Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Joe Bostic of the short-lived black newspaper the People’s Voice subsequently wrote, “I’ve never forgiven any of these guys [Rickey’s audience] for not showing resentment and indignation at Rickey’s effrontery. They were adults. They were educated and intelligent people. And someone, a white man at that, is going to tell them how to act in a public place!”

  But as Rickey expanded on his theme, he carried the black leaders along with his patronizing approach. Mann wrote that Rickey’s words prompted “deafening applause.” Before the evening was done, the blacks had agreed to create a “Master Committee” charged with controlling the enthusiasm of black fans. In time almost the entire black community of Brooklyn was involved, including bartenders who were advised to tell their patrons, “If you want to drink John Barleycorn, then stay away from the ballpark.” The black sportswriter Dan Burley, who was raised in Fort Worth, warned his readers against transforming “our Yankee Stadium routines, at Negro League games, to Ebbets Field.” Burley went on, “You know the Stadium routines, don’t you? They are staged with beer and pop bottles. Knives sometimes. Once in a while they use blackjacks for props. The variations come when two big fat ugly women get to wrestling with each other in the grandstands, sweating and cussing like sailor-trained parrots.”

  I have not found a comparably appalling description of black baseball fans anywhere in the mainstream white press. Nonetheless Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn was an idea whose time had come. It was safe even beyond a bit of after-dinner blundering by Branch Rickey and a misguided polemic typed by one Dan Burley.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  JACKIE HIMSELF WAS WINTERING in California. November brought the birth of Jackie Robinson Jr., a star-crossed child whose turbulent life ended in the wreckage of a sleek English sports car before he reached his 25th birthday. As a husband and now a father, Robinson faced a problem common to all young ballplayers in the employ of Rickey: money. Or rather the absence thereof. Rickey paid Robinson a $3,500 signing bonus, and $600 a month during the season. By his standards, these figures were generous. (He refused to pay anything to the Kansas City Monarchs for Robinson’s contract on the grounds that the Monarchs “are not a legitimate business.”)

  Some forgotten black promoters out of Pittsburgh organized a barnstorming tour for the Jackie Robinson All-Stars to play exhibitions in October and November. “I came back to California with the promoters’ checks amounting to about $3,500,” he told me. “That would have gotten us through the winter in decent shape. But the damn checks bounced. Every one.” Robinson took his case to the famous black lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall. This produced promises but no cash. Robinson then signed to play with a semi-pro basketball team, the Los Angeles Red Devils, for $50 a game. But at Rickey’s insistence he quit after a few weeks. “He was afraid,” Robinson said, “that I’d get hurt.”

  All but 1 of the 10 leading batsmen from the International League’s season of 1946 quickly were promoted to the major leagues. The exception was the batting champion, Robinson. As hot-stove league conversations rose and fell, questions about Rickey’s intent drew only stony silence from the normally loquacious executive. Jackie himself, who never criticized Rickey, told reporters, “I guess he wants to make sure my good season with the Royals was no fluke. And I can’t say that I blame him.”

  Years later, in a number of conversations, Rickey carefully explained to me his thinking during the winter of 1946–47. The concept that Robinson’s great season was a fluke, he said, “never crossed my mind. Just take one aspect of his play. Bunting. Jackie was an even better bunter than the old standard bearer, Ty Cobb. There was no question in my mind that Jackie would become a star.” But Rickey himself was feeling isolated. Almost to the man, the other club presidents opposed bringing Robinson into the major leagues. The commissioner, Happy Chandler, was not overly opposed to integration, as his predecessor, the sharp-faced Kensesaw Landis, had been, but Chandler offered no public words of support. The press was mixed. For every Jimmy Cannon whose heart and prose reached out to support integration, there was a Jimmy Powers dismissing Rickey as a cheap, self-promoting bum. So it was not as if when 1947 dawned Rickey was riding a mighty tide of approval for the long overdue integration of baseball. He was not.

  “Even at home,” he said, “I faced opposition. My wife, Jane, a fine Christian woman, enthusiastically supported baseball integration but very firmly maintained that I should stay out of it. I was 67 years old. Jane thought the strains associated with integration would lay me underground.”

