Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  As his troubles mounted, Jack could take comfort in knowing that Branch Rickey stood solidly behind him; not a scintilla of tension had ever flared in public between the two men. But in July, Rickey’s place in Brooklyn began to crumble. Exactly how it crumbled was to have a severe impact on Robinson’s future with the Dodgers.

  The death that month of one of the four Dodger owners, John L. Smith, a friendly pharmaceutical millionaire well liked by the players, set in motion a struggle for control of the club between Rickey and Walter O’Malley, its vice-president and chief counsel. Like Rickey and O’Malley, Smith had owned a quarter-interest in the Dodgers. Whoever gained control of Smith’s block of shares would be in an excellent position to control the club. Increasingly critical of some of Rickey’s decisions over the years, and ambitious to own the entire operation, O’Malley decided to seek control. (The remaining block of shares was owned by Dearie Mulvey, whose father had run the club in the 1930s; but for some years Mrs. Mulvey had taken no interest in its affairs.) Securing John Smith’s shares, O’Malley then moved to acquire those of Rickey, whose days as general manager were now numbered. Aware that Rickey’s capital was stretched thin, O’Malley offered to buy his quarter-share for exactly the amount Rickey had paid for it, about $300,000. Rickey’s only recourse would be to find a better offer elsewhere, which O’Malley would then have to match, according to board rules, in order to acquire the share.

  Suddenly, in September, Rickey scored a financial coup. In “the biggest deal of his career,” as a newspaper put it, he accepted an offer to sell his stock for $1,050,000 to William Zeckendorf, a rich New York real estate speculator who had helped assemble the parcel of land for the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Of this sum, $50,000 was a premium that Zeckendorf exacted from Rickey—or, in effect, from whoever matched the offer—for tying up his money while the deal unfolded. (Behind Zeckendorf’s serendipitous offer was Rickey’s great friend John W. Galbreath, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, where Rickey would soon be the new general manager.) O’Malley matched the offer. He also soon discovered that Zeckendorf had turned the premium of $50,000 back to Rickey. In O’Malley’s eyes, Rickey had cheated him out of the sum. “That was a lot of money in those days,” O’Malley’s son, Peter, would say in 1972.

  At a press conference in October, as he toyed with an unlit cigar, Rickey denied that a rift existed between himself and O’Malley; although his contract as general manager would expire on October 31, he would be delighted to stay on in Brooklyn. But Rickey was finished on Montague Street; O’Malley would soon exact a fine of one dollar from any employee who mentioned Rickey’s name in his presence. At his own press conference, O’Malley let it be known that the club would take a new direction—away from Rickey. Rickey’s old position would be subdivided, to prevent the abuse of power by any one man. Instead of the frequent sale of players to generate revenue (with Rickey taking a commission on each deal), the Dodgers would aim to win games and serve “the little guy.”

  Rickey’s departure was a blow to Robinson. All his life, America had tested Jack’s faith in religion, in idealism, in America, in himself; Rickey had justified that faith. With Rickey, Jack had not simply been a token of social change but a spearhead into the heart of bigotry. Only recently, that year, Rickey had appointed the first black scout in the major leagues, Elwood Parsons of Dayton, Ohio. Jack, and other blacks, could now dream not simply of playing in the major leagues but of becoming scouts, coaches, and perhaps even managers there.

  Sometime in November, from Ciudad Trujillo, where he and Rachel were on vacation, Jack at last wrote Rickey about his departure. For “about a month” Robinson had been meaning to write, but “finding the right words come hard.” Rickey’s exit had been “tough on everyone in Brooklyn,” but “much worse” for him. “It has been the finest experience I have had being associated with you and I want to thank you very much for all you have meant not only to me and my family but to the entire country and particularly the members of our race.” As for the future: “I hope to end my playing days in Brooklyn as it means so very much but if I have to go any place I hope it can be with you.” He and Rachel hoped that they could continue to count on Rickey’s advice and counsel “regardless of where we may be.” The letter was signed, “Sincerely yours, Jackie Robinson.”

