’Malley’s lust for power and money was extraordinary. But another consideration was Rickey’s own avarice. It left him vulnerable to O’Malley’s ambushes. But finally a major additional element was the relentlessly anti-Rickey prose, much of it written by Young, published in the lurid popular tabloid, the New York Daily News. “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” as the tabloid billed itself, was selling two million copies a day and twice that many on Sunday. If you wondered about Errol Flynn’s rapaciousness, Franklin Roosevelt’s perfidy or the multitudinous flaws in the character of Branch Rickey, the News was an indispensable source. At one point the paper’s right-wing politics got so extreme that President Roosevelt interrupted a press conference to present John O’Donnell, a crypto-Nazi Daily News columnist, with Hitler’s highest military honor, an Iron Cross.

  I agree with Anderson on Young’s remarkable reporting skill, but other considerations temper my evaluation of this short, loud baseball writer. Young’s ego grew without restraint until, as happens with some journalists, the ego interfered with telling a straight story. Beyond that he was—as Walter O’Malley and Buzzie Bavasi repeatedly demonstrated—readily subject to corruption. Then there was Young’s vulgarity. Not even Leo Durocher was quite so militantly obscene.

  As I wrote earlier, I had a close but contentious acquaintanceship with Young, formed during my years of covering the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune. We sat side by side in press boxes for hundreds of summer days and afterward, in bars, on planes, on trains. I heard him out on his money problems, his extramarital affairs and his simplistic view of life. “You got to remember this,” he said after three or four bourbons, “there are only two kinds of people in the world. The good guysh and the bad guysh.” Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he turned on me. Once when I joined him for breakfast at a hotel coffee shop, he stared up through a hangover and said, “If I fucking looked like you do in the morning, I’d fucking kill myself.” I moved to another table.

  When Young discovered that the fine Dodger pitcher Clem Labine designed men’s sportswear during the winter months, he decided that Labine must be gay. Young disapproved of gays and he began in print to question the manliness and courage of Labine, who was a former paratrooper. At length Labine marched through the clubhouse stripped to the waist and presented himself to the Dodger trainer, a soft-spoken osteopath named Harold Wendler. “Doc,” Labine said. “I want you to tape my right arm behind my back.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, Doc.” When Wendler finished, Labine sought out Young. “Some of the stuff you’ve been writing about me,” Labine said, “is so out of line, the only way we can settle this is with our fists. But I’m bigger than you. I want the fight to be fair. That’s why my right arm is taped behind my back.

  “Are you ready, Dick?

  “Let’s go.”

  Young fled.

  After I left the Tribune and began writing books and magazine articles, I encountered Young from time to time. He usually said something like “You had enough sense to get out of the fucking newspaper business. If I were younger, I would, too.” I never truly caught Young at full foul blast for many years. That came about in April 1972, as The Boys of Summer rose to the top of bestseller lists from Brooklyn to San Francisco. The NYU Varsity Club honored me with a banquet and an award—a modest pewter platter—and asked Young to introduce me from the dais at the NYU Club, then located a few blocks from Times Square. A fine crowd arrived, including Dean John Knoedler, who had taught a lively Shakespeare course with a stress on Shakespeare’s sexual humor, and Sid Tanenbaum, an All-American basketball guard whose smooth, sure-handed performances influenced and inspired many lesser players, including me. Kudos and smiles. The great Tanenbaum shook my hand. The dean asked if I remembered why the character Enobarbus died in Anthony and Cleopatra. “He took thought and died,” I said, echoing one of Knoedler’s finest lectures. “Full credit,” the dean said. “Let me buy you a drink.” Then Young was called on for the formal introduction. He had been drinking bourbon whiskey at great speed.

  “Lotta you maybe think I never went to college,” Young began. “Well, fuck that. I took a writing course at NYU. Teacher was damn pretty. I couldn’t write much back then but I fucked the teacher. She gimme an A. Couldn’t a’ been for my writing. That was lousy. So I figure she gimme an A in fucking.”

