Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Jack was innately proud, and after six major-league seasons, he had become increasingly confrontational. He needled umpires. He taunted opponents. He corrected reporters when he thought their stories went off the tracks. These qualities in a white baseball man, say Leo Durocher or Eddie Stanky, drew acceptance and even approval from the general run of reporters, who described both as aggressive fighters. But to most reporters around at the time, these same qualities made Robinson “uppity.” They liked their Negroes docile, subservient and saying if and when they spoke, “Yowsah, boss.” These newspapermen were not robed night riders. They just felt that Negroes should know their place, and remain several paces back of the whites. No mainstream New York newspaper—not one—employed a black sportswriter until the New York Times hired Bob Teague in 1959, a full 13 years after Robinson broke into organized ball. All the sportswriters reporting on the Dodgers in the 1950s were white men. Robinson had the keen eyes of a .300 hitter. He noticed.

  Among the various estates in which Robinson sought acceptance—playing field, clubhouse and press box—he believed that the press, the fourth estate, was by far the most acutely bigoted. That is one reason why he started his own magazine.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  AN UMPIRE NAMED FRANK Dascoli called a close pitch against Carl Erskine one summer day at Braves Field in Boston. From second base Robinson shouted, “Do the best you can, Dascoli.”

  Another close pitch. Ball two. Again, “Do the best you can.” After two more close pitches, the runner walked. “Do the worst you can, Dascoli,” Robinson yelled, his strong tenor carrying toward Bangor, Maine. “We’ve seen your best.”

  I laughed. Dascoli threw Robinson out of the game.

  Did this smack of prejudice? I asked Robinson over dinner at the Kenmore Hotel. “I don’t think so,” Robinson said. “Just the case of a lousy umpire. Bad eyes and rabbit ears.”

  At least until his betrayal at the chubby hands of Walter O’Malley in 1956, Robinson accepted the Dodger management that followed Rickey without much complaint. Neither Bavasi nor O’Malley offered anything approaching Rickey’s admiration for Robinson, but Jack accepted that as the way things were. This is not to say that O’Malley and Bavasi were bigoted men. They were not. But neither possessed Rickey’s flaming social conscience.

  During the 1953 season, Robinson telephoned me at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis and reported that during the previous night’s game Eddie Stanky, then managing the Cardinals, held up shoes when Robinson came to bat. “Hey, boy!” Stanky called. “Shine these!” That was followed by some name-calling, “black bastard.” Robinson said to me, “I’ve been in the league for six years and I don’t think I should have to put up with this shit anymore.” Stanky dismissed Robinson’s charges at first, but then backed down. He was competitive, he said, not racist, and he would bother Robinson any way he could.

  I wrote the story, which ran in the early edition of the Herald Tribune. Then the racist sports editor, Bob Cooke, read my piece and ordered it killed. He wired me angrily, “We will not be Jackie Robinson’s sounding board. Write baseball, not race relations.”

  Perhaps I should have quit and gone public right then, but that was beyond what I knew how to do. I was only 25 years old. (I did have the sense and gumption to quit the following year.) When the Western trip ended, O’Malley invited me for “a friendly visit” in his office at 215 Montague Street.

  He began with the obligatory reference to the Brooklyn prep school I had attended and he had served as a trustee. “I’m surprised,” he said, “that a Froebel Academy boy would be so easily taken in.”

  “Who?” I said. “What? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m getting at Jackie Robinson, who got at you.” O’Malley had seen the one-edition story and he said it was “a waste of valuable newspaper space. I’ve known Robinson longer than you and I can assure you that he is first and foremost an inveterate seeker of personal publicity.”

  “But, Walter. What I wrote actually happened.”

  “I have no doubt that it did, but it was of no consequence. By playing up these remarks you make them become more important than they were and, as I have suggested, you give Robinson personal publicity over trivialities.”

  “Walter. The manager of the St. Louis Cardinals called Jack a shoeshine boy. I’d hardly call that trivial.”