  Instead of ending their relationship, Rickey’s departure seemed to open the way to a deeper understanding between the two men. According to Rickey’s grandson, Branch B. Rickey, “Sometimes my family believed that my grandfather really had two sons—my father and Jackie. We all accepted it as a fact of our lives; we knew that my grandfather loved Jackie, and we all respected Jackie. My own father knew how much Jackie meant to my grandfather and he was careful not to be resentful.” This close relationship, maintained chiefly through telephone calls and infrequent reunions, would last until Rickey’s death in 1965. “God brought these two men together at this time in our history. If they had not met, I am sure that baseball would have become integrated eventually—but never on the same plane, never in the same way, because of the synergy that existed between them. I think Branch Rickey was simply overwhelmed by Jackie Robinson, the quality of the man. Robinson was overwhelmed by my grandfather, who was larger than life in his passion for what he believed in.”

  Speculation now turned to Robinson’s own future with the Dodgers. In September the Sporting News had inquired, with more prescience than it knew, “Jackie Headed for Polo Grounds as a Giant?” Jack waited for news that he, too, was gone. But if O’Malley and E. J. “Buzzie” Bavasi, a veteran in the organization who now took over as general manager, ever discussed trading Robinson, no such move came about. That winter, declaring himself completely satisfied with his pay, Jack signed a 1951 contract to remain a Dodger. His salary was $39,750, up from the 1950 figure of $35,000.

  OCTOBER FOUND JACK once again barnstorming through the South, for the promoters Ted Worner and Lester Dworman. He did so reluctantly. In August, he had accepted an offer to manage the Mayaguez club in the six-team Puerto Rican League during the late fall and winter. “I’ll have my family down there with me,” he said, “and I positively will not play.” Jack also wanted the experience of managing, which he hoped to do one day somewhere in the Dodgers organization in another historic step for a black man. At some point, he discussed his prospects with both O’Malley and Bavasi, who appeared to encourage him. “Nothing was promised,” he said. “The idea intrigues me,” he declared, “for the sake of my race.” Pressed in March to say more, O’Malley himself allowed that there was “no reason why at some later date, Jackie could not become a manager of a triple-A club.”

  Instead of managing in Mayaguez, Jack found himself barnstorming after Worner and Dworman pointed out a clause in his 1949 contract that gave them the right to his services in 1950. In any event, barnstorming paid much more; according to one source, the 1949 tour had netted him over $15,000. Accordingly, in October he set off with Campanella, Newcombe, Larry Doby, and members of the black Indianapolis Clowns on a ramble through the South. In at least one place, Charlotte, North Carolina, blacks played against whites (a team of major leaguers) for the first time in local history. The tour continued uneventfully and profitably through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida, before Jack took his vacation in the Dominican Republic, then returned with Rachel to New York.

  Once again, Jack found himself, accompanied now by Rachel, doing a radio show each Saturday, but he also was appearing on television, where his charm and articulate speech made him a popular guest. He and Campanella found time to work with neighborhood youths at the Harlem YMCA and also to visit schools and youth groups across the city. With his name opening doors, Jack was also instrumental in soliciting funds for a proposed youth center attached to the YMCA. An appeal to John D. Rockefeller III, who sent the organization a gift of $2,500 in December, led a Rockefeller aide to note: “Because the call comes from Robinson, I think it would be ni
ce if you could telephone him or see him briefly.” That fall, Jack also started what would become an annual tradition for him—raising funds and gathering toys, clothes, and other gifts for the poor at Christmas. In 1950, raising about $9,000 for this purpose, he also hosted a party for some fifteen hundred needy youngsters in Harlem.

  With Martin Stone’s shrewd advice, he also sorted through the latest offers. For a while, they discussed with the producers of The Jackie Robinson Story a plan for Jack to do another movie for Eagle-Lion Productions; but nothing came of the idea. Stone looked hard into a proposal for Jack and Rachel to star in a husband-and-wife television show; however, this idea, too, fell through. The likelihood of such a show succeeding in 1951, even with Jackie Robinson involved, was slim indeed.

  BY MARCH, when Jack reached Florida for preseason training, the post-Rickey regime had taken root. The Brooklyn offices had been renovated to purge all traces of Rickey; his fish tank and the portrait of Lincoln were now history. O’Malley had also dismissed Burt Shotton, who had been derided by Dick Young in the New York Daily News as aloof, indifferent to his players’ problems, “a vain, proud and stubborn person.” In his place, warmly welcomed by Robinson, who would later call him his favorite manager, was Charlie Dressen. Only five feet five inches but thickly built, outgoing, and confident to the point of egotism, the fifty-three-year-old Dressen had been a mediocre player but an aggressive coach or manager, first with the Reds, then with the Dodgers, before going on to the Yankees. In Brooklyn he had once served under Durocher; like Durocher and Robinson, he had an insatiable desire to win and the self-assurance that he could outsmart any opposition. Dressen made it clear who his ideal Dodger was: “I am counting on Robinson to be the most valuable player in the National League next year.”

