Branch Rickey (12 page)

They were playing Walter O'Malley's tune. He was a heavyset, pure Irish backpatter who came out of mortgages and business loans and limited partnerships, and had attached himself to the Brooklyn Trust Company. Rickey was having trouble with the Brooklyn Catholics. He asked fellow baseball man and team co-owner O'Malley if he could keep the Catholics on his side. Sure, purred O'Malley. Instead, he went to Bishop Malloy of Brooklyn and said: “Isn't it a hideous thing to have this Durocher with his three wives and adultery being held up as an example for good Catholic youth? I truly can't understand why Rickey allows this to happen. I am distressed to talk about this, but your Father Powell is correct, I feel, in protecting the Catholic Youth Organization by keeping the children away from Dodgers games.”

Of a Brooklyn morning in April 1947, Rickey had a large meeting at the Dodgers office about the season that was starting, and the farm teams, when his private phone interrupted him. He took the call and listened in silence. Then he roared, “You son of a bitch!” Nobody had heard him swear before. When he hung up, he informed Durocher, “That was the commissioner. You've been suspended from baseball for the year.”

“For what?” Durocher cried.

Officially it was for gambling, but really it was for everything. Small, large. He had them crazy. What hurt Rickey most was that Durocher wouldn't be on the field when Robinson needed help.

Early in the morning of April 10, 1947, Branch Rickey woke up Jackie Robinson and told him to come to the Dodgers offices right away. When Robinson got there, he was given a contract to sign. He was told to report to the clubhouse at Ebbets Field, where the team was playing an afternoon exhibition game against its Montreal farm club, the last before the regular season. At the field he would find the interim manager, Clyde Sukeforth, with whom he might be somewhat familiar.

Rickey then dictated a memo to his secretary, Jane Ann Jones. He told her to make one carbon. It read:

Jane Ann's nephew, a detective I knew from out on the streets, told me that Rickey took the original and put it in his inside jacket pocket. The carbon was given to Arthur Mann, an assistant. Mann brought it to the ballpark and passed it down the line in the press box during the sixth inning. Of course the paper was then lost. It wound up under the feet of one of those Phi Beta Kappas in the press box and thereafter in the dust pan of a cleaning man.

It was the great historical document of the time. Over the years, we heard that Rickey's family had the original. Or maybe it was in a desk someplace, who knew? Burt Roberts, a judge in the Bronx, and I thought that maybe if it was around in a drawer someplace, we could find it and donate it to the Brooklyn Museum or to the Library of Congress and have the satisfaction of being civic heroes and of course having a small plaque hung near the memo thanking us profusely for the donation.

I took a chance and called Rickey's daughter in Elmira, New York.

“Oh, the nicest man bought that from Daddy and donated it to the Library of Congress,” she said.

“What happened?” Burt Roberts asked.

“We got thrown out at first,” I said.

 

“Hey, nigger!”

Here is Ben Chapman, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, standing on the top step of the dugout at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in April of 1947.

“Hey, nigger, go back to the cotton field where you belong.”

Jackie Robinson, in one of his first times to bat as a Brooklyn Dodger, walks pigeon-toed to the batter's box. His face shows nothing. He fights to keep down everything he ever believed. If hit, hit back. Can't do that now. When challenged, smack first. Can't do that, either. Insulted, call them on it, right in their faces. No good, either. I can't even turn my head to look at him, Robinson thought. If I see him, I'm not going to be able to stop myself.

Chapman had been a thoroughly forgettable outfielder and pitcher with the Dodgers and Yankees, during which time he made frequent anti-Semitic remarks. We were fighting World War II but he reserved his patriotism for home.

Upstairs, in his box suspended from the upper tier, Branch Rickey was hunched forward, kneading his hands anxiously. “Papini,” Buzzie Bavasi remembered him saying. On that first day in the Dodgers offices at Montague Street, he and Robinson had read the parts of Giovanni Papini's book
Life of Christ
that inspired Robinson to accept the ideal of turning the other cheek. It is a lofty thought, and one that Robinson has promised to keep and knows that he should, but it is so immensely difficult because somebody just said he was a nigger again and his bones are raging.