  “But it is. It most definitely is. When I was practicing law, I spent hours around the Kings County courthouse. You heard ethnic comments all the time. ‘Look they’ve appointed another Jewish judge.’ A comment like that is absolutely meaningless.”

  “I’d say it is absolutely offensive.”

  O’Malley’s face briefly showed unhappiness. He bit off the end of a cigar, then lit it. “I’m simply suggesting that you focus on the positive,” he said. “We won that game in St. Louis. But now it seems that you and I have a difference of opinion.”

  “My father says that’s what makes horse racing.”

  “How is your dad?” O’Malley said with real warmth. “If he wants to come to the game tonight, I’ll have two box-seat tickets waiting for him at the press gate with my compliments.”

  For me it was just about impossible to dislike Walter Francis O’Malley. But the larger issue here became brilliantly clear in remarks Branch Rickey made on September 22, 1957, the 95th anniversary of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

  “Once Negroes organize effectively in certain areas of the country,” Rickey began, referring to the southern states, “we must be prepared to see political control pass locally to colored citizens. If that day comes, it would be too much to expect all Negroes to forgive and forget the record of the past 100 years. I am afraid the white man will justly reap as he has sown.

  “How long will the white citizens of this country go on ignoring the agony of the Negro? They call you an extremist if you want integration now—which is the only morally defensible position. To advise moderation is like going to a stickup man and saying to him, ‘Don’t use a gun. That’s violent. Why not be a pickpocket instead?’

  “A moderate is a moral pickpocket.”

  Here we encounter two remarkable characters, both agreed on the integration of baseball and in time the country, both agreed that bigotry is wrong. But what a difference in each man’s ethical compass.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  STORY IDEAS FOR OUR SPORTS came in a great rush, partly because Robinson and I had been thinking through racial issues from our different viewpoints across several seasons. I write “partly” here because another reason that story ideas sprouted was nothing less than the mainstream press itself. The New York Times, Bob Cooke’s bigoted Herald Tribune, Newsweek magazine and the New Yorker, to cite just a few samples, all lacked the conscience or the courage to cover racism in sport, let alone in the country at large. The field of socially conscious sportswriting was wide open.

  I remember an enlightened few: the great sports editor Stanley Woodward, who was fired by the Tribune; Jimmy Cannon, composer of passionate columns for the New York Post; Shirley Povich, the Maine gardener’s gentle son who wrote for the Washington Post; and the irascible Dave Egan, a Harvard man who worked for the Boston Record. There may have been others who dared to take on racism, but not many.

  When I first traveled with the Dodgers in 1952, the team was working through a spring-training stretch in Miami, where I was struck at once by the dazzling skills of major-league ballplayers. Then I noticed the comfortable interracial relationship between Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, between Roy Campanella and Carl Furillo and so on through the lineup. I asked the manager, Charlie Dressen, about color as an issue and he snapped back, “It ain’t an issue. Robinson is the best ballplayer I ever managed and if you want to know about prejudice, let me tell you this. I don’t go to church but my family was Catholic. I grew up in Decatur, Illinois. The Klan was big there and the Klan hated Catholics. One night when I was about eight, there was a big commotion and a son of a bitch
was burning a cross out on our front lawn. That’s all you got to know about them bigots. They burn crosses at night to scare eight-year-old kids.”

  As I say, there was no visible racism in the Dodger clubhouse, but after the ballgames blacks and whites had to go separate ways. The white players and the sportswriters, all of whom were white, stayed at the McAllister Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. The McAllister rose across the street from a pleasant bayside park with walkways shaded from the Florida sun by stands of palm. No black dared walk in the bayside park. No blacks were allowed to register at the McAllister.

  After a few days I wondered about accommodations for the black Dodgers, Robinson, Campanella and Joe Black. That led me to drive a rented Chevrolet to a motel in a northern quarter of Miami Beach. This place was called the Sir John, and as I recall it was two or three blocks distant from the ocean. The sandy shores of Miami Beach were restricted to whites.