  Looking for support, Rickey said, he turned to the ballplayers. “The Cardinals had just beaten the Dodgers in a pennant playoff. I thought, or anyway hoped, that when the Brooklyn placers saw Robinson, saw what he could do, they would rally round and demand that I call him up. I thought they would see not only a black star but also a World Series share, perhaps $7,500 in those days, essentially doubling the annual pay of many players.” As Rickey later conceded, this was a complete miscalculation. To once more cite Sartre on anti-Semitism, “bigotry is a passion.” As such it can be totally dominating, like lust.

  The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers would not undergo spring training amid the stubby palmetto trees and racist cops of southern Florida. Rickey moved the Dodgers and the Montreal Royals clear out of the country to a solid, if steamy, baseball town, Havana, Cuba. Broadly, this was a land dominated by a brilliant, charming and totally corrupt former Cuban army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista.

  I was invited to lunch at Batista’s villa at another time. He proudly displayed a library of at least 1,000 books, all leather-bound and neatly inscribed in white ink F. Batista. “I have read every one,” he told me. His English was excellent and he said with some pride that he came from a poor working-class family and had been a laborer in the fields, on the docks and for the railroads. “I peddled fruit,” he said, “and I was a tailor and a mechanic. All this before I joined the army.” He advanced to sergeant and then, through the force of his charisma and his intelligence, he became the union leader of Cuba’s noncommissioned soldiers. In 1933 he led an uprising known as the Revolt of the Sergeants, and from that time forward he remained the Cuban Strongman. His absolute power endured until 1959, when Fidel Castro’s revolution forced him into exile in Spain. I remember thinking once or twice during a long and genial conversation with this stocky, loquacious character that he could have me liquidated in an instant in the manner of Josef Stalin.

  I did ask him about some revolutionary rumblings, explosions in public places throughout Havana. “Hah,” he said. “In New York you have the Bomber Mad. Here we have 12 bombers mad.”

  I thought that was an amusing and harmless response and published it in Newsweek, where I had been working as sports editor. The Cuban authorities dissented from my viewpoint. The next issue of the magazine was censored by scissors. The Mad Bomber item was carefully cut out of every copy of Newsweek that entered Cuba.

  The established white upper class in Cuba, wealthy from fields of sugarcane and tobacco farms, looked down on Batista as a boisterous multiracial character who was dangerous but could be bribed. Batista was of mixed European, Chinese, African and Amerindian descent. Initially he promised the Cuban people democratic socialism, but in a long and dismaying epoch, he sold out to big American industrial interests and then entered into horrific dealings with such American hoodlums as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. In time Batista ceded to the hoods control of Cuba’s two preeminent tourist attractions, casino gambling and prostitution.

  An American journalist named David Detzer, visiting Batista’s Havana back then, wrote an unsparing description.

  Brothels flourished. A major industry grew up around them: government officials received bribes, policemen collected protection money. . . . Prostitutes could be seen standing in doorways, strolling the streets, or leaning from windows. . . . One report estimated that 11,500 of them worked their trade in Havana. . . . Beyond the outskirts of the capital, beyond the slot ma
chines and the prostitutes, was one of the poorest—and most beautiful—countries in the Western world.

  I remember walking the streets of Batista’s Havana at night and being constantly solicited by big-bottomed hookers or by their acned, adolescent pimps. “Seestair,” one boy called to me. “Cinco pesos.” He then made a sucking sound. But there was no violence, none at all. American tourists were a significant asset to Cuba, and Batista’s police guarded them as though they were vestal virgins.

  It is an interesting irony that Rickey, the moralist, seeking to avoid American racism, put his young ballplayers into the hooker (and gonorrhea) capital of the Western world. Some, surely not all, of the ballplayers behaved like churchwardens.