  You could feel discomfort in the room. Young was oblivious. “Now I gotta introduce this fucking guy,” he said. “Only covered the Dodgers for around three, four years and he writes a book and it’s a fucking bestseller. Go fucking figure. Here he is.”

  When I got my hands on the microphone I looked at Young and said, “Why did you agree to introduce me if you didn’t want to introduce me?” After that evening we seldom spoke. (Young died in 1987.)

  It may seem curious that such an ineffable boor could write, but Young wrote very good, hard-edged tabloid stuff. When he wanted to point out that the Dodger pitching staff, specifically Ralph Branca, was choking under pressure, he began a story, “The tree that grows in Brooklyn is an apple tree and the apples are in the throats of the Dodgers.” When the columnist Jimmy Breslin started a feud—the subject was Mets’ pitcher Tom Seaver—Young lashed back, repeatedly referring to Breslin as “Fatty the Writer.” Seaver moved on to Cincinnati, Breslin retired from the field.

  Joseph Medill Patterson founded the Daily News in 1919, and it is generally regarded as America’s first tabloid newspaper. The News was easier to read than a full-sized newspaper while one traveled New York’s crowded subways, and this surely contributed to the paper’s success. But so did its extensive and groundbreaking use of pictures, its intense coverage of celebrity scandal and, almost from the start, a much livelier sports section than you could find in, say, the New York Times. Paul Gallico, the hard-driving sports editor of the News during the 1920s, scored heavily with what is now called participatory journalism. Gallico sparred with Jack Dempsey in 1923, when Dempsey was training for his dramatic bout with Luis Ángel Firpo. At six foot three and 192 pounds, Gallico was bigger than Dempsey. No matter. Dempsey knocked him out in 1 minute and 37 seconds. Gallico wrote that after the fall he heard the referee counting, “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.” Gallico followed up by swinging at Herb Pennock’s curveballs, golfing against Bobby Jones and racing laps against the swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller, famous for playing a bare-chested Tarzan in a series of movies. Gallico himself became a national celebrity. Then, in 1936, after covering the Berlin Olympics, he quit ne
wspaper work with a memorable essay called “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.”

  “That was a marvelous era that is past,” Gallico wrote.

  And yet in all those long days of endless excitement, I found myself usually too busy reporting to do much evaluating. Why did we love Dempsey? What makes us go to ballgames to the number of ten million spectators a year? Why do we stand for dirty football? What makes women athletes such wretched sports? Why are Negroes athletic? What makes Gene Tunney tick?

  Sportswriting has been an old and good friend and companion to me. One does not, it seems, barge ruthlessly out of such a friendship. Rather one lingers a little over the good-by, sometimes even a little reluctant to leave, and uncertain, turning back as some old, well-loved incident is remembered, calling up again the picture of vanished friends, having one’s last say, lingering as long as one dares before that final, irrevocable shutting of the door.

  He then began writing books and finished no fewer than 41, many quite popular.

  “I’m a rotten novelist,” Paul Gallico said near the end of his days. “I just like to tell stories. If I had lived 2,000 years ago I’d be going around to caves, and I’d say, ‘Can I come in? I’m hungry. I’d like some supper. In exchange, I’ll tell you a story.

  “‘Once upon a time there were two apes. . . . ’”

  Joseph Patterson had served under Douglas MacArthur during World War I, attaining the rank of captain. That was how he liked to be addressed in the years that followed. But neither Captain Patterson, nor anyone else, could find another tabloid sports editor with all the gifts of Gallico. Instead he promoted a loud, hustling Midwesterner named James Powers, who immediately began writing a daily column called, reasonably enough, the Powerhouse. A decade before Rickey took over the Dodgers, battle lines were being drawn for a small, savage war that in time drove Rickey to fury. As Buzzie Bavasi has said, Rickey was the greatest baseball scout who ever lived. But he had no idea, not a suggestion of a clue, of how to contend with an aggressive and belligerent tabloid press. Many things, including his innate contempt for tabloids, stood in the way. (Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, Bavasi himself better understood the media. In fact, handling the tabloid press, specifically Dick Young, was his forte.)