  Black Dodgers stayed at the Sir John, and so did musicians and other entertainers working the nearby resort hotels, the Algiers, the Roney Plaza and later the Fontainebleau. The Sir John was an undistinguished two-story concrete structure built around a pool. When I got there of an early evening, the scene was dreamlike. In dim light thrown off by Chinese lanterns people sat about on lounges, sipping tropical drinks. Nearby a saxophone player was running off jazz riffs. Except for me, everyone inside the Sir John Motel was black.

  Robinson, wearing gray slacks and a dark polo shirt, walked toward me and we sat at a small table under a folded beach umbrella. “Too quiet for you at the McAllister?” Robinson said.

  “I wanted to see what this place was like.”

  “You’re the first,” Robinson said. “You’ve broken a color line. You’re the first white reporter to come to the Sir John.” He offered a pleasant smile.

  “I also wanted to get your feelings on the state of integration. I think there could be a story there.”

  “You might get in trouble trying to do that. Anyway your paper won’t be interested in what I have to say.”

  “I don’t know just how much I can get into the Trib, but I’ll never know if I don’t try.”

  To begin with, Robinson said, I ought to understand that barriers were coming down “not just because of me. It isn’t even right to say I broke the color line. Mr. Rickey did. I played ball. Mr. Rickey made it possible for me to play.” The brisk (for the time) pace of major-league integration was a pleasant surprise. “It’s been what, six years since I came to Brooklyn and something like half the big-league clubs now will pick up a Negro if he has the ability.”

  “The Yankees—” I started.

  “The Yankees are not in that half. Or the Red Sox. Or the Cubs.”

  “I’ve read that in the beginning you took fierce abuse.”

  “There was a core of ‘antis.’” He pronounced the word “an-ties,” rhyming with “neckties,” and it was Robinson’s own personal term for bigots. “But then there were guys who were supportive. Lee Handley and Hank Greenberg in Pittsburgh. Stan Musial in St. Louis. And on our club, lots of guys. Gene Hermanski, [Gil] Hodges, little Al Gionfriddo. He was the first guy who told me to come on in and shower with the white guys. And, of course, Pee Wee [Reese]. I’ve never had a better friend in sports.”

  “How about the fans?” I said.

  “When I first came up,” Robinson said, “there was organized opposition coming at me. I could tell it was organized because one fan would yell something from one part of the stands, and another would yell the same thing from somewhere else. It became like a chain; it sounded like it had been planned beforehand. It was that way the first time we played an exhibition at Fort Worth, Texas. Now it’s nothing at all in Fort Worth. Only a few yell at you and it’s not organized.

  “The hardest damn thing has been you guys, the press. Dick Young from the News makes things up. Others take shots.”

  I raised a final topic. Rickey had been forced out of Brooklyn after the 1950 season. “Do you miss him in the front office?” I said.

  Before Robinson spoke, he looked at me very hard. “Just say that I’m not Walter O’Malley’s kind of Negro.”

  “Are you saying O’Malley is prejudiced?”

  “No. But I guess I’m saying that O’Malley is not my kind of white man.”

  I shaped Robinson’s comments into a Sunday feature for the Trib and sent it north by Western Union, night press rate collect. The Trib’s editors were always after me for Sunday features, specifically to fill columns of the early edition while waiting for later hard-news stories to break. Sometimes there was nothing to send but fluff. This piece, however, was more than a filler, much more. It contained facts and comments that were fresh and new. I was proud of the story that I called “Jackie Robinson on Integration.”

  It never ran. The most important sports story of the time was the integration of baseball and the Tribune, so admirable in many ways, would have none of it. Just describe ground balls, the editors were telling me. That’s the sort of stuff we really want.

  “I appreciate your trying,” Robinson said, “and look at the bright side.”

  “There is no bright side, Jack. I just got censored.”

  “Oh yes there is,” he said. He started to laugh. “They didn’t make you pay the Western Union bill.”

