Branch Rickey (10 page)

The owners' vote on this report was 15-1 in favor. Rickey was the only one against. He walked out of the meeting in Chicago in cold anger. When he got back to Brooklyn, he found he didn't have a copy of the statement. He called for one and was told that all had been destroyed, at which point he knew the owners were going to try to evade, duck, and short-circuit the law. He walked out of his office and flew to Blue Grass Field in Lexington, Kentucky, a place of sprawling horse farms and a university and the home of baseball's new commissioner, Albert B. Chandler, known as “Happy,” who was in the office behind his house. Rickey sat in a leather chair.

“Rickey told me that he couldn't go ahead in face of that vote,” Chandler recalled. “He said, ‘I can't do it unless I have your full support.' ”

“Can this man play?” Chandler recalls asking Rickey.

“He could make the major leagues today.”

“Then bring him on.”

 

Through all this time in New York, while Rickey is trying to change America, there are eight large daily newspapers. The true calling of news reporting was to reach into the sky and try to change some of the sour patches of earth beneath. It never happened. A few Southern editors stood up for blacks, and their actions were so monumental that these men are still known today—Ralph McGill of Atlanta, and Hodding Carter of Mississippi, and Harry Ashmore of Little Rock, to name the most obvious. Hugo Germino of the Durham
Herald-Sun
, Smith Barrier of the Greensboro, North Carolina,
Daily News
, and Frank Spencer of the
Winston-Salem Journal
believed that Robinson was at least a human being and wrote about him as such.

No white editor in the North became a civil rights legend because no white in the North wanted anything to do with it.

Some years later, Bob Teague, who played football at Wisconsin and therefore had an aura of fall leaves and Saturday-afternoon Big Ten games, was hired by the
New York Times
and worked quite successfully for many years. Teague was black. Always he covered sports. Only a few subway stops away from the paper's offices was Harlem, where children were raised in poverty and went to schools that did not teach.

They were not called reporters then, they were known as baseball writers, or boxing writers, or racing writers. Those were the big jobs in the sports departments. If you covered racing you got the chance to be with the grandest of people, the Whitneys and Woodwards. The boxing writers hung around with real men, including managers who were always ready with a payoff, whether it was required or not. I covered two fights when the boxing writer was away in my time at the old Hearst paper in New York, the
Journal-American
. I am stuck in snow at three in the morning and so I take a room at the Hotel Edison. I go to the all-night drugstore at Broadway and 50th to get toothpaste and a toothbrush. From a snowbank on the corner leaps Sol Gold, a co-manager of the great middleweight champion Tony Zale. He leaps in front of me so he can pay for the toothbrush and toothpaste.

Since baseball was top in readership, its writers had the best jobs. Just hours after New Year's Day they were en route to Florida or Arizona. Someday they would fly, but back then they traveled by Pullman from city to city and stayed in top hotels and ran up so many overtime days that they never had to answer the phone or do a lick of work in the off-season. There were three major league teams in New York and writers were assigned to them permanently and for years. They regarded themselves as part of the team, as in, “We're playing Detroit tomorrow.” The writers covering the Yankees were preposterously stodgy. Those with the Dodgers liked golf, for some reason. Since the Giants were owned by an alcoholic, the writers all drank heavily. One writer, Joe King, of the
World-Telegram
, wrote with Balzac's dagger in every sentence about the Giants' manager, Leo Durocher. In return, Leo went to the taxicab that took King away from the old Polo Grounds ballpark each night and left a note saying “You are a stumbling drunken bum.”

In the Cincinnati Reds' old Crosley Field, two big, wonderful German women had a counter near the press box from which they served the largest sandwiches in all of baseball, and maybe sports. Surely, members of the Baseball Writers Association deserved such service, even though, because of them, there was not a black mouth to feed.

The Baseball Writers Association of America organization was a fake and a fraud, a shill as white as the Klan. The teams paid the way for the writers traveling with them, starting with spring training. They also gave the writers $8 a day meal money. Only one or two newspapers declined to be part of such a corrupt arrangement. The others were delighted to save the money.

The association was in charge of all press boxes at baseball games, and only reporters working for daily newspapers, and thus only whites, were permitted to enter. Association rules kept out reporters from the weekly papers, almost all of whom were black. There was the New York
Amsterdam News
and similar papers in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore, and elsewhere, all shut out.

In Brooklyn, the only reporter from a weekly paper admitted to the Baseball Writers Association was Jack Butler of the
Brooklyn Tablet
, the official publication of the borough's Roman Catholic Diocese. As there were perhaps fifteen black Catholics in the entire diocese, this made their weekly newspaper safe and white.

The association rules were so sinful and scandalous that even a faint voice in protest could have shattered the arrangement. But it continued to exist because the team owners allowed it. The newsmen opposed not. Everybody was silently satisfied at working in the atmosphere of a restricted country club. Comfort would be ruined by the opening of the door for even one black sports reporter. Who would sit next to him?

When the rumor of Jackie Robinson first turned real, the association polled members in each city. Someone had the notion that a strong negative reaction to Robinson by baseball writers would keep him out. It did not. In Cincinnati, there was a single vote against Robinson. Everybody assumed it had been cast by Tom Swope of the
Cincinnati Post
, an old-timer, gruff as a watchman. Swope said nothing. Of course he was far better than voting to keep some infielder from earning a living just because he has dark skin.

In New York, Jimmy Powers, the sports editor of the
Daily News
, then with a circulation of nearly three million, wrote not even one column during this time that called for making room for black players. The thought of Powers, with that immense circulation behind him, losing the clear chance to become a new and commanding figure in America causes you to wince. Oh, he lost that chance, don't worry about that. He was the most persistent and vicious of Rickey's enemies. He delighted whites who saw blacks as not just playing baseball but also taking white men's jobs in the iron workers' union.