  Rickey divided his playing personnel into three categories: major league, minor league and black. He booked the Dodgers into the famous Hotel Nacional de Cuba, a glittering eight-story resort towering over the Malecón, Havana’s great roadway overlooking the Gulf Stream and the sea. Winston Churchill had favored the Nacional, as had the movie Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, and the Duke of Windsor. Its elegance confused some of the ballplayers, whose customary off-the-field attire consisted of dungarees and T-shirts. Preoccupied with other matters, Rickey never did impose a dress code.

  “Let me tell you about the Nacional,” said Mike Gavin of Hearst’s New York Journal-American. “The steaks were so thick you could barely cut them. Rickey picked up the basic tab for most of the writers, but there was another problem. At the Nacional I couldn’t afford the tips. . . . ”

  Rickey booked the white Montreal Royals into the barracks at a nearby upscale military academy. The blacks, Robinson and now Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, were dispatched to a small, drab hotel called the Boston.

  “I was enraged,” Robinson told me. “We quit Florida and we get segregated by the dictator of a banana republic. When I calmed down Mr. Rickey told me it was he, not Batista, who did the segregating. He said it was absolutely essential that there be no black–white conflict at this point in time within the Dodger organization. I ended up accepting his approach. I pretty much accepted all of Mr. Rickey’s approaches in those days.”

  Ernest Hemingway’s villa, Finca Vigía, was located just outside Havana. Boxing was Hemingway’s favorite sport, but he followed baseball closely, and now he invited a dozen Dodgers to party at the villa. Whiskey flowed freely and after a while Hemingway began boasting of his skill with his fists. Although he was 20 years older than the ballplayers, and probably out of shape, he offered to take on any of them, one-on-one. Hugh Casey, the hulking relief pitcher from Georgia, stepped forward and within a minute knocked Hemingway clean through a glass cocktail table. Hearing the clatter and the thud, Mary Hemingway ran downstairs, helped her husband to his feet and banished the Dodgers into the tropic night. “We are never inviting ballplayers here ever again,” she said to friends.

  “But we were innocent,” Pee Wee Reese told me. “No one lifted a finger until Hemingway started throwing punches at Big Hughie.” (Curiously the lives of Hemingway and Casey ended in similar ways: suicide, a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. Casey died in 1951 at the age of 37 following a broken romance. Hemingway’s death came a decade later when he was 61, after extended episodes of mental illness.)

  Jackie Robinson underwent a difficult spring. As I’ve noted, he neither drank nor smoked, but Robinson was a serious major-league eater. Steak, shrimp cocktail, french fries, apple pie topped with two baseball-sized lumps of vanilla ice cream. Jack loved them all. It was said he never saw a meal he didn’t like. Except in Cuba. “The food at the Boston,” he said, “was so bad it actually made me sick. Everything was fried. Everything was greasy. I suffered a couple of bouts of dysentery. That didn’t help my ball playing.”

  Nor did a decision from the Dodger general staff. Eddie Stanky was the established Brooklyn second baseman of whom it was said, “He can’t run, he can’t hit, he can’t throw. All he can do is beat you.” Pee Wee Reese was securely established at shortstop. The Dodgers put a rookie at third, John “Spider” Jorgenson, whose hustling style pleased manager Leo Durocher. But first base? Well, there was Howie Schultz, tall and strikeout prone, and “Big Ed” Stevens, who had some power but essentially was a .250 hitter. “First base,” Durocher told Rickey, “is where we most need help.” Rickey dispatched one of his assistants to a Cuban sporting goods store where, for $14.50, he bought a new first baseman’s mitt. Rickey presented the glove to Robinson, who had never before played an inning at first base in organized ball.

  “I wasn’t pleased,” Robinson told me. “Now, in addition to everything else, I was going to have to learn a new position.” First base is different from the other infield spots in that most of the time you move not toward the ball but to the bag. Catching throws properly involves a stretch toward the ball and deft footwork. Robinson never became really comfortable at first.