In his box, Branch Rickey calls out, “What are they saying to Robinson?” Looking down, he knows the answer. A concession man selling beer behind home plate is waving to another one a few rows up and this one comes down, balancing his beer, and now the two of them stand excitedly and Rickey knows exactly what it is about and he goes down onto the field and speaks to Robinson.

“We have an agreement. That you ignore these people for three years.”

“I'm supposed to let them do this to me?”

“For three years. Here you're not even here for a week.”

“Do you know what it's like to have somebody doing this to you?”

“No, you do. And I can tell you precisely what you can do about it. Stand up and hit. Walk up there and listen to none of this and show them what you do with a bat.”

He did nothing the first time up. Later in the game, he singled. When the Phillies kicked the ball around, he went to third, and then scored on Gene Hermanski's single. The Dodgers won, 1-0, and the pitcher, Hal Gregg, decided it wasn't so bad to have Robinson out there behind him.

The next day, Chapman got right back up on the top dugout step, chesty and cheap, and continued a career of lousiness by calling more names at Robinson.

“Hey, nigger . . . ”

This time, Eddie Stanky of the Dodgers stood in front of the Phillies dugout and snarled at Chapman: “You yellowbelly. You know he can't answer you. I'd like to see you do it if he was free to fight back.”

 

Rickey used the 1947-48 off-season for speaking. He made a speech at Wilberforce College in Ohio that was somewhat longer than a full reading of the Constitution. Wilberforce was a black school that was a part of the foundation of America. By then so was Rickey, and he made sure you knew it. The young students couldn't contain themselves. The man speaking to them had just reached out and pointed to the world and told them it was theirs. They had heard so many people talking to them and of course nothing was learned, except to reiterate that black is black. Suddenly, dramatically, they were hearing that color no longer mattered from a man who had an official license to say so. He was Branch Rickey, who had put Jackie Robinson into baseball and he was telling them that this big, new, wide-open world is theirs and get out there and take it.

“I believe that racial extractions and color hues and forms of worship become secondary to what men can do,” Rickey said. “The denial of equality of opportunity to qualify for work to anyone, anywhere, any time, is ununderstandable to me.”

He then reported to the audience, and for the first time anywhere, that the baseball owners had tried to keep Robinson out of baseball by a 15-1 vote. In giving a meticulous account of his Robinson adventure, Rickey was often unable to overcome shyness about his vote.

 

A bone spur in the ankle had Jackie limping by the end of 1947. An operation during the off-season left him unable to do anything. He gained weight. Around this time, his close friend, the Reverend Karl Everette Downs, who had married Rachel and Jack, had a heart attack and was turned away by the white doctors at the hospital in Austin, Texas, and died. This drove Robinson to candy bars, which were his enemy. He put on thirty pounds at least.

At spring training in 1948, Durocher, back from his year's suspension, watched Robinson come onto the field as one would inspect livestock up for sale.

“How can he put his shoes on?” Durocher wondered. “Last year he was great. I get here and he shows up a fat cook.”

Robinson had to suffer through a spring training of sweat and groans. Flop on your belly and come right off the ground and flop on the ground and come off the ground and do this again because this is a drill without end.

By season's end Robinson had been in 147 games and hit .296. Pretty good.

In 1949 Robinson exploded. He was in 156 games, had 203 hits, 16 home runs, 124 runs batted in, and hit .342. Each time he got on base, the crowd shimmered with excitement. He walked right off the bag in the pitcher's face. He danced, faked, started, stopped, and then ran. His slide was pure form. He stole 37 bases in that season. “He prepared himself for this,” Rickey said, extolling his sliding pit exercises in spring training. That season, Robinson was named the Most Valuable Player, which was an understatement.