In 1946, from June until September, Powers wrote eighty columns against Rickey.

Rickey had neither met nor even seen Powers. At an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium, Rickey told his press agent, Harold Parrott, “Tell me what he's wearing. So when I look around I'll know him.” Powers wasn't there. He never went anywhere except to Madison Square Garden, where he announced the Friday-night fights on television for Gillette razors, and the mobsters who promoted the fights under the name of the International Boxing Club. Otherwise, he wrote his column and went to the golf course in Westchester.

Faced with this barrage from Powers, Rickey plunged into temporary madness himself. He and his people at 215 Montague Street put together a thirty-seven-page rebuttal. “His charges are poisonous smokescreens, personal vilification, innuendoes, colored exaggerations, half truths, untruths, flat lies,” they wrote.

Rickey showed it to John Smith, who as president of Pfizer understood that you survive on remaining cool and patient and not stumbling. He told Rickey, “Your mode of refuting Powers's assertions dignifies them and adds weight to them.” Smith knew that someone practicing prolonged lousiness usually winds up falling into your lap. And in this he was correct.

One day in 1949, Rickey received a copy of a letter Powers had written to somebody in his business:

The letter brought jubilation to the Dodgers' office mail room. A guy called out, “This does it!”

“And you are doing what?” Rickey asked.

“Sending it to every newspaper in the city,” the mail room guy said.

“No, you're not. You're throwing it away,” Rickey said. “Nobody is to know this exists. I've never sunk low enough to do a thing like this. I never should have taken him seriously. Now we can forget him.”

Rickey called John Smith at Pfizer and thanked him profusely for being right. Of course only the owner of heaven could walk completely away from a wonderful opportunity to inflict some discomfort on a rat that had been gnawing on his feet for some time. Somebody in the Brooklyn office called Powers and told him that Rickey had the letter and was holding it and would do nothing with it. Immediately, Powers looked out the
Daily News
sports department window at 42nd Street and took many deep breaths to keep his heart from stopping dead. After which he never wrote another bad word about Branch Rickey.

Rickey then—just for nothing, for he never would think of getting even—sent free passes to Dodgers games to Powers and his family. Powers promptly answered: “I appreciate your thoughtfulness very much. I too wish you a lot of luck, and if there is anything I can do for you during the season, I will be glad to do all I can do to help you.”

Of the other white sports reporters in New York, none matched the bitterness of columnist Joe Williams of the
World Telegram
, a Scripps-Howard paper. He was out of Memphis, and it showed. By printing Williams's tobacco road views, the publishers showed support for them. He never quit. In 1946 Williams wrote that Rickey deliberately lost the pennant race for the Dodgers by trading second baseman Billy Herman to the Boston Braves and postponing a championship until the next year, when Robinson's arrival would make it “a Negro Triumph.” Then, a few years later, when Robinson was a fixture with the Dodgers, Williams wrote, “It might help Jackie Robinson if he remembered that he came into the majors as a ballplayer, not a symbol.”

Robinson caused the gravest of all fears: what if this black man makes it and then there is another one after him and soon a third and fourth and more, then what will happen to our way of life, this national pastime, if these players take everything and the whites we applauded turned out not to be so great and wound up working in Southern gas stations? And what if our fans can't stand sitting next to blacks and leave the ballparks and the game? Civilized society had to rely on outsiders who came out of alleys to call for beliefs and behaviors that were supposed to be American.

The man Rickey needed so badly was just out of his reach. His name was Dave Egan and he wrote for the
Boston Record
, a Hearst tabloid. As early as the 1930s, he wrote things like, “The kings of baseball can bay to the moon and howl to the stars but there is no way for them to shuck off the fact that theirs is a sport that is no more national than the trolley to Brookline. How can you claim to represent the nation while you exclude anybody not of white caucasian extraction?”

This is February of 1947, just weeks before the start of baseball season. Branch Rickey is walking into the Carlton Branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn to talk to thirty civic leaders, all men of color, about Robinson. Of the six points he had written down at the start of this grand experiment, he had achieved all but one: “the backing and thorough understanding from the Negro race, to avoid misrepresentation and abuse of the project.” Now he was setting to finish the job.

He got up right away. “I'm not going to tell you what you hope to hear. Someone close to me said I didn't have the guts to tell you what I wanted to do; that I didn't have the courage to give it and that you people wouldn't be able to take it. I believe all of us here tonight have the courage. I have a ballplayer named Jackie Robinson . . . on the Montreal team . . . He may stay there . . . He may be brought to Brooklyn. But if Jackie Robinson
does
come up to the Dodgers the biggest threat to his success—the
one
enemy most likely to ruin that success—is the Negro people themselves!

“I say it as cruelly as I can to make you all realize and appreciate the weight of responsibility that is not only on me and my associates but on Negroes everywhere. For on the day Robinson enters the big league—
if
he does—every one of you will go out and form parades and welcoming committees. You'll strut. You'll wear badges. You'll have Jackie Robinson Days and Jackie Robinson Nights. You'll get drunk. You'll fight. You'll get arrested. You'll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You'll symbolize his importance into a national comedy . . . and an ultimate tragedy—yes, tragedy!

“For let me tell you this. If any individual, group, or segment of Negro society uses the advancement of Jackie Robinson in baseball as a triumph of race over race, I will regret the day I ever signed him to a contract, and I will personally see that baseball is never so abused and misrepresented again!”