  But immediately and ultimately this was no laughing matter. Suddenly I recognized the crippling limitations imposed on my assignment. Write about the first integrated major-league baseball team, but be careful. Never, ever mention integration. When I persisted in writing about race, Bob Cooke, the sports editor, pulled me off the Dodgers and sent me into the Arizona desert to cover the Giants. That was in late winter of 1954. Like the Dodgers, the Giants were becoming integrated, but the team had no firebrand like Robinson. Willie Mays was the brightest Giant star but rather than protest against racism—the Hotel Adams, the Giants’ base in Phoenix, refused to accept blacks—Mays affected docility, saying more than once, “Why make a bad fellow of myself?” In his later years, anger exploded within Mays and contributed to his difficult demeanor. But at the time Willie, at 23, was somewhat childlike, except when he was playing ball.

  After a nasty spat with Leo Durocher I left the Trib during the summer of ’54. Durocher accused me of misquoting him and demanded that I apologize. Bob Cooke, the sports editor, said the paper’s relations with Durocher required me to do so. Red Smith later wrote that the Herald Tribune fired me for quoting Durocher accurately.

  By then I was willing, even anxious to move on. Indeed, the story that launched my subsequent writing career was a straightforward, uncensored piece for Sport magazine called “The Ten Years of Jackie Robinson.” In memory I cherish the Tribune and my gifted, cultured colleagues in the sports department. Al Laney, once an assistant to James Joyce. Ed Gilligan, who led me to the novels of Thomas Hardy. The warm, delightful Red Smith, who liked to call his widely popular column “my daily spelling lesson.” The Trib was more than just a newspaper I worked for. It was my university. But accepting censorship, even genteel censorship from a charming, handsome Yale man named Bob Cooke, poisons a writer’s soul.

  For his part, Robinson followed our meetings with a quiet quest to find backers for a magazine that would cover what the mainstream press did not. That was what led to his phone call the following winter asking me to help develop Our Sports.

  I joined him in a suite at the Flatiron Building. Robinson had been conducting a weekly radio show on WNBC and I thought he might want me to help him prepare the scripts. But instead, seated behind a desk in a bare office—there were just two chairs and a desk—he began to outline the magazine that would be called Our Sports.

  Reading from notes, he said that in the days following World War II Negro athletes had reached the top in most major spectator sports. “Our Sports aims to corral all the activities of Negroes in sports into one interpretive medium for the vast Negro audience.” His manner was alive with excitement and enthusiasm. “I’m going to write a col
umn every month. I want you to help me there. I’m a lousy typist. Then I want you to write a story for us under your own byline every other month. And meet with our editors from time to time. We need as many ideas as we can get.” Most of the editors were white. Robinson then mentioned a fee: $150 a month. Since my Tribune salary was only $120 a week, Robinson’s offer was a fine supplement. (When I decided to leave the paper a year later, the editor, Whitelaw Reid, offered me a then staggering $10,000 a year to remain.)

  Robinson’s enthusiasm was understandable. He would finally be able to get his words and ideas into print, and on a regular basis. My enthusiasm matched his; I was excited to start working closely with a complex, brilliant and heroic man.

  But the magazine was doomed from the start. Major advertisers—General Motors, Campbell’s Soup, Philip Morris—discounted the Negro market in those days, and without major advertising a mass-market magazine cannot survive. Jack and I talked that through, and we convinced ourselves that if we published enough powerful stuff we would break that barrier. “I have experience breaking barriers,” Robinson said. We published powerful stuff. The barriers remained.

  We ran a piece called “Will There Ever Be a Negro Manager?” The writer, earnest, intense Milton Gross of the New York Post, thought Monte Irvin of the Giants and Roy Campanella were excellent candidates. Neither became a manager, although Irvin later signed on as executive assistant to the late commissioner Bowie Kuhn. (Frank Robinson became the first black big-league manager at Cleveland in 1975.) We marched fearlessly into hot-button issues. Was the Yankee organization bigoted? We thought so. They discarded an excellent black Puerto Rican first baseman named Vic Power because a scout reported that Power liked white women. Power played with other American League teams for 12 seasons and recorded a lifetime batting average of .284. When I encountered Vic in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1973, he was coaching the island’s national amateur team and was happily married to a pretty blonde.