Behind him, applauding, crying compliments, was Rickey. He did a great thing in American life, yet he was mortal. He soon came to illustrate perfectly the mutual envy of politicians and businessmen. The politician cannot restrain himself from taking his brilliance into the world of business. Before long, he is on a breadline. The businessman is sure that he can run the world, and given a chance he is out there on the public stage. Soon the people are ready to garrote him. The wise shoemaker sticks to his trade and maintains a mouth filled with nails. That was not to be Rickey or Robinson.

This particular thing began on April 19, 1949, when Paul Robeson, the magnificent singer and actor, speaking in Paris, said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to full human dignity.”

“They won't fight for their country?” In the halls of Congress, that cry was heard, most loudly in the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was sending out telegrams asking public figures to appear at a special hearing on Robeson's speech. An early wire went to Robinson.

Rickey could not wait to send Robinson to testify about Robeson's speech. “I was in France in World War I,” Rickey said. “There were men of color dead. I believe they fought for their country. Jackie Robinson was in uniform. What does this man Robeson know about such things?” At a meeting, Buzzie Bavasi and nine others in the Dodgers office were against Robinson testifying. They thought he would show too much anger. Then Rickey cast his vote, which weighed more than all the others.

Rickey sat at his desk and began writing a statement for Robinson to give before Congress. He had everybody in the room do the same. Rickey ended up with many drafts but he suspected that something was wrong with all of them. He was right: white men were trying to write the passion of a black man. He asked Lester Blackwell Granger of the Urban League to lend a hand. They sat in Rickey's dining room and worked on a script that seemed fine and suddenly Robinson was talking about it to a United Press reporter.

“I'll fight any aggressor,” Robinson said. “Any aggressor as well as the Russians . . . I've been treated very well. I'll fight anyone who tries to take away my American heritage. I want to fight for my child's right to live in this country and for any other child's.”

A few days later, on July 18, 1949, Robinson and his wife, Rachel, came into a congressional hearing room that was crowded and tense. He read his script, which ended with him saying, “We can win our fight without the Communists, and we don't want their help.”

Rushing then from Congress to Ebbets Field, he drew a walk in the sixth inning and immediately, rocking back and forth, taunting, he stole second. The catcher threw wild trying to stop him. He flew to third. Now he prowled down the base line. The Cubs pitcher watched him over and over. Robinson was gone in the middle of a look.

In the eighth inning he hit a triple, and the instant he got his foot on the bag off it came and he started down that line and in the confusion the pitcher balked and Robinson walked home.

“He thrilled his country all day and saved the last great thrill for Brooklyn at night,” Rickey said after the game.

Robinson started in six All-Star games. He played in his first World Series in 1952 and in game one hit a home run against Allie Reynolds of the Yankees. By then he was no longer unique in baseball. Don Newcombe, the black pitcher Clyde Sukeforth saw in the rain, was on the mound for the Dodgers. Soon the Dodgers had three blacks, and the team won six pennants, a World Series, and finished second three times and third once. Robinson was Rookie of the Year, National League Batting Champion, and Most Valuable Player. Roy Campanella was voted Most Valuable three years. Don Newcombe was Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable once.

 

Rickey kept one aspect of Brooklyn baseball history on a shelf well out of reach. That was the Daffiness Boys reputation that so many loved because it was real. Rickey wanted to win games not laughter. Now came through the door a Queens County high school graduate, William Loes, who brought back the past. Because he could pitch, Rickey signed him. Because he made everybody laugh and feel better, Loes is remembered today as a great Rickey success.

Rickey's best-known afternoon in Brooklyn came when Loes was a high school prospect from the Astoria neighborhood in Queens when he arrived in Brooklyn one afternoon with his father and George Douris, who had been the official scorer for Loes's no-hitters with Bryant High School. They went to lunch with Rickey, which made Loes's father nervous about the check. “Don't worry,” Douris said. He couldn't pay either.