  In Florida, O’Malley made other changes. The austere complex at Vero Beach would serve for basic conditioning; the team would then move to Miami for its exhibition games, in Miami Stadium. Most players welcomed the change, but for Jack and the other black players it meant a return to Jim Crow. They could not eat in, much less stay at, the luxurious hotel that would house the white players and staff. For Rachel, who came down to Miami with Jackie and Sharon and other team wives, the Jim Crow arrangement was humiliating. “It certainly did not help to bring us together,” she said of the players’ wives. “I remember sitting on a rickety old ‘colored’ bus with Jackie Junior and seeing some of the white Dodger women staring at us as we drove off to our colored and quite unequal hotel. Or waiting for the infrequent ‘colored’ taxi to come along, since white drivers could or would not take us. That was certainly not the best way to make friends.”

  Bottling up his resentment, however, Jack concentrated on getting in shape. Dieting had become a serious, if painful, part of his daily routine. Over the winter, at Dressen’s urging, Jack had gone at least three times on a ghastly Mayo Clinic diet consisting mainly of eggs and grapefruit. “That dieting business is awful,” he complained to reporters. “The main feature is no bread, and boy how I love that bread.” At Vero Beach (joined by Newcombe and Campanella, who were even more seriously overweight) he put himself on another round of this diet. He also repudiated his 1950 strategy of restraint: “I’m going to open up on the bases this season.” The other Dodgers were also eager for battle. The pitching corps of Roe, Newcombe, Erskine, Branca, and Clyde King was healthy; the home-run power of the Dodgers, tops in the league for the past two years, seemed assured. The outfield, especially Snider and Furillo, was fleet, the infield probably the best in the majors. And everyone seemed ready to follow Dressen. “We have a different attitude this year,” Jack wrote. “I can tell that by the way the fellows talk and act. Last year at this time we thought we could take it any time we wanted. We knew we had the best team.… This year we feel we have the best team, but we know now we will have to scratch and fight to win every game. That’s the way we are going at it.”

  For Jack, the scratching and fighting began in the exhibition season. Unfortunately, the enemy was not a baseball team but an umpire—Frank Dascoli of the National League, in a game at Asheville, North Carolina. Called out at first by Dascoli, Robinson lit into him with heated words that continued after Dascoli ejected him. Later, Dascoli accused him of using ethnic slurs—“wop,” “dago,” and the like—in his tirade. The charge shocked Jack. If Dascoli was seeking to discredit Robinson, he could hardly have picked a more clever way, even as Jack, adamantly supported by the Dodger coach Jake Pitler, denied using such language. “Jackie would never use an ethnic slur, never,” Carl Erskine said. “And he was not a real umpire-baiter, compared to many other players. He disliked inconsistent umpiring, that was all. He was a superb, complete major leaguer, even when his skills were running down. He was a disciplined and spiritual person who would not have used ethnic slurs, period.” Consciously or not, a trap was being set for Robinson. Both at home, from Rachel, and within the club, he heard advice to be quiet. Dressen warned him about the futility of antagonizing umpires. “I like aggressive play and want you to be that way,” he assured Jack, “but lay off those umpires. If you get a reputation for questioning every decision they’ll give you the works and it will hurt you as well as the club.” Later in the month Dressen spoke out again: Jack “might be a little too aggressive for his own good.… I don’t want to get the umpires mad at him. He’s too valuable to get put out of games.”

  Lying low when he was sure that a conspiracy, formal or informal, existed against him was difficult for Robinson. At Ebbets Field, after clashing with umpires Babe Pinelli and Dusty Boggess, he flatly declared his belief that some umpires were abusing him: “Anything I do, they’ll give me the worst of the breaks. I know what I am up against.” Although he had promised to try and stay out of trouble, “I’m not blind. I think I know what’s going on. Certain umpires are out to get me.” Although he didn’t want trouble, he told the Chicago Tribune, “I’m not going to be a sitting duck.” Even to some of his allies, Jack’s challenge to the umpires was ill-advised and even unseemly. To those disposed to dislike him, he was indeed a sitting duck. The Sporting News, now superficially in support of integration in baseball, criticized Robinson for his “umpire-baiting.” In a haughty rebuke, the journal called upon him to be “the superb and stylish batsman, the deadly double-play dealer, the intrepid base-runner” he often was, which would “perhaps” take him one day to the Hall of Fame. However, “for the mean and petty practices of the chronic griper, there is no place, except in shabby, sordid memory.”