  For all Rickey’s expertise at scouting, he was unaware that the organization already included an athlete who would become an all-star first baseman. That was 23-year-old Gil Hodges, who came up as a catcher. The Dodgers summarily assigned Hodges to Newport News of the Piedmont League for 1947, where he caught 120 games and hit .276 with good power. It was not until 1948 that Hodges became the Dodger first baseman. Robinson then moved to second (Stanky moved to the Boston Braves, charging, “I’ve been stabbed in the back.”) When Rickey acquired third baseman Billy Cox in a trade with Pittsburgh, the Dodgers fielded one of the great defensive infields of all time: Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox. “Those fellers can really pluck ’em,” Joe Black said in his understating way.

  Reviewing this period with Robinson, I thought of Job. Jack was segregated from the white players, stuck in a third-rate hotel, fed brutal cooking and now to crack the major leagues he had to learn a strange position. “At least,” I said, “Rickey neglected to ask you to sweep the clubhouse.” Robinson did not crack a smile.

  Attendance at Havana’s Gran Stadium was disappointing, running to only about 3,500 a game. Robinson’s color—and gate appeal—were not distinctive in a Caribbean setting. The Cuban Baseball League traced back to the 1870s and began including black ballplayers in 1900. All the great Negro League stars, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, played Cuban winter ball without controversy. “Negro League salaries were terrible,” Joe Black said. “We had to play winter ball in Cuba to make a living.”

  After Rickey’s athletes rounded into shape, he organized a seven-game trip across the Panama Canal Zone, where the Royals took on the Dodgers every day. Rickey met privately with Robinson and issued marching orders. “Jackie, you can forget about what you did at Montreal last year. That’s ancient history so far as these men [the Dodgers] are concerned. Your minor-league record doesn’t mean a thing. You’ll have to make the grade on the field against major-league pitching and major-league defense, so I want you to be a whirling demon against the Dodgers. I want you to concentrate, to hit that ball, to bunt, to get on base by any and every means, I want you to run wild, to steal the pants off the Dodgers, to be the most conspicuous player on the field—but conspicuous only because of the kind of baseball that you’re displaying. Not only will you impress the Dodger players, but the stories that the newspapermen send back to Brooklyn and New York will create demand on the part of the fans that you be brought up—now!” In an uncertain time, Rickey looked everywhere for support.

  Robinson thought briefly. “I’ll do my best” was all he said. Robinson then played superlative baseball and the Dodgers responded by circulating a petition to bar him from the team. Glory and infamy were marching side by side.

  The story of the anti-Robinson petition has been told and mistold several times, most recently in a 2010 book called Dixie Walker of the Dodgers: The People’s Choice, composed by Dixie’s daughter, Susan, and the late, prolific Maurice Allen Rosenberg, who wrote under the name of Maury Allen for a variety of publications. Allen/Rosenberg was energetic at the keyboard but a t
ireless self-promoter who was often a stranger to truth. He claimed, for example, to have covered the Dodgers in their late years in Brooklyn, but during that period he was a lowly fact-checker working within the Manhattan offices of Sports Illustrated. Allen and Susan Walker insist in their book that Dixie did not originate the petition, which is not the story that Walker told me.

  Not only did he originate the petition, he typed a letter to Rickey on March 26, 1947, requesting a trade. I found that memorable letter in one of the many bins in one of the many warehouses of the Library of Congress. Rickey had donated it to the library.

  “Recently,” Walker wrote in that long-ago spring, “the thought has occurred to me that a change of ball clubs would benefit both the Brooklyn baseball club and myself. Therefore I would like to be traded as soon as a deal can be arranged. For reasons I don’t care to go into, I feel my decision is best for all concerned.”

  In those old reserve-clause days, ballplayers were given no control of their careers—highly paid peons, some called them—and Walker’s letter infuriated Rickey. At a staff meeting Rickey said, “No players on the Dodgers will have anything to say about who plays or who does not play on the club. I will decide who is on it and Durocher will decide who of those who are on it does the playing.”

  He did not deal Walker until December. Then he shipped him with two journeymen pitchers, Hal Gregg and Vic Lombardi, to Pittsburgh. In return Rickey acquired the great left-hander Preacher Roe and Billy Cox, at his peak arguably the best defensive third baseman of all time. Trade? This was more like grand larceny.