  As usual, such hostility served mainly to drive Robinson to new heights of brilliance. Early in June, his batting average stood at .412, tops in the majors. And despite uneven pitching, the Dodgers were off to a fine start. In contrast, the Dodgers’ crosstown rivals, Durocher’s Giants, staggered from the gate; by early May, the team had lost eleven straight games. When five losses to the Dodgers exacerbated the bitterness between the two teams, Jack found himself yet again at the center of a storm.

  By this time, Durocher and Robinson, both driven to win, had spawned one of the more complicated personal relationships in baseball. Jack had never forgiven Durocher for humiliating him in Ciudad Trujillo in 1948 about being overweight; later that season, he was also not charmed when Giants fielders picked him off three times on the base paths. Yet Durocher had backed Jack’s entry into baseball, and he had never allowed race to surface as a factor even when Robinson tested the limits of his tolerance. Jack did so by bringing Laraine Day, Durocher’s film-actress wife, into their war and appearing to question the sexuality of the Giants manager, a noted clotheshorse given to dowsing himself with cologne. “Leo,” Jack would announce loudly, as he sniffed the air, “I can smell Laraine’s perfume.” (Ms. Day, after watching Robinson play in the 1947 World Series, had told a reporter she was “ ‘amazed’ by his catlike movements.”) After Jack’s first crack about perfume, according to Harold Parrott, Durocher sent him a case of Lifebuoy soap at the Dodger clubhouse; Leo wanted Jack to know he stank. �
��My dick to you,” Durocher yelled at Robinson in another exchange. “Give it to Laraine,” Jack shouted back, “she needs it more than I do.” Perhaps these exchanges explain why Durocher at times seemed obsessed by Robinson. “You’ve got a swelled head,” Durocher would scream at Jack. “Who are you to have such a big head?”

  Late in the season, Laraine Day herself got into the act, mocking Robinson and the Dodgers as a bunch of sissies. “Did you notice,” she asked reporters after a game in which he was hit by a pitch, “how Robinson rubbed his hand where he was supposed to have been hit? He kept rubbing it for a long time.” No Giant player would have rubbed: “Our boys aren’t cry babies.” (Jack promised to fix Laraine good after the season, on his radio show.) The heckling between Robinson and Durocher continued on to the last game—that is, the last scheduled game—of the season, on September 9, even as Robinson denied hating Durocher. “I just don’t like to be called big-headed and I don’t care to be knocked down.”

  To Pee Wee Reese, the Robinson-Durocher war of words was mainly a comic spectacle. But it also had its violent aspect, mainly because Durocher expected his pitchers to intimidate opposing batters. In 1951, with the Robinson-Durocher feud still going strong, Jack and Sal “the Barber” Maglie, the saturnine Giants pitcher, clashed after Maglie, goaded by Durocher, sent the Dodger player down into the dirt with wicked inside pitching. Jack, setting down a bunt designed to lure Maglie over so that Jack could level him, ended up only bumping Maglie after he refused the bait. When Durocher denounced the play as “bush” league, Robinson assured everyone that Durocher himself had taught him the trick when he managed the Dodgers. As the series progressed and became more violent, with several Dodger players hit or menaced by Giant pitchers at Durocher’s command, Robinson kept up an almost maniacally intense verbal barrage against the Giants. Hit by the pitcher Larry Jansen, he mocked him as he trotted to first: “You’ve got a nerve to try to scare a guy with that stuff. Try and do it again.” His taunting rattled Jansen, who proceeded to yield a monstrous homer to Hodges, a double to Bruce Edwards, a single to Reese, and a double to Cox before he was hustled off the mound. Over six games, Jack hit three home runs, drove in eight runs, and averaged .409. While the Dodgers gloated in triumph, Durocher was left to mumble, unconvincingly, that “it’s a long season.”